How will ethnic Australia vote in 2022: an essay in memory of Jim Jupp

May 1, 2022 ~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ Leave a comment

For Jim

James Jupp died early in April at the age of 90. Jim remains a towering figure in Australia’s knowledge of its own diversity, an instigator and creator of some of our most powerful documents of memory, and a continuing challenger to the worst aspects of Australian racism and self-satisfaction.

There are nearly twenty years between us, he a child of the Depression and War, me a post-war reffo kid drawn to understand the strange land in which my parents had concluded their escape from European and Asian tyrannies.

His passion for politics began early. He attended the London School of Economics in the post-war expansion of education under Labour, where he completed a Masters thesis on the Radical Left in Britain. He deepened his fascination for party politics and the interaction between morality and venality.

Armed with his M.Sc (Econ) he set out for his Australia on his own money (he was not a Ten Pound Pom as he had not done his national service and Australia would not fund him). He was on a vague promise of a job in Melbourne from Hugo Wolfsohn, a Melbourne University politics academic , a Dunera refugee, then visiting the LSE. Sailing from Marseille through Singapore to Fremantle, Jim arrived penniless, staying at the Salvation Army hostel. Borrowing the train fare from Bill Hartley, a left-inclined activist he had met on the ship, he travelled across the country to Melbourne. Jim became involved with the ALP in Melbourne during that period after the Split. Six months after his arrival he became a senior tutor in politics at Melbourne University.

I first met Jim Jupp through reading his Australian Party Politics as an undergraduate in the Government program at Sydney University in the late 1960s. It’s also where I read his first book on immigration, Arrivals and Departures. By then he was back in the UK at the University of York – heading the Department of Politics there when he met Marian at a political science conference, and the rest is history – 44 years of a great marriage.

Jim seemed to have an attraction for the Dominions, moving to Canada for a few years in the mid-1970s, where he completed his PhD through London University on democratic politics in Sri Lanka. From a chair in Politics in Canada, he returned to Australia in 1978 to become Principal Lecturer at the Canberra CAE. He then went on to establish the highly regarded and pivotal Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies at the ANU.

Now a mature scholar with a ferocious appetite for work (he always intimidated me) he created an expansive and insightful set of projects without which it would be hard to imagine Australian migration, multicultural and political studies today. Although he was working with the inheritance of the earlier founders – such as Jean Martin, Jerzy Zubrzycki and Charles Price- he was able to integrate their different perspectives into a much more multifaceted and interdisciplinary project that was quite his own.

His interest in the politics of immigration and the dynamics of policy led him into many engagements with government, including the chair of the Hawke-era review of Multicultural policy (ROMAMPAS). Its report demonstrated his emphases on equity, fairness, participation, cultural respect and reciprocity: to my mind it is by far the best of the many attempts to portray the complexities and opportunities of multiculturalism in Australia over the past 45 years. However he recognised that governments were fickle beasts who could not be fully trusted to hold to rationality, let alone principle. It was in that context I think that he decided an important contribution he could make would be to create a real and collaborative history of multicultural Australia and the peoples who had made it. In 1984 he convinced the Hawke government to support the preparation of an Encyclopaedia of the Australian People, drawing on his own amazing network of scholarly and community contacts. It would be one of the most important mementoes of the Bicentennial year in 1988, recognising the integral place of Indigenous Australians, and publishing challenging analyses of the country that Australia had become, while offering stimulating visions of the country it could become.

He was distressed by the resurgence of racism that had characterised the 1996 election, and the destruction of so many institutions of multiculturalism that followed the Coalition victory. His commitment to knowledge about Australia as a crucial element in reducing the ignorance on which prejudice was based, drove him to convince the Council of Australian Governments (with the advocacy of Jeff Kennett) to support a new edition of the Encyclopaedia, which was published for the dawn of the new century in 2000.

Jim early recognised that the big debates about cultural diversity were already being superseded by the emergence of religion as a defining line within Australia. His Encyclopaedia of Religion in Australia from 2009 (the third of his volumes in which I was privileged to have a commentary) remains a stunning survey of the diversity of beliefs that humanity can pursue within a single society.

There are many other dimensions of Jim’s work and life that we could explore and perhaps his friends will gather in the future to undertake that joyous and revealing task.

