Tag: australia

The Degradation of Data in Multicultural Australia

~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ 1 Comment

The Degradation of Data: why Australia knows so little about its multicultural realities


Submission to the Multicultural Framework Review Draft Terms of Reference.

Andrew Jakubowicz PhD FRSN FASSA

Emeritus Professor of Sociology
University of Technology Sydney

Consultant Sociologist

3 March 2023

Context

As the Draft Terms make clear, it has been many years since Australia’s institutional capabilities in relation to multicultural policy have been reassessed. The Framework Review is thus a welcome initiative. As a scholar of and participant in the development of multicultural Australia since the 1970s (initially as a member of the NSW Migrant Task Force reporting to Immigration Minister Grassby) I recognise that there are many issues that will need to be addressed. However not all of these have been identified in the draft Terms of Reference, most importantly the critical role that will be played by evidence-based policy which depends on well-considered structures of data collection, analysis and application which is totally missing leaving the Terms seriously flawed.

Current Challenges in the Data field

Over the past three years as the COVID pandemic has affected Australian society, it has become clear that the knowledge base associated with multiculturalism is seriously degraded and operating with declining effectiveness; scholars in the field have long known this, identifying its inception to the closure in 1996/97 by the incoming Howard government of all the key knowledge and policy institutions created out of the 1978 Galbally review (eg Office for Multicultural Affairs, Bureau of Immigration, Population and Multicultural Research).

My comments are derived from my history of research while an academic, and my recent professional engagements as:

  • Member Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing advisory group on COVID and CaLD communities (especially Data working group)
  • Analyst Vaccination Task Force, Commonwealth Dept of Health and Ageing
  • Senior Advisor Cultural and Linguistic Diversity, Royal Commission on Disability
  • Lead consultant Waverley Council (NSW) Cultural Diversity Policy and Plan
  • Consultant Sydney Migrant Services:  Report on Multiculturalism and the Community: looking back and looking forward
  • Author on politics of multicultural communities The Conversation (475000 reads)

There are at least four reasons for this failure in relation to Knowledge Data and Evidence that are apparent to me as a sociologist concerned with this issue. I submit that these dimensions should be addressed as part of the terms of reference.

  1. The concept of Cultural and Linguistic Diversity (CaLD) has underpinned data collection policies of Australian governments since 1999. It was designed to replace the term “non-English speaking background” which had become common after the ABS retired the concept of “Race” after the 1966 Census.  In detail,  CaLD requires four different criteria in its simplest form – born overseas in a non-English speaking country, speaking a language other than English at home, level of proficiency in English, and Australian Indigenous status. However it is rarely applied in totality leading to many mistakes in policy and practice – for instance the NDIA only discovered in September 2021 that its CaLD data included about 20% of people who were Australian indigenous language speakers and who were double counted.  Moreover the emphasis on intersectionality identified in many recent government policy papers appears totally missing from the Terms of Reference.

  2. The Racialisation of Australian policy language in the wake of Black Lives Matter has revealed other data problems. The current Terms document talks of “second generation plus migrants”, which is extremely confusing in its application, let alone what assumed model of society underpins it. It may refer to ongoing racist responses in society to inherited physiognomy, or the continuation of cultural practices brought by the migrant generation which are sustained by their descendants (eg dance, dress, language or religion), or contradictory identities experienced by descendants of immigrants, or many other possibilities. Recently the Diversity Council of Australia has promoted the idea of cultural and racial marginalisation, abandoning linguistic diversity as an issue (or implying it is included in culture where relevant). Unlike other comparable societies, Australia has no data marker for race, a consequence of a decision after signing on to the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racism in 1966 to accept the UNESCO directive to remove “race” as a social descriptor. “Australia uses “racism” in many contexts but it has never been defined, not even in the Racial Discrimination Act. The Review should address and seek to resolve this issue.

