I agree with dws here in that your only chance of getting them to "see" the value of Perl is to show them what it can do, to show it to them in action.  I would suggest that you ask to be allowed to experiment in limited ways with Perl.  Ask them to let you install it on the server for your use.  Then, occassionally create scripts to do creative things that no one else is doing now.

At my office, we started using it for behind the scene system administration, to listen for hackers, and to process data for reports for managers.  We used it to do things that no one had ever considered doing in VB (in our case) because it wasn't worth the effort and was too much work to set up.  The result has been that people have been pleased by the fact that server maintainence is easier, that hackers are being detected quicker, and that reports that were previously put together manually by managers using MS Excel are now e-mailed to them by the server.

That's Spenser, with an "s" like the detective.