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Commentary on: Migrant Resource Centres »
Prof Andrew Jakubowicz.
Text Commentary
Now we can do it for ourselves...
1978 - Migrant Resource Centres bring a new level of migrant participation in crucial issues
The first Migrant Resource Centres opened in 1978, the result of a proposal of the Galbally Report. Soon they were scattered through areas of high migration such as Wollongong, Liverpool, Cabramatta and Fairfield in New South Wales, and St Kilda and Broadmeadows in Melbourne. They evolved into forums where migrants began to have real input into issues that concerned them - a long road from the policies of the '40s and '50s.
Under the assimilationist ideology which had pervaded government and wider social perspectives on the settlement and adaptation process, migrants had been expected to undergo a simple transformation into "new Australians". By the late 1960s there was a recognition that this process was not a realistic understanding of the much more complex real-world situation. Government began to appreciate the role that ethnic communities could play in delivering services to their own members - it could be cheaper and more effective, as it would use community volunteers supported by government workers, and would reflect community priorities insofar as these could be identified.
Through the early 1970s, under the influence of the Australian Assistance Plan, numerous local community centres began to emerge, such as the Surry Hills Neighbourhood Information Centre and Neighbourhood Action Centre (NICNAC) in inner Sydney. The Migrant Task Force reports to the Minister Al Grassby argued for these centres as a strategy which would allow local people from different ethnic communities and older Australians to join together to provide programs reflecting local needs - outside the strictures of public service rules. It could harness the energy of community action and lead towards positive social change.
The Liberal government's Galbally Review team was influenced by these models, and developed a proposal for a network of local Migrant Resource Centres in high migrant settlement areas. They would be run by appointed committees drawn from local, state and federal government, with local ethnic and other community groups represented. The first were established in 1978 in Parramatta (Sydney) and Richmond (Melbourne).
There were very different responses to these ideas across the country - but probably the Centre that most dramatically engaged with the popular participation dimension was the Illawarra Migrant Resource Centre based in Wollongong. Its initiator and first co-ordinator, Helen Meekosha, argued in her 1979 report to the Interim Committee for the Centre, that the crucial issues included jobs - particularly for migrant women. Throughout her consultations with migrant leaders they referred to the limited opportunities for women, the policy of the local major employer Australian Iron and Steel (AIS), not to employ women, and the result - thousands of women pushed into "outwork" at home, sewing for the clothing industry for poor pay and in bad conditions.
The Interim Committee also demanded that the Minister - then Michael MacKellar - agree to a constitution for the Centre which would guarantee a real membership of ethnic and other community organisations, and an elected committee. In a confrontation with the Immigration Department bureaucracy, which still did not trust the local community to run its own affairs, the Minister delayed until the latest moment, and then approved the election. This set a precedent for centres throughout Australia, and marked the first representative involvement by ethnic communities in jointly running programs for themselves.
The Illawarra Migrant Resource Centre went on to work on many key campaigns with community groups throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. These included:
- the Jobs for Women Campaign, a fourteen year struggle to secure women the right to work at AIS (won finally in 1994);
- the community languages campaign in 1982, in which ethnic high school students confronted the NSW Department of Education and the Minister for Education to demand full recognition of their performance in community languages at the HSC exam;
- the Outwork campaign in the mid 1980s, which won recognition for outworkers of rights to workers' compensation if injured at home, and then the recognition that they were in fact employees, with rights to trade union and industrial protection;
- the Cringilla coal wash dump campaign, to protect the heavily migrant suburb from becoming a dumping ground for waste products from AIS;
- the establishment of a community legal centre for the Illawarra area; and
- the development in 1993 of a kit for young women covering gender and identity called "Let's talk About Ourselves".
Other Migrant Resource Centres took on key issues in their own localities, as well as providing direct services - welfare advice, advocacy, special English classes, media training for ethnic leaders, and community cultural development such as writing and oral history programs and documentary films (eg Launceston in Tasmania). The MRCs remain as vestiges of the communal ideas of the 1970s, offering bridges between communities, and with government.
Further reference:
Jakubowicz, Andrew; Morrissey, Michael; and Palser, Joanne Ethnicity, class and social policy in Australia, SWRC reports and proceedings, no 46, Sydney, Social Welfare Research Centre - University of New South Wales, 1984.
Jupp, James (ed) The Australian People: an Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and their Origins, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1988.
Meekosha, H and Rist, L "The Resources Centres: boom or bust?", Migration Action, 1 (1), 1982, pp 27-31.