  3. Governments are apparently apprehensive about what the data would show in relation to inequities in the health and other social systems; they have no communication strategy to manage their fears and so lock down even the collection of “dangerous” data. Throughout the COVID pandemic, governments have been reluctant to use the CaLD core data points in assessing the testing, infection, morbidity and mortality of the virus on communities. Mortality data are only available far after the date on which the deaths occurred yet even so have revealed massive inequities with high multiples of deaths among first generation migrants compared to the general population. Fierce resistance by the NSW government to collecting data on language spoken by people being tested resulted in much greater infection and morbidity than might otherwise have been the case, despite pilot work in Victoria demonstrating the effectiveness of using this data to identify priority groups for contact who had low testing numbers. The dynamics of this problem, replicated in all states except Victoria (though not used, thus having the same negative outcomes) and recognised and implemented by the Commonwealth only late in the day, was revealed by the extraordinary progress made once vaccination started and the vaccination data could be enhanced by correlations with the CaLD data in the 2016 Census under the MADIP program. The AIHW used a similar approach in its latest report on chronic illnesses and CaLD health. This situation of government data hesitancy should be a matter of priority for the Review as it is the best documented expression of the degradation of data and the conscious refusal by government to collect and use data that would have had major health benefits to Australia’s multicultural communities. The situation continues, with COVID deaths currently heavily concentrated in migrant elderly cohorts, without public recognition or apparent government concern.

    4. While the Review purports to reference a national multicultural framework, it does not identify the roles of state, territory and local government as requiring specific attention. The data problem is magnified by the different attention and interest of these many spheres of government in ensuring the effective collection and application of data, and their orientation to the empowerment of multicultural communities in the conversations with government and their agencies. Having seen first-hand what the confusion, tension and impact of these un-coordinated spheres has proven to be, with destructive consequences for the well-being of communities, especially their most vulnerable members, it is imperative that the Review identify, explore and address these issues.

Summary of additional proposed inclusions

The Terms unfortunately contain confusing and limited perspectives on the issues that should be addressed. In our 2013 chapter in “For Those Who’ve Come Across the Seas…: Australian Multicultural Theory, Policy and Practice” on the still outstanding issues in multicultural Australia, Assoc Prof Chris Ho and I identified three broad issues –
·       the need for a reinvigorated and systematic Research framework and network to improve evidence, data and build deeper and inclusive knowledge,
·       a process that deals with Representation in its two meanings of political voice and socio-cultural presence, and
·       Recognition of the multicultural realities through legislative and institutional reform, including engagement with intersectionality (gender, age, sexuality, disability, social class, locality) .

The current Terms reflect some of the second two ideas, though in a far too limited and confusing way.  No reference to Research, data or evidence- based policy appears in discussion or  in the Draft Terms. While there has been a hint in pre-Election statements by the minister that this Data issue might be addressed in a separate exercise, without this Term being incorporated into the heartland of the review process, the Framework Review will most probably fail the Australian people.

 

ENDS

 

Andrew Jakubowicz BA PhD FRSN FASSA

Emeritus Professor

School of Communication
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of Technology Sydney
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Australia
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Recent book: Cyber Racism and Community Resilience
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W: Making Multicultural Australia

 

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Moving on from White Australia: Election 2022?

~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ Leave a comment

Despite years of critique the Australian national parliament has been overwhelmingly White and massively male, unlike the country as a whole. But something changed at the 2022 election – most clearly around racism and sexism. How might this play out in the negotiations to come?

The Whitlam government supposedly ended the White Australia policy in 1973. For fifty years though, White Australia has hung on in the elite structures –Commonwealth cabinets, the High Court and the ABC Board as examples, even while changing at state and especially local levels. Prior to the 2019 election I argued that we would realise down the track that “Election 2019 was the last White Australia election, in which Euro-Australians dominated the parliamentary seats and both major party leaderships, and where xenophobia was the insistent leitmotif of the Right“. If this election marks an ending for White Australia we would expect to see change in voting, representation and policy.

