Dear Readers,
Victoria started stage 4 lockdown since 2 August. Two weeks later, we are now seeing the decrease of the daily infected cases down to 300’s from a peak of 725 cases on 5 August. The Premier was cautious optimistic on easing of the lockdown measures from mid-September. But he emphasized that the road of elimination of the virus and Melbourne back to normal would be a long way ahead.
It is now clear that the war with Covid-19 is a long haul fight that needs the participation of everyone in the society. Many members of the CALD communities with limited English capacity fail to acquire up to date Covid-19 information from the mainstream media. Many ethnic media suffered drastic reduction of resources and advertising from struggling supporters resulted in closure or reduction of services. The Victorian Chief Health Officer, Professor Brett Sutton pointed out that many CALD Australians received information about Covid-19 in their own languages from their home countries through social network. According to Professor Sutton, much of these information were incorrect and we are now seeing a high percentage of “untraceable cases” represented by CALD communities.
We are glad that Premier Daniel Andrews had announced a $14.3 million package to support CALD communities to face this challenge and from it $5.5 million will be spent on distributing Covid-19 information to the CALD communities. The courage and effort for the Victorian government to embrace the CALD communities and the CALD media to fight this war with Covid-19 is to be commended.
The federal government should now review its media policy and its advertising campaign to give greater support to CALD communities. We noticed that the federal government had only launched a CALD Covid-19 advertising campaign in the first few months of the Covid-19 spread. In practical, there is no CALD campaign for Covid-19. We see this as totally unacceptable as the CALD communities are among the most vulnerable communities at Covid-19 in Australia.
We urge the federal government to respond to and address this challenge immediately.
Raymond Chow
Publisher, Blessing CALD