Australia keeps promising to learn Indonesian. Almost nobody does

Australia has spent more than fifty years writing reports about becoming "Asia-literate", and for a while Indonesian looked like the success story. By 2001, Bahasa Indonesia was the second most studied language in Australian government schools, behind only Japanese, with more than 211,000 enrolments across primary and secondary years. Writing for New Mandala, researcher Kirrilee Hughes tracks what happened after that, and the numbers are blunt. Almost none of those pupils ever finished: researchers found 99 percent dropped Indonesian before Year 12. The few who stayed are now fewer still. Year 12 Indonesian fell from 1,167 students in 2009 to 619 in 2022, and 486 in 2024. Universities tell the same story: 1,686 students were studying Bahasa Indonesia in 2001, but by 2022 only about 564 Australians were enrolled in all Southeast Asian languages put together.

Part of the reason is that the interest was always top-down. Indonesian entered Australian schools in the 1950s because the federal government put it there, not because parents or scholars asked for it, and the funding arrived in bursts that never lasted. One programme peaked at around A$30 million a year and was shut down in 2002. A later one spent A$62.4 million over four years and also ended. One researcher found that between 1987 and 2007 not a single Australian language policy hit its own participation targets, and that was still true in 2025. There is also almost no community keeping the language alive at home: at the 2011 census fewer than 56,000 people in Australia spoke Bahasa Indonesia at home, about a quarter of one percent of the population.

Hughes sets all this against ACICIS, a consortium of Australian universities that has sent students to study inside Indonesia since 1995 and has just turned thirty. Its method is unglamorous. It does not arrange housing, so students have to find a room in a kos and sort it out themselves, living among Indonesian students instead of sitting in a classroom in Melbourne. The government schemes came and went; the one that put young Australians inside Indonesian daily life is the one that survived.

Why it matters

This is really about who in Australia will be able to read Indonesia twenty years from now. Fewer Australians with the language means thinner reporting, fewer diplomats who catch what is actually being said in Jakarta, and more decisions made on stereotypes. If your work touches Australian partners, in trade, tourism, study, or government, expect to keep carrying the language and the explaining yourself, because the other side is not training many people to meet you halfway.