Just before the election the BBC asked why the Australian Parliament was so White (and male). Sydney Policy Lab director Prof Tim Soutphomassane noted recently that “a celebration of cultural diversity has never been accompanied by a sharing of Anglo-Celtic institutional power”. Peter Khalil, an ALP MP , said in November last year that Australian politics was still swamped by an “Anglo Boys club”. Opting to describe himself as one of the 21% of the population who were NIPOCs (non-Indigenous people of colour) he reflected on years of racism and marginalisation he had experienced and witnessed inside the ALP and outside.

At the 2022 election the trajectories of change differed from each other along almost every conceivable parameter that was not old White male: middle aged well off White women took the elite Liberal urban seats from men. Younger people of colour, usually women, took many of the new Labor seats. Smart mainly young White people took the seats that were turning Green. White Australia was fragmenting along race and gender fault lines. The LNP was left with almost only older White guys in the House.

Voting

The election demonstrated the salience of specific ethnicity in contributing to voter-decisions in many seats, while the more general concern about rising racism played out for a more diverse electorate. “The Chinese vote” has been a focus for interest with many newspaper articles reflecting on the impact of the bellicose rhetoric of the LNP towards China and its impact on the “safety” that Chinese-ancestry voters felt with the conservatives. The Tally Room blog has argued that there was a significant shift towards the ALP (or better put, away from the Liberals) in electorates where the China-ancestry vote was significant. Where the opportunity existed for a potentially-successful Asian or Chinese candidate for the ALP, they were usually successful.

In Fowler, which is a very multicultural electorate with a large Vietnamese community (many with Chinese ethnicity) where the ALP ran the seemingly-resented candidate Kristina Keneally, the ALP vote dropped by nearly 19%. The local Independent Dai Le picked up all nearly all those previously ALP votes, while also taking nearly all the votes that left the Liberals (13%). The Senate vote in Fowler for the ALP also dropped significantly (8%) from 2019, while the Liberal vote rose slightly. In effect the ALP’s safest seat in NSW most likely cost the Party a secure majority.

The key electorates where an apparent anti-Liberal shift in the Chinese-ancestry vote was determinate included Bennelong, Reid and Parramatta in NSW, Chisholm, Higgins and Kooyong in Victoria, and Tangney in Western Australia (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-24/chinese-australian-vote-election-swing-labor/101091384). Some benfitted the ALP, some the Independents.

Representation

Peter Khalil (Wills, Vic) and Dr Anne Aly (Cowan, WA) had been fairly lonely non-European members of the ALP Caucus until the election. Aly (her origin is Egyptian Muslim) worked tirelessly during the long COVID lock-down in Perth to build opportunity for candidates of colour. In Perth Sam Lim (a Malaysian-Chinese immigrant) took Tangney with a 11% swing, building on his deep links with communities throughout Perth as a key police liaison person during the lockdown. Zaneta Mascarenhas, born in Kalgoorlie, whose parents arrived from Goa in 1979, took Swan with a 12% swing. Aly herself increased her vote in Cowan by nearly 10%.

In NSW the 9% first preference swing against Liberals in Bennelong was achieved by Jerome Laxale,the popular Labor mayor of Ryde, whose parents were Francophones from Mauritius and Le Reunion. He repeated the victory that Maxine McKew had achieved against John Howard in 2007, also with strong Chinese and Korean support. McKew though was another outsider Capatain’s pick, and could not hold the seat against John Alexander. Kristina Kenneally tried to take it as a Captain’s pick in a Section 44 by-election, but did not get that local support and failed. In Reid a popular local candidate, Sally Sitou, of Lao Chinese background, reclaimed the seat for the ALP with an 8% swing, on the base of very strong Chinese support.

In Victoria both seats that went to the ALP were won by “ethnic background” candidates. In Chisholm Greek-background Carlina Garland saw a 7% swing away from Gladys Liu, though only 4% went to the ALP. In Higgins Dr Michelle Anada-Rajah, a Tamil born in Sri Lanka, saw a 5% swing away from Liberal Dr Katie Allen bring her 3% of first preferences.

