National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia

Issues

We need to adapt and reform the institutional processes of Australian society in order to accommodate and respond to the cultural diversity of today's community.

This is necessarily an incremental and evolutionary process - and one that has been happening in a somewhat erratic manner for decades.

In terms of protecting the rights of the individual - and in particular, the right to equality of treatment - the legal system is critical. There are four areas that warrant priority attention:

• The law is inextricably interwoven with the culture of the society in which it evolved. Ours is based on an English system that on the whole has served Australia extremely well. But laws and regulations may have an unintended, differential impact in a society comprising many ethnic, cultural and religious groups. We therefore need to examine systematically the ways in which our laws and associated processes may impede equality before the law.

• Administrative decision-making affects the daily lives and entitlements of all Australians. At the Commonwealth level Australians who feel that they have been unjustly treated may appeal to the Ombudsman or the Administrative Appeals Tribunal or, on more specific issues, to the Veterans' Review Board, the Social Security Appeals Tribunal, and the newly established Immigration Review Tribunal. There are concerns that barriers of culture or language may disadvantage Aboriginal or NESB Australians in making use of this important machinery of review.

• One of the most obvious threats to equality is where evidence in court is inaccurately or incompletely communicated because a witness does not speak or understand English. The presence of so many Australians with a limited knowledge of English - some 370,000 - poses a major challenge to equality of treatment in the judicial and quasi-judicial processes of Australian society.

  Professionally trained interpreters are necessary. Their use is, Constitutionally, the prerogative of the Commonwealth, States and Territories in their respective jurisdictions. To date only South Australia and Victoria have legislated some form of right to an interpreter in court.

• Racial prejudice in some form exists in all societies and within all groups in society. The Racial Discrimination Act (1975) protects the rights of the individual by outlawing the behavioural expression of such attitudes. Recently, however, there has been a marked increase in the public expression of race hatred, through offensive graffiti, inflammatory leaflets and posters, and even in incitement to and acts of violence.

  Until this year there had been no specific legislation to outlaw group racial vilification. The New South Wales Government has now introduced such legislation and the option is being examined in other States.

  At the Commonwealth level the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission will be examining the effectiveness of such legislation as part of its current National Inquiry into Racist Violence.

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