Message from the Publisher #09

Dear Readers,

On 13 August, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews announced 5 million to support the distribution of Covid-19 information among CALD communities. A CALD Covid-19 Taskforce was set up and proposals were invited from CALD communities for Covid-19 projects. However, nearly two months later, little has been done to distribute Covid-19 information.
It was discussed in a meeting with Premier Andrews that the government needed to support ethnic media at this time of Covid-19 as practically most community support to ethnic media disappeared with local businesses face hardship, especially during the lockdown. Many ethnic media have already stopped publishing or broadcasting. In return, ethnic media could help the Victorian government to equip CALD communities with government policies and initiatives to fight Covid-19 together.
Unfortunately, after nearly two months, ethnic media still receive nothing from the various governments. The government simply keeps on sending promotion and PR material to ethnic media without addressing how these media can exist.

I believe that both the state and federal governments need to face the reality that just producing CALD Covid-19 information in different languages is NOT sufficient for them to be distributed. And more important, sending out the information to CALD community organizations is again unable to guarantee their distribution. Yes, social media is fast in distributing information occasionally. However, it is often noted that misinformation and false news are faster and widely spread than useful government information. There is simply no social initiatives to distribute government information through the social network.

The more successful and reliable way of distributing CALD Covid-19 information is through community ethnic media promotion. Adding community flavour to government information allows greater support for it to be distributed through community support to these media. The internet and mobile communications allow greater flexibilities to distribute through various social platforms. But the most important is that information must be put into ethnic media platforms first.
National Ethnic Media and Broadcasting Council (NEMBC) recently received funding to produce Victorian daily 4 minutes Covid-19 news in different languages. This is essential as CALD Victorians can access to up-to-date daily CALD information and be connected. BlessingCALD.com.au is proud to have ALL of this daily news to be broadcasted online to all multicultural Victorians to support this meaningful initiative.
I believe that this is a good example of demonstrating how we can work together to serve CALD Australians.

Raymond Chow
Publisher, BlessingCALD

5 Oct., 2020