His last work An Immigration Nation Seeks Cohesion brings together his life’s passions. Written in his mid 80s and drawing on his work across all the fields in which he had contributed, there is a chapter that contains his vituperative and unrelenting commentary on the collapse of a humanitarian morality in Australia. Jim echoed Karl Marx’s words, as he reflected on White Australia, where history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce.

He passed the book to me when we last met at the International Metropolis Conference in Sydney in 2018. In a somewhat faltering hand, it is inscribed “Best wishes to Andrew, a great friend over the years, Jim Jupp”.

Election time – shaping up for the ethnic vote debate

The debate over whether an “ethnic vote” phenomenon exists in Australia re-emerges at each Federal election; and here. Broadly put, some argue that at the margins people from ethnic communities can be influenced by issues which are cultural rather than economic, or which relate to their countries of origin rather than to their duties as Australia citizens. The rise of racism (as with the emergence of Pauline Hanson’s movement in 1996) can drive those who feel targeted, to support parties with anti-racist programs. Particular candidates can also instigate opposition based on anti-racism, as when the Chinese and Korean communities organised to defeat John Howard in Bennelong in 2007, then swung back to the Liberal Party with the moderate John Alexander.

In 2016 I suggested issues associated with ethnicity would play a critical role in the deciding votes in marginals with significant multicultural populations. As it turned out they did – delivering at least two seats in NSW and one in Victoria to Turnbull, and thereby government.

In 2019 I suggested that ethnic voters might well save Morrison’s government. While Queensland proved more important in the large, the saving of Chisholm and Reid gave Morrison the tiny buffer he needed to gain a plurality. Some of the resistance to the ALP push came in Labor electorates, where the “ethnic vote” was focused on conservative religious values displayed during the 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite, ultimately recruited by the commitment of the LNP to pass a religious discrimination act if re-elected.

Christina Ho and I drilled down in the 2019 results for the marginal Liberal seat of Banks, concluding that the Chinese Australian voters (a grab-all that conflates many divergent tendencies and backgrounds, but captures the “visible minority” element relevant to experiences of racism) tended to be slightly more pro-Labor than the average voter, but followed the broader swing towards the Liberals.

The heightened awareness of the role that ethnicity may play in this election derives from three factors – the salience of international affairs (China, Russia/Ukraine, India) in public discourse, the quantum increase in the take-up of citizenship from the waves of arrivals in the high immigration years before 2017, and the appearance on the political scene of the second-generation of earlier arrivals in significant numbers. There are also a number of both first and second-order issues that have particular salience for some ethnic communities.

The government pandemic responses have unlocked insights into structural discrimination against ethnic minorities that have long been buried under the “most successful multicultural society in the world” slogan. The high rates of death among ethnic communities, the economic and social undermining of their well-being through lockdowns which affected industries employing high proportions of ethnic workers, and the unrelenting experience of reinvigorated racisms experienced by people of colour, have demonstrated that Australian multiculturalism faces critical challenges.

Where the Parties Stand

A statement on cultural cohesion promised for 2021 by Minister Alex Hawke has not eventuated, while the April 2022 Budget cut expenditure for multicultural programs by 10% (at page 41) , and reduced support to the Human Rights Commission for anti-racism programs going forward. The ALP has not yet released its main policy goals, though a policy report on Multicultural Engagement from 2021 was very limited in its goals and did not include earlier commitments from 2016 and 2019 to expand government multicultural policy capacity. The Greens proposal for multicultural legislation sits undebated before the Senate, though the party has re-visioned its anti-racism policies, including the proposed Act once more. At time of writing the main parties all agreed to provide policy updates, but have not yet done so.

The Federation of Ethnic Communities of Australia (FECCA) has an election wish-list. It wants an Office for Multicultural Australia covering the whole of government, based on a commitment and strategy to advance a fair and inclusive society.

It may be moot to what extent the policy choices offered by the parties in cognate areas actually capture the attention and enthusiasms of significant voting blocs. However, it is at the margins that choices made have an impact on outcomes. Critical electorates with significant ethnic populations include Parramatta, Reid, Banks, Greenway and Lindsay in NSW, and Chisholm, Bruce, and Wills in Victoria. Then we need to add the high Jewish population areas of Goldstein and Wentworth where the teal independents also face populations with significant proportions of overseas-born, also apparent in North Sydney. These are the areas most opposed to the arguments of supporters of religious discrimination legislation.

