For more than a decade, Australia has built its Asia strategy as though its greatest resource lay across the ocean rather than within its own suburbs. A parliamentary inquiry, meant to repair a broken pipeline of Asian language and cultural expertise, has instead repeated the familiar error: treating Asia capability as an instrument of trade and regional influence while overlooking the one-in-six Australians of Asian heritage who already carry that knowledge in their daily lives. The deeper question the report fails to ask is whether a nation can truly understand its neighbors abroad if it has