By DIRK MULDER

With a new free trade agreement Australia is set to do business in Indonesia – problem is we won’t have anybody who can do the talking

The Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies could be out of business, long before travel between the countries re-starts.

ACICIS sends Australian students to Indonesia, 2500 since 2014. But it stopped in March as COVID-19 kicked-in.

The consortium has 25 member universities (23 Australian) but their fees amount to only 10 per cent of programme funding. With no student-income, ACICIS expects to be out of business by October, before student travel is expected to start.

It needs $150 000 to see it through to mid-2021, when it believes something approaching normal operations will resume. It has launched a fundraiser,  here.

Dirk Mulder is CMM’s international education correspondent.