On the ground

An early focus on Chisholm and Parramatta helps clarify what impact an “ethnic bloc” might have. Noting that the 2021 Census will not be released until June, the data depends on 2016 – more than five years ago and a pandemic in between – the two electorates are apparently different but may have many similarities.

Almost half the population of Chisholm reported speaking a language other than English at home. The electorate had a China-born population of 14%, with 17% having both parents born in China. About 20% spoke a Chinese language at home, with 15% speaking Mandarin and 5% Cantonese. The next major language was Greek. However in the intervening period, the Chinese population would have grown and the Greek declined. Reflecting the high proportion of the China-born population, 36% of the population reported No Religion, while 6% reported Buddhism. In 2019 the Greens vote of 12% and the ALP of 34% were insufficient to halt the Liberals win – with a primary vote of 43%, though suffering a swing of just over 2%. The informal vote at that election rose by 50% to 4.5%. In 2022 it will be the LNP Gladys Liu against ALP Carina Garland.

Over 60% of the Parramatta population spoke a language other than English at home, with Arabic and Mandarin equal on 8%, Cantonese and Hindi about equal on 5% and Tamil on 3%. About 15% were born in India, with another 8% in China. Hinduism and Islam were highly-represented as religions, though the largest religious group was Catholic. Since 2019 the sub-continent population has risen, with many more becoming citizens. In 2019 Labor led the Liberals on first preferences, (45% to 41%), with the Liberals helped out by the UAP and the Christian Democrats. The swing to the Liberals was 7%, with an informal vote of 8%, steady from 2016. While the ALP secured a 2pp win of nearly 6000 votes, the seat is being strongly contested. In 2022 it will be ALP Andrew Charlton against LNP Maria Kovacic.

Do It Yourself

Readers can explore their own electorates (here given for Chisholm) by searching the ABS Quick Stats and the AEC Tally Room.

Why a Multicultural Act would help reduce the impact of COVID on Australia’s multicultural communities.

February 4, 2022February 4, 2022 ~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ Leave a comment

We (don’t) know what has been happening to Australia’s multicultural communities during COVID, but if we had a Multicultural Act maybe we would. At least distraught community organisations would not have to constantly plead to governments for information about illness, hospitalisation, and deaths amongst their language group.

Throughout the pandemics local geographies have provided conceptual proxies for real demographies. Sometimes the data released by government has just been stupid. The main areas with lots of international students were portrayed as low vaccination zones, and given short shrift in the media for failure to care. The vaccination proportions were based on the 2016 census base, when the universities in Randwick, Sydney City, Melbourne City and elsewhere were chocker-block full with Indian and Chinese students. They were all counted in the population base in 2016 (creating what statisticians call the denominator in the equation). Then the vaxx count in those areas as elsewhere formed the numerator in 2021. At its most extreme the postcode for UNSW showed zero vaccinations (colleges closed, international students gone elsewhere or home), producing a numerator of 0. The denominator whatever it had been in 2016 was added to the Randwick local government denominator. Screamingly low – as with Bondi Junction where all the locally resident students here for English language courses in the colleges had been sent away as the colleges closed.

When I phoned my local state MP to suggest they might like to question the figures they were posting weekly (postcode 2052 showing zero) I was told not to be stupid, of course the figures were good; they came from the NSW Government. So Randwick City, where I live, has continued to look very poor on vaxx rates . Whoever is doing the calculations on vaxx rates for localities needs a sociology lesson really quickly.

So how does this tie-in to a Multiculturalism Act? There is no Commonwealth agency that holds the hose for culturally diverse communities. There used to be a number until Howard cancelled them all in 1996/1997 – the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research for two. The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments refused to replace them and the ALP since has avoided any engagement with moving forward in this regard. The Turnbull-Abbott-Morrison governments simply turned the other way, muttering “nothing to see here”. The Greens have a policy proposal out there in this area, covering both rights and an institutional arrangement to progress them, which would do some of the work but not enough.

The main Commonwealth advisory body, the Australian Multicultural Council, has been silent on the impact of COVID on multicultural communities, as indeed on most things, as it was designed to be. The Australian Human Rights Commission Race Discrimination Commissioner is proposing a new set of anti-racism actions, but these still remain within the boundary of individual discrimination, not systemic failure. The advisory group on cultural and linguistic diversity to Commonwealth Health was not set up for nearly a year after the COVID pandemic began, and has no executive authority, spending most of its time checking translations of rapidly changing COVID information for cultural and linguistic bloopers.

