Page 3863 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 25 August 2010
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model. But we also have the language education which is available through the multicultural community. I was going to say it was through the Ethnic Schools Association, but not every single school is affiliated with that association, but you will get the drift.
Language education can actually be described in two ways. The first one is the language of commerce, and that is what we teach our young people in the schools—that is how they can compete in the commercial world nationally and internationally by knowing the various Chinese languages—Cantonese and Mandarin—knowing Indonesian, knowing Japanese, knowing the European languages. That puts us on an equal footing commercially. It is not only the language; it is the culture. If you have ever heard of the difficulties of doing business in Japan, you would know that it has as much to do with the culture as it does the language. Learning Japanese will also give you that cultural training for when you actually get into the business boardrooms.
But the other sort of language is the language of the kitchen. This is the language of the ordinary people. It is how people converse, how people convince, how people talk to each other, how they share their joys and their sorrows. You do not do it through the academic milieu of the training that we do in a lot of our schools systems. It is about talking to people about the quality of corn flakes. That is when you really find out about culture—it is the language of the kitchen. That is where the Ethnic Schools Association comes into it.
You do not need to have a command of Burmese or Korean, but these are available in the Ethnic Schools Association’s suite of opportunities for young people to learn, and, indeed, if you want to as older students. This language of the kitchen is so important. Once upon a time Indonesian was the language of the kitchen; it was not one of our commerce. It is now. Hindi, for example—
Mr Doszpot interjecting—
MR HARGREAVES: Indonesian and Malaysian, got it in one. The Hindi language, for example—did you know that Bangladesh is the only country that ever got its independence because of the struggle to not want to surrender their native tongue? Now, that is the importance of language to them. It is important that we support the Ethnic Schools Association to do what they are doing. The government actually allocates funds to distribute amongst all of these schools, and those funds are absolutely needed and welcomed.
Mr Barr talked about the quality of teachers, and we need to recognise that that is a thing very high in the priority of the government, and I applaud that. We also need to recognise that the Ethnic Schools Association have qualifications in smaller languages, but sometimes they are not necessarily the qualifications needed in mainstream education.
A lot of the work in the ethnic language schools is done by volunteers. I want to put on the record my appreciation of the volunteers that give of their time—the mums and the dads and the people who just love a particular language. I want to also mention Mandy Scott, whom Ms Hunter mentioned, as a leading light in the pushing of
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