Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to the member for Boothby for raising this very important motion. When the coalition government took office, one of its first great announcements and actions was to establish this New Colombo Plan. It is a signature policy in the coalition's foreign policy platform. As a middle power, Australia naturally invests significant thought and effort regarding its role and its place in this world. How we interact with countries in the Asia-Pacific region, and further abroad, has a significant impact on our own future and on the future of the planet. If we want to interact meaningfully, if we want to trade more, build ties, achieve international goals, foster relationships and, indeed, build friendships, we need Australians to be as literate as possible when it comes to the cultures, the languages, the practices and the business practices of our neighbours.

The New Colombo Plan continues to be a crucial element of this government's long-term plans to build closer relations for Australia in our region, including at the grassroots level. By building these networks and strengthening Australia's connections in our region, economic growth, prosperity and stability may continue to grow, hopefully for many years to come. In its first five years, the New Colombo Plan will have supported more than 30,000 young Australians—undergraduates from 40 Australian universities—to undertake study and work based placements in 35 different locations across our region. We are on track to meet that 30,000 target. Not only is this expanding the horizons of some of our best and brightest future leaders, it's creating more opportunities and links for Australians at large.

I had the huge privilege earlier this year to meet some of the New Colombo Plan recipients from around my electorate of Brisbane. I met with them both in Brisbane and here in Canberra, when some of them visited. Their placements stretch right across the Asia-Pacific region. What struck me most was their eagerness to learn about the countries they were travelling to, and their hope to be fully immersed into the languages and the cultures they would experience. They did really recognise that huge and rare opportunity before them. I was really confident that they would make both Brisbane and Australia very, very proud.

Thousands of Australian undergraduates are returning to Australia now with new skills and networks from their experiences across the region. They enhance Australia's capacity to engage with our neighbours into the future. I was really taken earlier—I think it was earlier this year when the Singaporean Prime Minister visited—by that story of how the Singaporean Prime Minister's wife had previously spent a significant amount of time in Australia under a similar program many decades ago, and how that had fostered that great relationship we now have with Singapore. In particular, I want to give a shout-out to some QUT students, like Alexandra Tran, who have become New Colombo Plan alumni ambassadors after their very successful stints overseas. Alexandra did a three-month internship with QBE in Hong Kong and now she studies with the New Colombo Plan scholarship in Korea.

New Colombo Plan recipients have been working on a range of projects, from entrepreneurship in Fiji, to humanitarian engineering and work in India, to Mandarin language immersion in China, to industrial design projects to support people with disabilities in Singapore. That's a great and broad array of backgrounds. Equally, this program supports students from Australia with a broad array of backgrounds. We're talking of Indigenous students, students with disabilities, students from regional and remote areas, students who began their life in a refugee camp, students who are the first in their families ever to attend university, as I was, or indeed the first in their family even to have a passport and travel overseas.

Over 60 per cent of New Colombo Plan mobility grant recipients are female; 15 per cent were born overseas; and over 20 per cent speak a language at home other than English. A full 10 per cent have never travelled overseas before. Around 240 private sector organisations have signed up to support the program, offering those internships and mentorships to these scholars. Nineteen Australian business leaders have joined the New Colombo Plan as business champions. They'll be promoting the program across their networks to emphasise the real value of this. Many of the businesses involved are providing transformational opportunities for all of these new Australian future leaders so that they gain real-life experience in the workplace.

So, the New Colombo Plan is going from strength to strength. It has broad support from right across the parliament, the university sector, business, the broader community and, importantly, our region. I commend it.

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