'Nearly everybody I meet will ask me about my heritage.'
Diversity Council Australia critical race expert Dr Virginia Mapedzahama says the experiences of Louisa, Mark and Wei show the tension between how people self-identify and how they are identified by others.
"If we want to know about the racial make-up of Australian society, we have no choice but to ask questions directly about people's racial identities. "What that sort of data allows them to do is easily say, 'when it comes to pay inequities, how are black women getting paid?' We can't do those same discussions in Australia because we're not actually collecting that data."While Dr Allen agrees that race can be relevant, she believes understanding people's ethnic or cultural identity is a more encompassing notion of identity than race.
"Their articulation or notion of identity transcends this notion of race. Culture, religion and language also plays into this." Census general manager Duncan Young defended the usefulness of the current ancestry question in the Census during a cultural diversity data seminar in September, pointing out it had recorded the Italian heritage of around 460,000 people with Australian-born parents who might not otherwise have been captured.
She also noted someone's country of birth may also not reflect the complexity of some cultures. In India for example, citizens can speak many different languages or follow different religions and cultural traditions. Multicultural Affairs Minister Andrew Giles has also acknowledged Australia still doesn't effectively measure its diversity and this provided a fundamental barrier to fully appreciating the issues that face multicultural Australia.
These standards will form the basis for further data collection and analysis across government, such as the expansion of ethnicity data collection in the Census, and expanding call data collection on a wide range of health and welfare topics ranging from hospitals, mental health, ageing and disability.Dr Allen says when the Census questions were developed, authorities had made it clear they didn't want to discriminate against people of different races.
Dr Allen says Australia is no longer the archetype of a predominately white, colonised nation but the country's diversity wasn't being properly reflected in the data.
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