In summary of the ten or so seats the ALP won from the Liberals across the country, six were won by “ethnic candidates”, four of whom were people of colour. On the other hand the seven new “teal” seats, though all won by women, are all now represented by Euro-Australians (aka Whites). So how might this matter?

Policy

The ALP released its Election Statement on Multiculturalism under the names of Katy Gallagher (Finance) and Andrew Giles (Multicultural Affairs) two days before the vote and well after most of the pre-polls and postal votes had been cast. The Statement appears pulled out of the 2021 Multicultural Engagement Taskforce Report chaired by Peter Khalil. Two critical additions include a commitment to a Multicultural Framework Review, which will have to consider whether Australia should have a Multicultural Act (which is Green’s policy), and a re-assessment of the standards for measuring Australia’s diversity. The COVID pandemic and the failures to protect multicultural communities have foregrounded the urgencyof these issues .

It is unlikely the LNP or the Teals will have an interest in or an appetite for pushing these concerns to the top of the food chain. However the new ALP NIPOCs and the Independent Dai Le will have a major investment in exactly that dynamic, creating with Aly and Khalil a significant bloc. The new government’s best-known leaders are Albanese and Wong, two surnames drawn from the deep hinterland of multicultural Australia. Farewell White Australia?

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

~ 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.

Gaming the Virus: fighting the last war cannot win the next one

~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ Leave a comment

Gaming the virus in NSW: how fighting the last war will not win the next one.

One of the few extraordinary benefits for sociologists of the pandemic must be the real time experiments it generates in the relation between social theory and social practice – or put succinctly, how class continues to be an issue in contemporary Australia, most sharply in neo-con libertarian jurisdictions, less so but still there in more social democratic communalist states. Alan Kohler has pointed to the failure of conservatism (he is too hopeful) while Ross Gittins sees the pattern of infection as a reflection of class (too absolute though getting there). Age, race, and gender were called out early on. The virus is alert to the best social space for its transmission to accelerate, where crowding at home, at work and travelling, poor communication, and a mobile population produce the optimum hosts. If trust fractures so that the capacity of the social order to protect people from the virus is undermined, then that social order can rapidly follow. The social remains only a step ahead of chaos, imbued with the ever-present imagined tension between individual and communal well-being.

As the public imaginary has become saturated with metaphors for the “battle” against COVID19 Delta, so the real-world takeover of the key cities in Afghanistan by the Taliban has dominated the real politik. Just as the American Maginot line at Kabul was overwhelmed by the Afghan anti-imperialists, COVID is surrounding and breaking through our defences. The Taliban is a social movement, the impact of which on modern social values and relations we may well abhor. COVID Delta is a social disease, the impact of which on our social sinews – trust – we should rightly fear.  The moment Trump decided to get out (almost the same strategy he propounded in the USA against COVID in 2020) the idea of a single line of resistance that could be sustained by the Kabul government was undermined. Giving up on COVID Zero has a similar smell about it. We must learn to live with them both, some of our leaders now pronounce.

Returning to the COVID battle, there have been calls to refresh the ANZAC spirit, stand together, and face the foe (though Gallipoli was just a better version of the Kabul withdrawal – better planned and executed but in essence the same). We have been told we will be “throwing everything at it”, and sending in our best and bravest. Instead of generals fighting the last war (though we have some of them), we have scientists, grim faced, calling on the citizen soldiers to stand firm, obey orders, and suffer for the greater good. Uniforms abound in the battle lines – police, nurses, military – some with boots on the ground, some with needles in our arms, some now with pepper bombs. Arm-chair strategists and tacticians (including yours truly) argue the toss, seeking to decipher the war plan of a now enshrined and variously interpreted Doherty Report.