What can we deduce from the proxy data that is out there? Firstly as with earlier waves, the correlates of “bad experiences” including mortality are linked to age, underlying morbidities, overcrowding, poor health literacy, and economic marginality. Vaccination rates may well be affected by cultural orientations to vaccines and to culturally-specific antivax campaigns also associated with some religious sects. What we know about cultural diversity in Australia is that all these factors are more extensive for multicultural communities. We are looking at class correlates of migrants, and cultural orientations (which have many different trajectories).

No one in government is holding a hose for these communities. At the state levels there is intensive work going ahead to inform and inject ethnic communities, using many innovative strategies. But the main function of the state agencies has been to calm and support cultural groups, with state governments more concerned with distracting their resistance and anger than with ensuring their rights. For two years I have been pointing out how the testing regimes are inequitable and ensure ignorance. How easy would it be now for the PCR and RAT testing reporting situation to collect one question – what language would you prefer to have your COVID information in? It would be a massive gamechanger, as work on vaccination language preferences has already proven to be.

Among the elderly in nursing homes and among people with disabilities from culturally diverse backgrounds, the impact has been huge. We now have a situation where nearly 100 people a day are dying, with a very high proportion of those people from ethnic communities with all the features described above. However no one holds a hose for them, and they become a bland statistic without political leverage, a cost of opening up so that other people can watch the cricket and the tennis.

Imagine the situation instead where a Commonwealth statutory agency, with research capacity and executive authority, was in the game, holding the hose, finding the flare ups and ensuring the retardants were directed to the appropriate place. Imagine pro-active engagement with the thousands of people in nursing homes from multicultural communities, currently isolated, sickening and dying, left to the uncaring and forgetful Minister for Ageing, and an equally irrelevant Minister for Multicultural Affairs.

It is about time that Australia, instead of slapping itself on the back as the most successful multicultural society in the world, realises that it is systematically failing at the task, and recognises the dead and dying people from diverse backgrounds as in-your-face evidence of this fact. Then we should have a cross-party conversation about how to make the situation better and thus become as inclusive and equitable as we pretend to be. Something like a Multicultural Act with some of the features of the 1990 agencies and a more pro-active agenda (like the old Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs set up by Fraser and knocked off by Hawke) would start to fit the bill. Any politician willing to risk a wedge to propose it?

Andrew Jakubowiczis emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Technology Sydney.

Fifty years a sociologist: insight from the pandemic

Featured ~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ Leave a comment

Three Minute Fellow’s Introduction. Wednesday 24 November 2021
Academy of Social Sciences in Australia
________________________________________________________________________________________

I am fifty years a sociologist. The COVID-19 pandemic brought front of mind for me the reason why.

It started in April 2020. For days I watched the Ruby Princess cruise ship bobbing on the ocean off Coogee Beach near my home and painted a picture of it. Early reports from New York were that people of colour were succumbing to the disease more quickly and dramatically than richer White folks. So, race was a proxy for class and class underpinned vulnerabilities in a racially encoded society.

I wondered how the pandemic would play out in Australia, touted by our leaders as the most successful multicultural society in the world. What would the lockdown mean for our culturally diverse communities? Australia might be different. But was it? How? Why?

I started to look for patterns and data which might help me find the answers.

At the time, I thought that the health system had long embedded the data-needs of multicultural Australia. Apparently not. The multifarious testing regimes did not collect any ethnic data. We did not know how the virus was spreading in ethnic communities. Nor who was being tested, missing testing or the languages we would we need to get information to vulnerable people.

I wrote to Minister Hunt’s office to ask for Cultural and Linguistic Diversity (CALD) data. The response was that the data was not available. Why? Because all jurisdictions had to agree to mandate its collection, and none had asked for this in twenty years.

You get the picture.

As it turned out, the National Health and Medical Research Council COVID19 committee had advised the government in mid 2020 that CALD needs and experiences should be identified but provided no advice on how this was to be done. Why? I was told the Government did not want to hear that advice.

Around that time, I joined with a network of people advocating how critically important the information was to reduce the impact of the pandemic on multicultural communities. Getting information was like squeezing blood. It would take over a year to make significant headway. By then, there had been hundreds of deaths and thousands of hospitalisations. Hardest hit were the multicultural communities of Sydney and Melbourne.

