Living in Harmony Festival 2013

20/03/2013

On Tuesday 19 March, the Redfern Town Hall was packed with people attending a forum organised by the Ethnic Communities' Coucil of NSW (including the SLP program) as part of the Living in Harmony Festival.

The topic of the day was 'Sydney’s Changing Multicultural Mix: Trends & Stats from Census 2011. We were fortunate to have an amazing panel of speakers at the event to share their experiences around gathering and analysing data, and to respond to questions and issues raised by the audience.

Matthew Johnson kicked of the day with a presentation about a report that he wrote for the ECC SLP project as an intern. The report looked at key demographics of CALD communities across 15 LGAs (available on request). Matthew explained some of the findings, and probably most importantly, how to look at these data and correctly analyse them. Statistics alone do not always shape the whole picture, and some of the Census data, like ‘language proficiency’, can be somewhat subjective and misleading to use by itself to draw conclusions on. Matthew also gave examples of way on how to cross-tabulate Census data and gave some examples of other useful databases that could be used to complement the Censis data. Next was a presentation by Brian Cooper, who went further into how to interprete data, and gave some good examples on how not to treat data and jump to conclusions based on a few statistics too quickly. He pointed out the limitations and how to be aware of the flaws of some of the statistics.

After the presentations, the panel members introduced themselves after which we went straight into an open discussion with the audience.

Panel members included:
Brain Cooper, Principal at Social Mapping and Community Planning
Matthew Johnson, ECC Post-graduate Research Intern
Dr Lynne McLoughlin, Community Education and Social Research, Office of Environment and Heritage
Lou Petrolo, Strategy & Community Relations Manager, SBS
Dr Astrid Perry, Manager, Multicultural Health Services
Dennis Smith, Institute Multicultural Education Coordinator, TAFE, Western Sydney Institute
Esta Paschalidis-Chilas, Acting CEO, Metro Migrant Resource Centre
Janice Webber, Senior Policy Officer, Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia
Susana Ng, Manager, Community Development, City of Sydney

The open discussion of the audience with the panel sparked a lot of interesting conversation about a range of issues that come up, varying from questions about inclusive education and how to best reach communities, to how to find data for what you need. Lots of great ideas and suggestions were raised and many people had the opportunity to meet people from different industries and fields.

The day demonstrated a real need for more similar platforms for discussions and the ECC is looking at ways of doing this in the near future, so stay tuned!
 

By Fieke Geerts