Wednesday, 17 August 2022

Legal and Social Issues Committee

Inquiry into Support for Older Victorians from Migrant and Refugee Backgrounds

Ms COUZENS (Geelong) (10:29): As a member of the Legal and Social Issues Committee, I am pleased to rise to speak on the inquiry into support for older Victorians from migrant and refugee backgrounds. I want to acknowledge and thank the secretariat, who as always did an outstanding job. I also thank the chair, the member for St Albans, who is currently in the chair, and my parliamentary colleagues on the committee. I also want to thank the many organisations and individuals who contributed by submission and at hearings.

The report was tabled on 2 August 2022 and explores how the Victorian government, councils, service providers and community organisations can better support culturally diverse older Victorians to access services, participate fully in the community and be healthy. More than one in four Victorians were born overseas according to the 2016 ABS census. That is 28.4 per cent of the Victorian population who were born overseas in over 200 countries. The report acknowledges that more can be done to increase multicultural older people’s awareness of available support, build their trust in government services, reduce the stigma associated with accessing care and provide services that meet their cultural and spiritual needs. The committee received 73 submissions and held five public hearings in Coburg, Geelong, Ballarat and online. With this evidence the committee was able to produce this report with 61 findings and 76 recommendations.

Culturally diverse older people can find it difficult to access services due to barriers relating to language, transport, housing, finances and visa status. The committee discusses many challenges in the report, including social isolation, barriers to economic and civic participation, digital exclusion, elder abuse and the cultural inclusiveness of aged care. The report aims to address these challenges to ensure that older people from migrant and refugee backgrounds can age with dignity and respect. To achieve this some of the committee’s recommendations include increasing funding for ethnospecific and multicultural organisations to provide essential services, trialling care finders or community connectors to help culturally diverse older people find and access services close to where they live, more specifically addressing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on culturally diverse older people, supporting professional development and career pathways for bicultural and bilingual workers, supporting various initiatives to increase the financial health and digital literacy of culturally diverse older people, supporting the expansion of activities to reduce the social isolation of older people and facilitate their civic and economic participation, developing an elder abuse prevention and response strategy and encouraging mainstream aged care providers to partner with ethnospecific organisations to improve their capability to deliver culturally inclusive services.

Victoria really is a great multicultural state that we are proud of, but there is always more to do. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet with many multicultural communities right across the state, hear their stories and hear their experiences of what it means to them to have to deal with services, how they access them and often the difficulties that they have. It was great to hear from the many organisations who gave evidence during the inquiry. It was mostly on Zoom because of the pandemic issues, but it was really great to hear from them and listen to the issues that they had in providing that support to multicultural communities, particularly people who have language difficulties and refugees who have come into the country and who struggle with language and struggle to understand how to access the supports that they need. We did hear from many organisations and those in communities who were providing some amazing services and were really committed to ensuring that their communities have the services that they need and to ensuring that the services were provided in the most appropriate way, so it was fantastic to hear from those organisations. We did hear from quite a number of those in Geelong, which was fantastic for me, and I encouraged them to put forward their views on what was happening in the Geelong community. This is a great report. I encourage all members to take the opportunity to read it, and I commend the report.