More than a decade ago, Professor Tony Liddicoat responded to the same discourse by stating that "we in the English-speaking ...
Language is the passport to personal mobility, opportunity and prosperity
I recently took a call from a journalist suggesting "Australian students need not learn foreign languages at school, as English is the indisputable global lingua franca and the education dollar, and our kids’ own time, might be better spent studying other subjects". It’s a familiar and mistaken line of argument.