Tuesday, 10 September 2024

Bicultural and bilingual workforce

Samantha RATNAM (Northern Metropolitan) (18:14): (1120) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Multicultural Affairs, and I ask that she develop a plan for the bilingual and bicultural workforce across Victoria and ensure this plan is fully funded. During the last budget process there was significant concern in the community sector, including the family violence sector and women’s health centres, that funding cuts would result in job losses for bicultural workers. As a result of considerable advocacy and effort, these service sectors did end up receiving an extension of some temporary funding for a further two years. This thankfully allowed them to keep their bicultural worker roles. However, that funding was actually a cut in real terms when accounting for inflation, and it is a two-year timeframe, meaning bicultural workers continue to face job insecurity. This is simply not sustainable for the workers or organisations or our community.

Bicultural workers are critical to bridging the language and cultural gaps between migrant and refugee communities and the services trying to support them. They help break down barriers to accessing all sorts of social services, including housing, health care, legal, family support and family violence services and more. In the family violence sector, decades of practice and research has shown us that culturally safe services can save lives. Despite this, we still have significant underfunding of multicultural family violence organisations. Not only should we invest in the bicultural workforce, we should be funding better jobs for bicultural workers – jobs that recognise the important role these workers play in delivering effective services, building trust within communities and raising the cultural knowledge base of their workplaces; and jobs that provide training opportunities and support over time.

The work that bicultural workers do is not easy. They often have high workloads. They are expected to do all the cultural work within their organisations, and they are expected to work within workplace cultures where managers are not often equipped to talk about race, culture and privilege. Bicultural workers also face obstacles in career progression and commonly have to stay in low-level roles because funding models do not create opportunities for development or progression. There is no statewide coordination of the bilingual and bicultural workforce, which means organisations have to take ad hoc approaches. This results in loss of duplication across organisations and ultimately leads to poorer quality outcomes for the community.

The government needs to take an active role in workforce planning and ongoing coordination so that the bicultural workforce have the support they need to meet the needs of a rapidly changing demographic statewide. Bicultural roles have been long underfunded, and we are seeing an enormous amount of unpaid labour done by bicultural workers and volunteers, who do not want to see their clients and communities abandoned. When the government does not properly fund bicultural workers in community services, migrant and refugee people pay the price. Minister, I ask that you develop a plan for the bilingual and bicultural workforce across Victoria and ensure that this plan is fully funded.