As the voice referendum date approached, Khushaal Vyas and Nishadh Rego suspected that their community might not be reached by any of the voice campaigns.
They also knew multicultural communities, in Sydney and elsewhere – including the increasingly influential Indian Australian community – could be decisive in the vote.
So they started a grassroots organisation called “Desis for Yes,” a volunteer group that aims to hold spaces for discussions in familiar settings, complete with chai and a south Indian breakfast.
“We wanted to create physical spaces for comfortable, informal conversations, for us to talk about the referendum with our communities, and to reach people who are otherwise not engaged in debates or in Australian politics,” Rego says.
He says they used their knowledge of their community to set up these conversations in an effort to ensure they had an impact.
“Our first community conversation was on a Sunday, and we organised it in a way where people felt comfortable.
“People were doing what they normally do on a Sunday morning.”
Rego says more than 60 leaders from the Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil and Kerala communities turned up to that first meeting in Sydney, with more organised since. Meetings are also being planned in other states, including in Victoria and South Australia.
“We have around 10 more conversations organised in the next month. We are going to where these communities are, to their community halls, their temples and their mosques.”
‘We speak the languages of our community’
Rego says he and Vyas realised “quite early on” that the campaigns wouldn’t be reaching his community. So they chose to act.
“We realised that the channels by which this referendum would be prosecuted wouldn’t reach our communities, particularly not in the language or platforms of our communities,” he said.
“And the number one reaction we get is, ‘what is this?’ and ‘tell me more’. There are just a lot of questions, and a pretty significant gap in knowledge about the significance and consequence of the vote.”
Vyas adds that he believes the campaign in his community will be won or lost based on access to information.
“When you speak to people who are undecided or even perhaps leaning towards no, the moment you’re able to explain that there is that sort of shared history in terms of the colonial past and those impacts [are] still being felt, a lot of people from south Asian backgrounds really resonate with [that] and can understand.
“There are very few hard noes, just mostly yes votes or people trying to learn more.”
Vyas describes it as a “race against time” to educate the community, saying that for all the resources of the campaign, misinformation is difficult to catch.
“It’s very easy to just forward a WhatsApp message that has a complete lie about how ‘they’re gonna steal your land’,” Vyas says. “Misinformation can spread so much more quickly than any explainer we can put out.”
He says it means information needs to be on platforms that are “actively being engaged”, which for many migrant communities usually means ethnic media.
For the Indian-Australian community, that includes Indian Link, a community platform that has been hosting discussions since 1994.
While it has hosted conversations on the voice, Indian Link’s founder and co-editor, Pawan Luthra, says neither the yes or the no campaigns have contacted them.
“It’s a bit of a shame because we feel that the story can be told quite effectively through our medium, and that our platform is not being effectively used,” Luthra says.
“We have massive reach within the Indian Australian community, the kind of reach other news platforms could only dream of. We speak the languages of our community, we convey the Indian angles of the campaign, but mostly, we just reach them.”
For a community that has rapidly grown into one of the most influential voting blocs in the country, and into the second-largest migrant group in Australia, reach is everything.
Luthra points to the huge number of community members who are either recent migrants or immigrated in decades past, who might not know the context or history behind the vote and are ultimately left out of the conversation.
“We feel a lot more can be done with community media, because we are a trusted source of information. And time is passing, they need to work on their multicultural strategies.”
Luthra also mentions multicultural communication strategies employed during the pandemic, which were criticised as being outdated and too dependent on translations and community gatekeepers.
Making inroads
However, Dr Shireen Morris, the director of the Radical Centre Reform Lab at Macquarie University, says the yes campaign has made “significant inroads” in multicultural communities.
One of the organisers behind Multicultural Australia for Voice, an appeal to garner support among organisations, Morris points to in-person forums that have been held to “inform community members” that she says have been “very effective”.
“Significant inroads have been made to inform faith and multicultural communities on the voice referendum. This has been paying off, but there is obviously more work to do,” she says.
“There are thousands of volunteers working very hard every day across the country. The campaign knows multicultural voters are important, so some great work is being done.”
But Morris adds that leadership should be shown by the communities themselves.
“It’s fantastic to see community members themselves stepping up and taking an active leadership role in this conversation,” Morris says.
“This is what needs to happen. Every Australian needs to take responsibility for accessing accurate information and sharing it with their communities, and helping dispel misinformation.
“Every Australian needs to take responsibility for the success or failure of this referendum.”