In November 2020 the Government finally established a CALD advisory group on COVID19. This group made the collection of CALD data an imperative and by September 2021 it was taking shape.

A team of data scientists has now extracted the social and cultural data from the immunisation register and tied it to the government data network. Finally, frontline health teams have the data to identify communities with low vaccination rates and enable effective communication with those who need it.

Having seen the data, many of those who had previously denied its value have understood how critical it is to our well-being. Perhaps they have realised how much damage was done because of the data hesitancy they championed.

My learning from the Plague Year is that the infection is about biology, the plague is about social science. If you’re not counted, you don’t count. Sociology 101.

In COVID-19, is Eighty Percent vaxxed the same everywhere and for everyone? If not, how do we make sure it becomes so?

September 10, 2021September 10, 2021 ~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ Leave a comment

The NSW government has made much of the promise that something good will happen when localities achieve 80% of second jabs of eligible people. However not all numbers are equal. It may be rather easier to reach the absolute number of 80% of the population over 12 years of age in some places than others. The difference depends on what proportion of the total population in each local government area (LGA) in NSW is over 12 years of age. Sitting behind the 80% figure may be an assumption that every LGA has a similar age and socio-cultural profile.

They do not, and the vulnerable have very different degrees and causes of vulnerability – primarily determined by the level of crowding in residential accommodation, which is a function of income and to some extent culture (attitudes to having large families), and place in the life course. In Australia these factors are found most commonly in multicultural and Indigenous communities. So clear multicultural and Indigenous equity policies that identify and respond to cultural diversity pro-actively rather than reactively, are crucial planks in the policy process. Unfortunately those planks are too often missing or barely present, often attached as an afterthought in response to some emergent crisis.

Not only does every LGA have a different profile, but also the LGAs “of concern” during Delta have higher proportions of people under 12, and of culturally diverse or Indigenous backgrounds – as well as many more reservoirs of infection into which everyone can be dipped. Let’s look at Blacktown in Sydney’s west, and Northern Beaches across the Harbour along the coast to the north, two very different places with different vulnerability factors, different outcomes, and different prospects. At the turn of 2021, Northern Beaches had an intensive outbreak of an earlier viral mutation; it faced local lockdown, divided at the bridge over the Narrabeen Lakes. The lockdown lasted a few weeks until total suppression was achieved. Blacktown nine months later as one of the most intensive areas of concern is part of a total lockdown zone.

When “80%” of Blacktown’s over twelve population is doubled jabbed, actually only 64% of the population will have been inoculated. However in Northern Beaches, also a large LGA but not one of concern, when 80% of the over 12s are inoculated this will mean 68% of the population will have been double jabbed. For Blacktown to reach the underlying level that Northern Beaches gets to with 80% will require its residents to achieve 85.4%.

Here’s the table that shows how this works.

Locality	Age group	2016 N	2016 %	2021 N	2021 %
Blacktown	0-12	66900	19.2%	80900	19.8%
	13+	281083	80.8%	331428	80.2%
	Total	347983	100%	412328	100%
Northern	0-12	44100	16.6%	44200	16%
Beaches	13+	221365	83.4%	230700	84%
	Total	265465	100%	274900	100%

Given the fetish for numerical magic that now pervades political discourse, the model proposed by the NSW government in fact creates a reservoir proportionately 25% larger of unvaccinated children in Blacktown compared with Northern Beaches. Furthermore this reservoir is contained in dwellings that are more overcrowded, poorer, less well ventilated, and with adults who are forced to travel for work, if they are lucky enough to have it. While an emotionally lacerated and more financially stressed western suburbs population surges towards vaccination as a promoted panacea for their woes, in fact to achieve an outcome that will work for them at the 80% level will demand a higher real world effort than they believe they are being called upon to make. In the unvaccinated pool may well be large numbers of the elderly, refugees and asylum seekers, and those with low levels of English competence and mother tongue literacy.

But does this matter? Some commentators claim that only 2% of under twelves who might get infected will get “very sick”. Sounds small, but apart from not knowing how many of the unvaccinated will get sick if exposed, the ones who do get sick can get seriously unwell – with a potentially endless long COVID post- viral scenario affecting them significantly. If ten percent of the under twelves are infected (a very conservative count if they are the vast majority of the reservoirs of potential targets for a very successful virus), then in Blacktown that will be 8000 or so – of whom 150 or more would be seriously affected.

