Let a thousand flowers bloom and language study

Tag：Imitation Flowers
It's only fair to report that the committee discussing security at the weekend's 2020 Summit didn't find all the submissions from "concerned citizens" particularly useful. Yet it's difficult to believe that some of the genuine offerings really received much of a hearing. None of the ideas advanced by Ms Linda Petrie (who apparently felt she had the right to speak on behalf of the trans-gender community) were taken up, and no one even referred to Shaky Ho's suggestion that, instead of invading Iraq, a more worthwhile contribution would have been to "park hospital ships in the Persian Gulf and treat casualties without discrimination". Submission 3862, which suggested that "Australia can learn a lot from Cuba", was likewise ignored. However, the submissions reveal the dramatic success of the so-called summit as a political exercise. Everyone apparently felt that this was a genuine attempt to shape our world. Even the letter-writers who accepted, with a jaded resignation, that their ideas would never be part of the mainstream apparently still felt energised enough to contribute to the debate. As Kevin Rudd is well aware, this is a page straight from Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. "Let a thousand flowers bloom," the great helmsman proclaimed, "and a hundred schools of thought contend, [this] is the policy for promoting progress ... and a flourishing socialist culture in our land." It certainly discombobulated the opposition and China began its great leap backwards, to the sounds of chanting Red Guards waving their little red books in the air, shouting down any alternate views. That's the political triumph of last weekend. The Opposition has been reduced to little more than a paper tiger, standing and reacting helplessly to Rudd's agenda. Now comes the hard part. Rudd will have to overcome two difficulties. He might be setting the agenda at the moment, but that doesn't mean that everyone within the party is happy. At a similar period in his government, Bob Hawke call the Tax Summit to chart a future for the country, only to find that his Treasurer, Paul Keating, was enthusiastically backing a consumption tax. Swiftly and deftly, the PM pulled the rug from under Keating. These two ambitious men were always going to clash these events just guaranteed that no quarter would be given when the collision finally occurred. There has been a lot of talk about future agendas, but this is matched with precious little change to the way the country is being run at the moment. The party's left has been told to curb their demands and slash government spending in the run-up to the budget. At the moment the party is accepting of the need to be some kind of pale imitation of the centre-left because of financial constraints and promises of change in the future. At some point Rudd's supporters will lose patience with the managerial techniques that simply create future agendas rather than present realities. The second difficulty is with implementation. The security stream of the summit was supposed to focus on "Australia's future in the world". Framing the question like this inevitably draws any analysis towards a particular conclusion. The discussion paper helpfully highlighted this it only contained two quotes and both referred to the need to develop "high levels of international literacy". In other words, learn foreign (particularly Asian) languages. This is a worthy cause, and the statistics are horrifying. Back in the 1960s, nearly half the matriculating students studied another language. Today, despite the relative decline of English, barely 15 per cent are gaining literacy in another tongue. Confronted with these stark statistics the need for action appears obvious. However, simply "tut-tutting" is not enough. Everything depends on the detail of the proposed solutions, and the past offers little reassurance that things are going to change. When (a much younger) Rudd worked for newly elected Queensland Premier Wayne Goss in the early 1980s, he enthusiastically worked to introduce more foreign language teaching into that state's schools. The need then was just as obvious as it is today. Opposition was overcome and Rudd forged ahead with a plan to develop language studies not Latin and Ancient Greek, but the languages of the future and our region: Chinese and Indonesian. The effort was wasted. A short time ago Queensland lagged the country in language teaching. Precious little of what Rudd attempted to achieve had borne fruit, and yet the idea had appeared so good, so obvious. Certainly that's the way it appeared from the top, looking down. The need was apparent and so the structures were created to meet the requirement. But that's not the way Australia works. Things develop from the bottom up, not in response to some five-year plan handed down from on high. Unless the "big ideas" generated at the summit gain some financial backing, they will remain wispy rhetoric changing nothing. Here is a simple idea to boost language training in the security environment. Defence personnel currently receive a small financial bonus depending on their proficiency in particular languages. At the most basic level this is just $900 a year. If we are serious about the benefits these skills provide, this amount should be doubled. Immediately. Any other ideas are just rhetoric.