Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD), Disability and work
There’s some underlying racism running about that suggests that people from CALD backgrounds (those foreign chaps) are either lazy or almost criminal in their desire to exploit Australia’s generous welfare system, get on our DSP and put their feet up..
What about the facts?
First of all, the welfare isn’t generous – if it was we wouldn’t be doing so dreadfully when it comes to poverty and people with disability from all backgrounds.
Here’s NOVA’s numbers: The majority of CALD participants have an 8 hour benchmark – this means that to get paid all we need to find is that much work each week. Again we get paid no more for finding more work.
Out of the 173 jobs found:
20% were full time
16% were 22-34 hours
53% were 15-21 hours
11% were less than 15hrs a week
23.6% of jobs found were for CALD workers who could not speak English. We had to job search within the persons own cultural and linguistic community – but that just makes good business sense!
32% of part time employment was at $14,000-$20,000 per annum
27% $20,000 plus.
I don’t want to go about why NOVA aims high – I did that earlier in the week.
What I do want to show is that people with disability who have migrated to this country want to work too – they have the same desire for participation and economic independence every Australian has and, when given the chance, they work just as hard and sometimes even harder – that’s how they are holding down their employment.
It’s easy to victimise minorities and to appeal to those that haven’t thought things through – that doesn’t help though and neither does it truly reflect the contribution made to our nations from migrants of all abilities.
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