Disappearing Austronesians?

Just came accross this claim in an article about efforts in Taiwan to save the endangered indigenous Austronesian languages of Taiwan:

'But of the world's estimated 300 million Austronesians - including New Zealand's Maoris and Hawaii's Polynesians - few can speak their language, and many languages now face extinction'.

Quite a claim to make considering that Malay, Filipino, Bahasa Indonesia, Malagasy and most indigenous languages spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Phillippines are Austronesian; all of which are thriving and growing in numbers of speakers. Indonesia is, after all, the fourth most populous country in the world, so this claims rings hollow.

Essentially there are two small but crucial errors to this claim. First is designating speakers of Austronesian languages as the one ethnicity. Yes, the peoples of Madagascar, Indonesia and the Maoris may speak languages of the same language family, but they don't necessarily share the same ethnicity. Likewise, it would be to say that all English, Russian, Hindi and Spanish speakers are all 'Indo-Aryans' as those languages are from the same language family too. If we were to go by this idea that language group equals ethnicity, then all native English speakers would also be classed as 'Germans', as it is a 'Germanic' language.

The second mistake is the line 'few speak their language'. This could be interpreted in the wrong way. What would be more accurate to say is that out of all Austronesian speakers, the overall number who speak their native Austronesian language is slowly decreasing. Definitely not the case in Malaysia, Madagascar or many Pacific Islands but very much so in multi-ethnic and populous Phillippines and Indonesia, where indigenous Austronesian languages are slowly being supplanted by the official Austronesian national languages of Filipino and Bahasa Indonesia respectively.

In attempting to report, caution should be taken when making such bold and ultimately erroneous claims.