Meanwhile cells of guerrillas jump the lines, acting as carriers for the virus as it seeks out the least socially integrated and most distrustful populations as its primary vectors.  It breeds too in the densely settled and impossibly crowded parts of our cities, as well as in the least well-defended outstations of urbanity. The emotions of fear, anxiety, and desperation multiply, while the elites in their palaces announce nostrums that simply erode the capacity of the key weapon, trust, to do its work of building resilience and security.

Sticking with the perhaps overworked metaphors, our best weapon against the virus remains the same one that so escaped us in Afghanistan, on the ground, people-based Intelligence. Intelligence is based on thousands of pieces of information, carefully collected and assessed, integrated and tested, applied and projected. In Afghanistan “our side” allowed our fantasies to supplant our science. Ditto in NSW as our troops chase around the landscape, always in arrears, always behind the ball.

Let us return to the claim “we are throwing everything at it”. We didn’t in Afghanistan and we are not doing it here; we fight with one hand behind our backs because we do not trust the people who are taking the brunt of the attack. We have little or any intelligence of where the virus will crest next – all we know is what has happened, not where we need to be to stop the spread. We have no real idea of how the affected populations are withdrawing from the battle, misleading us into believing that what we see is what is real.

We operate as though we need to placate the as yet minimally affected allied populations to keep them happy with the elite’s management of the war, rather than being smart and breaking the onslaught where it is weakest, while containing it where it appears strongest. We fail to ask the simplest question of our multicultural population – who are you and how do we help you to join the battle for what we call “freedom”?

In the year since it became clear that ethnicity was a proxy for many other dimensions of vulnerability (another echo of Afghanistan) , we have tested millions of Australians, many over and over. Had we at that time normalised requests from people being tested for data on language spoken and country of birth, we would have a heat map of communal vulnerabilities, and systematic guidance of where the enemy was moving, and where we should have a sense of looming threat. It took ages for this awareness to penetrate the consciousness of our strategists – in November 2020 Victoria began to see the value of this data, In February the Commonwealth began collecting the data. Neither of these jurisdictions release this information as they fear it will be used by the anti-vaxxer movement (a fifth column for the virus) to stigmatise ethnic minorities – a common enough practice without the data, and brought to a high art in the naming and shaming of ethnic neighbourhoods in west and south west Sydney. However New South Wales refuses to do so, despite the widespread affirmation from communities caught on the front line that such information would help them respond immediately and directly to the threats their people are experiencing.

In a recent Lancet article,  Daniel Pan and his colleagues explored the issues associated with the higher incidence of COVID and the poorer outcomes in the UK for Black and Asian ethnic groups. The group is trying to work out whether the social inequality(such as those identified in this article)  affecting non-Whites produces this ethnic effect, or whether there are bio-social factors that predispose non-White races to infection and severity of outcomes. In the UK they are able to ask these questions as the data is there – in Australia the data is not there in NSW, where the ideology of individual “freedom” squeezes out the reality of social impact . Even where some race data is available, as with Indigenous communities in western NSW, it was only after the virus reached the vulnerable groups that a reaction was instituted. However, the Health people could tell very quickly that Aboriginal Australians were being attacked, because they collect the data on Indigeneity, even if they did nothing about checking their low participation in testing and vaccination in the lead up. 

My approaches to Minister Hazzard have been ignored; my contact with the Premier’s office were originally treated with intense interest, and then frozen. My interactions with senior Health officials have generated tirades, suggesting I undervalued all the work their front line people had done talking with “ethnic leaders” and helping the communal pop-up clinics to operate. Yet every one of my ethnic community contacts in those areas of the battlefront are bemused and then dismayed to realise there is a weapon (collecting, processing and using ethnic language data by post code in testing and vaccine booking)  that could have helped them protect their people, and yet it has been dismissed without even a try-out. Moreover when you hear the NSW government ministers claim they have done everything possible that NSW Health has advised, remember where the opposition to testing is strongest- in NSW Health. What war are they fighting? What game do they now need to change?