On Saturday, 14 October 2023, all eligible Australian citizens aged 18 years and over will vote on whether Australia should change its Constitution to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia by establishing a body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.
This month ECCQ partnered with a coalition of community organisations including Settlement Services International, Welcoming Australia and Queensland Community Alliance at the Logan Entertainment Centre to host a learning opportunity about the Voice to Parliament. It is important to remember the practical difference The Voice will make in providing First Nations a pathway to be involved in the decision-making process on matters that have a direct and profound impact on their lives.
A key highlight for the month was the recent Queensland Executive Multicultural Service Sector Network meeting, chaired by ECCQ. We were joined by Stephen Mam and Brad Chilcott AM who reminded us that we all need to break out of our apathy and recognise that the cost of our privilege is still being paid by our First Nations people today. There is lots of guilt and shame from what happened in the past and we are not to blame for it, but we have the choice to do something about it.
It’s not too late to be informed on this referendum, so if you don’t know – find out. There are some great resources, including translated resources, that are readily available at:
- Multicultural Australia for Voice
- Community Toolkit Multilingual Poster
- In-language explainer videos can be found here.
- The Uluru Statement in your language
- Educational Resource toolkit
The role of the Queensland Executive Multicultural Service Sector Network is to provide a unified voice and a space for a multicultural think tank that meets with local decision makers to advance multicultural Queensland. I am proud of the achievements of this Network so far, which includes the development of an inclusive emergency response model for Queensland, titled ‘From the Ground Up’.
This past week the Bureau of Meteorology declared Australia has now entered an El Niño climate pattern. This means hot, dry weather which emergency services fear will increase the risk of bushfires around the country. It is important to ensure that the Queensland natural disaster framework is inclusive in how it prevents, prepares, responds and recovers from these events. The current inclusion of CALD community considerations is at best scant and at worst non-existent!
A lot more needs to be done to ensure that at every stage, considerations specific to CALD communities are not only present but understood and can be activated, I look forward to sharing this response model in the coming days.
