FECCA Policy Platform 2025

FECCA’s vision is a fair, inclusive Australia where multiculturalism is protected in law and delivered in practice. Our platform is anchored in human rights and anti-racism: every portfolio has a positive obligation to prevent discrimination, ensure cultural and language rights, and design with lived experience.

This means moving beyond pilots and goodwill to clear duties, standards and accountability embedded across government. It also means naming and tackling systemic racism – through measurable standards, independent oversight, and public reporting – so equity is delivered by design, not chance. Crucially, equity must be realised across metropolitan, regional and rural Australia, where distance and service gaps amplify exclusion.

We are calling for a modern national architecture that hard-wires multicultural equity: a National Multicultural Act, an independent Multicultural Commission and Commissioner, a strengthened Office for Multicultural Affairs (OMA), and transparent budget and data settings that make progress visible and accountable. These are the enabling reforms that will unlock better outcomes across aged care, health, mental health and digital inclusion, women’s equality and safety, media literacy, and cohesion.

A contribution-forward narrative – showing how migrants create value across the economy, services, and communities – must sit beside support mechanisms to shift perceptions from “utilisers” to co-creators of national prosperity. This includes recognising the contribution of multicultural communities to regional industries and local economies, and ensuring policy levers work in smaller population centres.

What We Ask For

• Embed human rights and anti-racism through legislating a National Human Rights Act and implement the National Anti-Racism Framework with mandatory cultural-safety and anti-racism capability across public-facing workforces.
• Legislate a multicultural architecture framework and pass a National Multicultural Act that enshrines multiculturalism as a core Australian value and sets statutory duties on all Commonwealth entities.
• Create independent oversight by establishing an independent Multicultural Commission and Commissioner to coordinate delivery, set standards, monitor outcomes, and report to Parliament.
• Strengthen System-Wide Coordination and resource OMA with a whole-of-government mandate to lead implementation, issue binding Access and Equity Standards, and convene an independent, community-endorsed advisory council.
• Make investment transparent by introducing annual Multicultural Budget Statements that map spending, identify gaps and unintended impacts, and commit to corrective action.
• Fix the data to fix the system by adopting nationally consistent CALD data standards (including ethnicity and language variables), with public dashboards and community-governed data stewardship.
• Guarantee language rights and establish a whole-of-government language policy, including routine use of qualified interpreters, plain-language, and in-language communications, and strengthened bilingual/bicultural workforce pathways.
• Partner with community to deliver initiatives and provide multi-year, outcomes-based funding to multicultural community organisations to co-design services, broker engagement, and maintain trusted feedback loops into government.
• Close funding gaps in programs supporting multicultural communities (across Commonwealth and state/territory streams) to ensure equitable access to resources, strengthen community capability, and enable full participation in an inclusive society.
• Address place-based inequities by tailoring commissioning, workforce, and infrastructure solutions for regional and rural areas (e.g., travel loadings, thin-market supports, digital connectivity) so access is genuinely national.