Last Tuesday, the Federation Room of the Victorian Parliament House was heaving with guests at the launch of the Victorian Multicultural Voices for ‘Yes’ campaign. The Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria (ECCV) has joined forces with Yes23 and Multicultural Australia for Voice alliance.
The Victorian Multicultural Voices for ‘Yes’, according to an ECCV statement, will engage with multicultural communities to “raise awareness about why the recognition of our First Nations People in the Constitution is important.” and how voting ‘Yes’ will achieve that.”
First Nations Elders and a host of multicultural community leaders, such as the Greek Community of Melbourne president Bill Papastergiadis attended the launch.
ECCV CEO, Mo Elrafihi, the MC for the event, underscored the “important role that Bill Papastergiadis and the Greek Community of Melbourne, the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV) and other communities” who are engaging their community members on the importance of voting Yes.
“First Nations and multicultural communities have shared values that bind us,” the ECCV CEO said.
Aunty Esme Bamblett, CEO of the Aboriginal Advancement League, and a member of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, the Victorian Minister for Multicultural Affairs Colin Brooks, and the Minister for Treaty and First Peoples Gabrielle Williams also spoke.
First Nations Elder calls on ethnic communities to become allies
Aunty Esme Bamblett called on multicultural communities to ally with First Nations Australians. She reflected on the 1967 Referendum when over 90 per cent of Australians who were not Aboriginal voted to support the counting of the Indigenous people in the Census.
“We need allies to get the Voice because we can’t do it alone. We didn’t do it alone in 1967 when 90.7 per cent of the people who voted in support of our mob were non-Aboriginal.”
The Elder said that an enshrined voice in parliament would allow the Aboriginal and Torres Strait (ATSI) people to advise the government on ATSI policies and programmes that “will work for best for our mobs.”
Aunty Esme Bamblett said that First Nations people had been here for thousands of years and joked, “Not me actually,” then went on to say, “We’ve got great cultural heritage to share with all other mobs” and that with a constitutional recognition and Voice to parliament “we will all be better off,” referring to the various multicultural groups represented.
The longstanding Chairperson of the ECCV, the former Victorian politician Eddie Micallef, of Maltese background, called on multicultural communities, mainly established ones, to reflect on the racism they encountered, “We were called ‘wogs’, ‘dagos’ and all that BS.”
“In 1917, the Australian government turned back a ship of Maltese immigrants because we were not considered white.”
Micallef reflected on his involvement in the 1967 Referendum, where he handed out ‘how to vote flyers’ and joked, “It shows you how old I am.”
The big difference then from now said the EECV chairman, “is that there was cross-party support,” unlike now when the LNP Opposition is backing the No vote.
Just as the Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Colin Brooks, took to the podium, the division bells rang, and he had to rush into chambers. On his return, he joked, “We don’t want to face the wrath of the premier for not turning up to a division.”
The minister said he was “thrilled to see the ECCV launch this awareness-raising campaign”, which would “harness the power and strength of our multicultural communities to achieve recognition of First Nations People in our constitution.”
Brooks became visibly emotional and tried to hold back tears as he attempted to read from a section from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, where it says, “Proportionally Aboriginal Australians are “the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers.”
Mo Elrafihi, ECCV CEO, says more can be done to engage ethnic media on the issue
Neos Kosmos spoke to the ECCV CEO, Mo Elrafihi, and asked if the planned town hall meetings and work with peak ethnic community organisations will be enough to sway multicultural communities to vote Yes in the upcoming Referendum.
Elrafihi said that in June 2023, the ECCV Board “unanimously approved our role, to raise awareness among multicultural communities of the importance of Closing the Gap,” and the launch of the Victorian Multicultural Voices for ‘Yes’ campaign was “doing exactly that, bringing together Victorian multicultural voices for Yes” in partnership with First Nations people.
Elrafihi said the ECCV and its partners “want to have positive conversations on the issues related to the Yes position” with its over 200 organisational members.
“We want to have positive conversations with the Greek Community of Melbourne, the Islamic Council of Victoria, and with people from different walks of life.
“We want to talk with people who support the Yes campaign and those who don’t, as well as those who don’t know about it.”
The CEO said he wants to raise awareness about the importance of recognising First Nations people.
“Part of that is to co-host town hall forums in partnership with organisations like the Greek Community of Melbourne, and the Islamic Council of Victoria, where we invite members of our First Nations communities to speak to multicultural communities about why it’s important to them.”
Neos Kosmos asked if town-hall meetings – where mainly the pro-Yes members of multicultural communities attend – will be enough to reach ethnic Australians who do not engage actively with the ECCV and other advocacy groups and whose access to information is multicultural media.
“Multicultural media is a crucial platform that informs and communicates, with ethnic communities about issues relevant to them, in their language and English, and the ECCV wants to engage both with our ethnic media and First Nations people on why it’s important to vote Yes.
“Neos Kosmos and all ethnic media are critical to the success of the Yes campaign,” Elrafihi said.
Neos Kosmos said that Yes23 has yet to do much to engage multicultural media to which Elrafihi said that “more can be done to reach out to the community through multicultural media.”
The ECCV CEO added that he knows some communities “are harder to reach and the ECCV” and multicultural media “can reach those communities which mainstream groups” and media can’t.
“Multicultural communities living in the outer suburbs of Victoria, in the west, north, and southeast, must be reached.
“We need to go out there and have conversations with them and reach them through ethnic media, social media, and town hall forums.”
“This will be the first time that migrant communities – our communities – may have encountered the concept of reconciliation.
“I speak as the son of a Lebanese migrant father and a Syrian mother; my family have probably never met First Nations people, so this could be the first time that many of our members are engaged with First Nations people,” Elrafihi said.
Elrafihi said the ECCV “was founded when our parents migrated here and faced discrimination, racism.”
“The ECCV’s purpose from its foundation was to advance our rights and improve our situation, and provide migrants and their children with a voice, what this referendum is about providing First Nations Australians with a Voice.”
Community forums on voting ‘YES’, include the Greek Community of Melbourne on 28 August.
