Organisers, participants, and attendees at the Australia – Taiwan Youth Dialogue evening

The Education Division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Australia, the Australian National University Taiwan Students Association and the Asia–Australia Youth Association co-hosted an Australia – Taiwan Youth Dialogue to promote increased engagement and mutual understanding between young Australians and Taiwanese. It was held on Monday evening, August 18, 2025 at the Australian National University, with a language-learning theme.

Maxim Shih, an Australian National Internship Program intern at the Education Division, welcomed everyone, then Education Division Secretary Flora Lee spoke about the scholarships to study in Taiwan available to Australians, and Samuel Wade from the Education Division spoke about his experience in Taiwan as a language student in 2019 as a Huayu Enrichment Scholarship recipient. He emphasized the benefits of studying a language in an immersive setting. 

A brief Q&A session was followed by a lively debate on the topic AI will make foreign languages skills obsolete. Therefore, people should not bother learning foreign languages. The six debaters—Veve-Ahn Fry, Catriona Fu, Ronnie Ling, Benjamin Pope, Jules Williams, and Dongzhe Xie—engaged with this very current topic, touching amongst other things on the utility of machine translation and the power of language to bridge cultural understanding.

The attendees mingled and enjoyed refreshments provided by the Education Division while the judges—Georgia Smith from the Asia–Australia Youth Association, George Griswold, another Australian National Internship Program intern, and Flora Lee—deliberated before announcing the affirmative side as the winner of the debate.

The Australia – Taiwan Youth Dialogue was a great success. Several attendees expressed interest in Study in Taiwan programs, and one of the debaters, Veve-Ahn Fry, applied to do a short-term language exchange program at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan.