How useful is the term 'culturally and linguistically diiverse' (CALD) in Australian research and policy discourse?

• Pooja Sawrikar, Ilan Katz
• Social Policy Research Centre

Read the full text

08 July 2009Can this term provide researchers, practitioners, and policy makers with a better ability to monitor and respond to their level of social exclusion and inequity to services, opportunities and representation, as the basis for promoting ethnic equality in the future, asks this paper.

Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) was introduced in 1996 to replace Non-English Speaking Background (NESB), both of which are commonly used in the social policy discourse to refer to all of Australia’s ethnic groups other than the English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon majority. However, CALD has developed negative connotations. It can produce ‘relational exclusion’, or the feeling of not belonging, for both minority ethnics groups as well as the majority, and it can produce ‘distributional’ exclusion, which refers to unequal access to services, opportunities, or representation. The authors of this paper presented at the 2009 Australian Social Policy Conference argue that CALD should only be used in a functional way to celebrate Australia’s diversity, but not in a categorical way to refer to a sub-group of its population. For this latter function, they propose the term ‘Australians Ethnically Diverse and Different from the Majority’ (AEDDM). This paper looks at how this term can provide researchers, practitioners, and policy makers with a better ability to monitor and respond to their level of social exclusion and inequity to services, opportunities and representation, as the basis for promoting ethnic equality in the future.