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National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia

National agenda initiatives

The above initiatives are making a substantial contribution towards the Government's overall economic and social justice goals, particularly insofar as they contribute to equality of opportunity for all Australians.

There remains a need for even more targeted measures in order to ensure that all members of the community regardless of background, are able to make their maximum contribution to Australia's development. The Government has therefore decided on the following additional initiatives to this end:

Recognition of overseas qualifications

The Government will reform processes for the recognition of overseas qualifications. The reforms include:

  • establishment of the National Office of 0verseas Skills Recognition within the Employment, Education and Training portfolio, subsuming the Council on Overseas Professional Qualifications.

The Office will:

  • promote national standards for skills recognition;

  • improve access to education and training;

  • encourage competency-based assessments;

  • develop counselling and referral services; and

  • promote occupational deregulation.

The Office will work with the National Training Board to ensure that processes for the recognition of overseas qualifications are integrated with processes for accrediting the skills of domestically trained workers.

  • institute reforms to recognition procedures under the Tradesmen's Rights Regulation Act (1946), which governs recognition of overseas qualifications in the metal and electrical trades;

  • develop necessary Commonwealth-State consultative mechanisms and co-operative arrangements; and

  • improve access to bridging and remedial training. As a first step in the long-term approach to the problem, bridging places under Jobtrain Bridging will rise from 150 to 180 in 1989-90 and to 200 in 1990-91.

Vocational English

Insufficient provision of vocationally specific English language courses is a major impediment to the integration into the labour market of people from non-English speaking countries. The Government will therefore:

  • examine the adequacy of current arrangements for vocational English in the context of a major review of post-school ESL provision (further details are provided in Chapter 6);

DEET's client services network

The Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) plays an important role in providing access to and information on training and employment opportunities, particularly for disadvantaged groups including recent immigrants and people with English language difficulties. The CES has a small network of specialist staff to focus on these groups.

The Government has recently undertaken a major review of the CES which recommended reforms aimed at providing enhanced services for industry and job-seekers.

Specifically, the review proposed an upgraded job-seeker specialist service with greater capacity to tailor services to the needs of individual clients. The Government has given in-principle agreement to the recommendations and is considering arrangements for their implementation.

Multicultural education in schools

As part of the forward work program under the national schools strategy the Government will:

  • propose to the Australian Education Council, comprising Commonwealth, State and Territory Ministers for Education, that social science education, incorporating multicultural education, be identified as a priority for collaborative curriculum development in 1990.

Multiculturalism in higher education

The Multicultural and Cross-Cultural Supplementation Program -which has already contributed to curriculum reform for professionals such as teachers, librarians, doctors, lawyers, social workers and business people - concludes in 1990-91 (with the term of grants ending by 30 June 1992). In order to maintain pressure for change beyond that date the Government will:

  • invite submissions from higher education institutions for funding of multicultural curriculum development and cross-cultural awareness initiatives as one of the identified national priorities under the Reserve Fund in 1990-93;

  • raise multicultural curriculum reform as an issue of national priority during profile discussions with individual higher education institutions;

  • pursue the inclusion of multicultural perspectives in professional fields of study as part of future disciplines assessments; and

  • ensure that the National Plan for Equity in Higher Education reflects equity concerns in relation to Aboriginal and NESB students thereby providing guidance to individual institutions in preparing their own equity objectives for inclusion in profiles.

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