When Julie Bishop was foreign minister she committed Australia to the New Colombo Plan, a bold push to get more young Australians out of their comfort zones and into learning opportunities across the Asia-Pacific region.
The growth in numbers was impressive. In 2014, 8437 Australian students pursued learning abroad in the Asia-Pacific region. By 2019, that number had almost doubled to 15,440.
Then, in March last year, as Australia’s global connections began to wither, student exchange came to a grinding halt. The New Colombo Plan, Westpac’s Asian Exchange and high school programs such as Rotary and AFS all needed to make dramatic adjustments.
Some activities were amenable to a virtual mode. Most were not. Building closer people-to-people links is the primary ambition of these schemes and, however miraculous our technologies, there is simply no substitute for getting young people to know each other up close.
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