The twenty percent of over 12s who are not vaxxed at 80% (or the even more scary 30% at 70% first proposed October relief from the lockdown) make up from 66,000 to 100,000 in Blacktown. So if we have 80% as our goal (and it has been reported that NSW Health is trying to convince science-hesitant politicians to ensure 85% are double-vaxxed) then the pool of unvaxxed at opening up in Blacktown will be about 132,000, half of whom will be kids under twelve. So ultimately 80% of “adults” defined as over 12, is 60% of the population. There is no way that figure can ensure a freedom of movement as now is promised. Rather it will ensure, at a daily conservative .05% infection rate and no break through in inoculated people, that about 60 cases will occur, with up to three hospitalisations a day, and probably one death a week, depending on age and co-morbidities.

We need to recognise that Blacktown, a hub for Indian communities among many others, has been extremely active in seeking vaccination since Pfizer has been made available ; its residents may indeed exceed the 80% goal (at writing they are at 86% on first jab – over sixteens, so about 60% of the population overall at the moment). Such local communities will need to “go for gold” (over 90% of the over twelves) if they wish to avoid the inevitable local lockdowns that are a predictable part of the opening-up policy of the NSW government. They will also need sturdy local paediatric intensive care facilities, and an expensive and extensive renovation program for local schools to ensure high levels of ventilation, HEPA filters and social distancing strategies in classrooms. However with tens of thousands of unvaccinated adults exposed to viral attack whenever they leave home, and bringing it back into homes with children when they return, the rosy future being painted may have a different hue when that time arrives. If the 80% figure was of the whole population (essentially meaning all adults over 12 are doubled jabbed), then the desired “herd immunity” saturation for the vaccine might be achieved and the children, potential carriers and victims, more effectively protected.

The need to keep testing and then tracing infected people underpins the pathways we have been promised. The Australian testing environment demonstrates the craziness and the contradictions of our history as a capitalist federation which promotes itself as the global multicultural success story. In each state testing can be carried out in at least three different institutional frameworks, with only a minimal data set collected across all of them. The Commonwealth cannot require the states to do anything in this regard – until infection is determined when notification is mandated through an agreement between the jurisdictions (all of which have to agree if anything is to be changed). Notification only requires name, age, gender and location. If one is tested at a Commonwealth respiratory clinic (essentially a GP clinic specially funded by the Commonwealth) then data can be collected on language and country of birth if the patient agrees. This data is spasmodically collected and is not processed for immediate use by public health agencies. Private testing agencies and private GP clinics do not regularly collect this information because it is not mandated so that most commercial software does not have the capacity, and no one has decided to assert the authority to require it to do so. The states have differing policies in this regard at their testing locations, where it is usually only at the second stage, tracing of infected cases and their close contacts, that preferred language is requested, if an interpreter is thought to be required. There is no sign that these data are collected, collated or used.

Ultimately we are not well prepared for the implications of the current road plans out of lockdowns. Our testing systems are dilapidated, unintegrated and deficient in key data needed to ensure we stay ahead of the curve. It is possible to overcome these problems – however they have to be recognised and addressed. This will not be an expensive exercise compared with the handouts to major employers provided during Jobkeeper, yet when achieved the results will be salutary and valuable in ensuring future well-being. It would be great if there were some evidence of bravery among our leadership in this regard.

In NSW the State Government notes that “work is being done” to integrate the vaccine status of people with their ServiceNSW profile so that the QR code process can automatically capture this information – a sort of vaccine passport that will increasingly be required to enter post 70% public places. Each jurisdiction however is playing its own game, which could all be standardised around the most effective solution. We would also need to ensure asylum seekers, temporary visa holders and people with neither codes nor smart phones were included. If as part of the same exercise the language people speak at home, their country of birth and their arrival year in Australia were also entered (just once), and the QR codes were adapted to be used in all testing regimes in the state, then an almost instantaneous picture of the patterns of testing would be available.

As well, languages required for communication would be known ahead of any surges, with both text and audio messages being sent to appropriate language speakers. Locality by locality, age group by age group, language community by community, the front line public health workers would know the groups in danger of missing testing, of missing vaccinations, and to some extent their patterns of movement and contact.

We already have a surveillance system in place, but it operates erratically, four days or more in arrears, and with no community content. It’s time that we became the successful multicultural nation our government claims we are, by foregrounding cultural diversity and Indigeneity in our strategic thinking, saving lives and livelihoods in the process.