For decades, policymakers have talked up the importance of foreign languages, but successive governments have a record of starting and then dropping programs.
The president of the Modern Language Teachers Association of Victoria says Australia's failure to have a national languages policy is holding the country back.
Andrew Ferguson says it is a very real shortcoming.
"I think that's a crying shame when we don't have a languages policy. By default, it's the Australian curriculum, and that makes some very strong statements about what languages education should look like and what the benefits of it are. But at the moment, well, we haven't had a federal government for decades, really, that's pumped a lot of money into initiatives."
The University of Melbourne's Dr Yvette Slaughter is the co-author of Challenging the Monolingual Mindset.
She, too, says Australia is suffering because it lacks a federal language policy.
In Victoria, for instance, it is compulsory for primary schools to teach foreign languages, but Dr Slaughter says that is not the case in other parts of the country.
"The state policies that each state have, the requirements, where, in a lot of states, it's not required at the primary level. In New South Wales, it's required for a hundred hours only at the secondary level. So there's a very big lack of policy to really support implementation of language programs, and there's certainly a lack of a federal language policy. We haven't had one for a long time."
Their criticisms follow the release of literacy and numeracy test results showing no significant improvement in Australia since 2015.
In March, Andreas Schleicher, education head at the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, criticised the Australian education system for falling behind.
His critique came after the release of the results of the Program for International Student Assessment, a test of 15 year-old students conducted every three years.
Australia's ranking had declined significantly, with 20 per cent of students not able to demonstrate basic skills.
Andrew Ferguson from the Modern Language Teachers Association of Victoria says those results should prompt a rethink of Australia's language-learning policy.
"We've had Naplan flatlining in a number of areas, and we've had decades of concentration, in particular, in primary on literacy and numeracy. Perhaps we need to rethink those strategies. The countries that are doing really well on OECD rankings are ones that have a plethora of subjects, and, in particular, multilingualism and appreciation of other cultures is built into the system. It's simply a given. Nobody questions it."
