specific investment in addressing racism and discrimination against CALD communities
within the workplace.
Such policies and programs extensively set out an employee’s right to participate in a
workplace free of racism and discrimination, and the responsibility of all staff to create a
culturally safe environment. They do not, however, detail redress for employees who
are subjected to racism or discrimination other than that set out by state and federal
anti-discrimination laws and Fair Work legislation.
Delivering core business without discriminating
While there were some policies and programs that sought to impact community
members more directly, a large proportion of them fell short of actively addressing
racism and discrimination. They were instead focused on supporting staff to engage
more effectively with First Nations and/or CALD communities and ensure they were not
additionally disadvantaged in the process of the agency undertaking its core business.
This is clear through policies such as First Nations or CALD focused child placement
principles for the child protection sector or policies that support the inclusion of
children and families in educational environments when English may not be a first
language, and similar policies in other sectors.
There is valid criticism among stakeholders of anti-racism efforts such as these because
they limit impact to preventing additional harm rather than seeking to address existing,
and in some views rampant, experiences of racism within the community.
Financial barriers to accessing anti-racism programs
The few overt anti-racism and discrimination programs that are directly aimed at the
community are delivered through training modules available to the public. There are
some different modalities in which these trainings take place, with some providers
offering exclusively online engagement with passive learning modules and others
offering face to face workshops, both pre-written and customised to the group that may
engage the training. There are several barriers to the impact of these training offerings.
Firstly, they are all delivered on a fee for service basis, which excludes individuals or
organisations without the resources to purchase the training; secondly, as opt-in
training, it remains highly unlikely that individuals or groups who have deeply engrained
racist attitudes and beliefs would engage or procure the resources.
4.2.2 Stakeholder Interviews
In undertaking stakeholder interviews, it became abundantly clear that in the absence
of consistent mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation, much of the knowledge of the
impact of anti-racism efforts at the state and territory level is held within the corporate
memory of organisations and not publicly available or accessible online. While direct
engagement with state and territory agencies was very limited for this research,
29