Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on an issue that is very close to my heart. That issue involves the role of languages in the development of our national teaching curriculum. I want to strongly support the inclusion of languages other than English in the framing of the national curriculum and, indeed, congratulate the government on taking this very vital step in developing our first national curriculum policy that commences from kindergarten and goes to year 12. I want to speak on the second stage of the development of our national curriculum, in which the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority will deal with the issue of languages. I want to speak in favour of putting into the national curriculum a language that has already been deemed a priority language through the 1987 national policy on languages and the 1991 Commonwealth priority languages incentives scheme, a language spoken by a large number of Australians—me included—and a language that has become an important part of our nation’s cultural, educational, social and economic objectives. The language, of course, is the modern Greek language and it has a valuable role to play in a national curriculum.

The importance of modern Greek as the basis on which fundamental texts that we use today were developed cannot be overstated. An understanding of the Greek language will serve to allow us to develop Australia’s research capabilities, because it is in understanding the fundamentals of language from which theories are developed that researchers are able to understand the roots of ideas that are relayed to us through theory. Having taught modern Greek in an accredited course for our secondary school curriculum, I myself have been a part of the development of the use of the Greek language in Australia. I was able to teach thanks to the formidable language teaching infrastructure, for which the Greek community in Australia deserves plenty of praise and credit. I was able to do so with the creation of the department of modern Greek at the University of Melbourne in the seventies, which served to provide a learning pathway for Greek language at the tertiary level—which in turn helped to train modern Greek language teachers.

As we move into the Greek-speaking community’s third and fourth generations, the Greek language has become a significant resource for our nation from which we are able to stay in touch with the rest of the world. Having said that, modern Greek is not only a language confined to the Greek-speaking community but a modern, working language that is one of the five official languages of the European Union and one of the top five spoken here in Australia. We need to get the balance right when choosing languages for the national curriculum. A balance between community and trade languages is required. The reality is that we have here in Australia resources and a capacity from which we can go forward with a strong national language curriculum, and it is on this basis that I say that the Greek language should be included in the Australian national curriculum.

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