‘We Were an Afterthought’: Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Communities in New South Wales, Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the impact on Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) communities in Australia of government and community responses to the coronavirus pandemic of 2019 in the domains of education, employment, housing, social connectedness, and public health communication. Most of the examples are drawn from the state of New South Wales. In Australia, CALD refers to people from countries not classified as main English speaking. Most CALD communities reported in this article are from refugee backgrounds, are recently arrived migrants or do not use English in most of their communication. Inadequate, and in some instances, inappropriate or absent support, adversely impacts CALD communities. We used a multidisciplinary bricolage approach that draws on media, government, and community support publications and concluded that CALD communities experienced heightened pressures due to lower resource availability and poor communication. This led to disruption of support services, exposing gaps and vulnerability. The results reported here challenge Australian government, schools, community agencies, researchers to include proactively CALD community perspectives when planning and responding to such crises in future. Improving communication, pandemic response planning, addressing needs and ensuring participation are key considerations.

KEYWORDS:

• Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
• education
• employment
• health communication
• housing
• social connectedness

Introduction

In Australia, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) refers to people born overseas in countries not classified as main English speaking (Australian Bureau of Statistics, ABS, 2013). The ABS identifies the main English-speaking countries as Australia, Canada, Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) and United States of America (ABS, 2013). The noun CALD has contestations (Shepherd, Ravulo, & Phillipson, 2021) and it is only used here because of a lack of a good alternative. CALD is used in this article to refer to people who live in Australia and are from a non-English culture but excludes Indigenous Australians. The phrase is rarely used on White people, even though they are CALD. Everyone has a culture, and every culture and language is different, yet the noun CALD makes one culture (Anglo) and language (English) dominant and the rest different from the dominant. The phrase CALD conceals identities by putting people from different cultural backgrounds together. For those who are bi-racial, CALD can be a source of confusion. Most CALD communities reported in this article are from refugee backgrounds, are recently arrived migrants or use their language other than English at home or with family members in most of their communication.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was first reported in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The World Health Organization (WHO) initially declared a public health concern in January 2020, followed by a pandemic in March 2020 (WHO, 2021). Several public health measures were adopted to contain the virus, and many remain in place. These measures include hand washing with soap or disinfecting with alcohol-based sanitizers, physical distancing including quarantine or isolation, and travel restrictions including community lockdowns. As a result of these lockdowns, school and university campuses, non-essential shops, factories, and high-density commercial offices were closed. Hospitals and clinics partially closed, while some opened COVID-19 treatment centers. All these measures of managing the virus bring unique experiences for people from CALD backgrounds.

Using a bricolage methodology (Kincheloe, 2005), we describe and reflect on the impact of COVID-19 on CALD communities in Australia in five domains: education, employment, housing, social connectedness, and public health communication. Education, employment, housing, and social connectedness domains were selected because anecdotal evidence showed that these were most affected by the pandemic for CALD communities. Public health communication was included because it featured prominently in reports from organizations providing services to CALD communities. Most of the examples are drawn from the state of New South Wales. These reflections offer some possibilities as to how Australian governments and community leaders can better empower and support CALD communities before and during pandemics (Harvey, Koloff, & Wiggins, 2021, May 28).

Responses in previous pandemics: a global picture

In previous pandemics such as the influenza of 1968, CALD communities are known to have received inadequate support (Wickramage et al., 2018). As Wickramage (2018, p. 1) said, migrant groups may be disproportionately affected in the event of health emergencies. The reasons for these vulnerabilities are political, sociocultural, economic, and legal but also limited access to health and welfare services (Wickramage et al., 2018). The WHO (2011) recommends that countries develop plans to respond to pandemics beforehand. These plans are called pandemic influenza preparedness plans (PIPPs). In 2011, the WHO did a review of PIPPs and found that only 13 of 119 countries (11%) had come up with strategies to tackle the communication challenges of ethnic minorities, refugees, immigrants, and indigenous peoples (WHO, 2011). Most countries focused on their “main” cultural groups (Gostin & Berkman, 2007). Smith and Judd (2020) made a point that vulnerable groups, including CALD, are often made more vulnerable during pandemics. Lessons can also be derived from West and Central Africa where Ebola outbreaks often result in some sections of society being stigmatized and excluded and considered vectors of the virus (Grove & Zwi, 2006).

It is essential for each country to prepare and plan for pandemics, argued Itzwerth, Moa, and MacIntyre (2018). However, research shows that plans by Australian governments do not adequately address the needs of populations that are most vulnerable, especially communication and participation (Itzwerth, Moa, & MacIntyre, 2018). The researchers also found a lack of coordination at different levels of government.

Unless interventions are rightfully targeted, and plans are made to be inclusive, the disadvantaged members of society will be “masked or neglected” during a pandemic (Garoon & Duggan, 2008; Smith & Judd, 2020). Writing at the start of the coronavirus disease in 2020, Smith and Judd anticipated that privileged sections of society would benefit from their existing power while the vulnerable would be the hardest hit. As Smith and Judd (2020) argue, it is:

the elderly, those with disabilities, people in prison, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, people with chronic conditions, and people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds, that will be impacted disproportionately by COVID‐19, particularly if assertive health promotion action is absent.

We explore how COVID-19 compounds these vulnerabilities in the domains of education, employment, housing, social connectedness, and public health communication.

Methods

Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, the authors of this paper planned to collaborate with a local CALD community to support refugee and recently arrived migrant families transition successfully into a local government secondary school. Health restrictions imposed by governments and universities prohibited this project from commencing. Nonetheless, observations and conversations throughout the first wave of the pandemic in 2020 suggested CALD communities faced greater challenge than other sectors of the wider Australian community. Given the prohibition on data collection, a purposeful interdisciplinary exploration was adopted to give insight to the challenges for CALD communities caused by the pandemic.

Bricolage approach

Researchers employed a bricolage approach (Lévi-Strauss, 1974). Bricolage derives from craft-people who gather whatever is at hand, both resources and tools, to create novel artifacts (Lévi-Strauss, 1974; Rogers, 2012). This method accepts insights that emerge through epistemological and subjective researcher positionality (Denzin & Lincoln, 2017; Rogers, 2012). Using this approach, researchers were able to gather and review information from several sources: newspapers and online media reports, journal articles, government reports, non-government agencies publications and anecdotal evidence.

Interdisciplinary approach

An interdisciplinary approach to draw insights from a plurality of disciplinary perspectives through a critically self-reflexive process (Kincheloe, 2004). The research team comprises scholars from education, public health and social work disciplines. Although given funding and ethical approval for data collection to commence in 2020, COVID-19 restrictions did not permit us to collect any primary data. Anecdotal observations suggested the impact of COVID-19 on CALD communities might be more acute than for the wider population and authors sought to test that proposition. Interdisciplinary research seeks novel insights to social situations through construction by affording an opportunity for researchers to engage one another (Mansilla, Lamont, & Sato, 2016).

Review

Each researcher identified and undertook independent review of relevant sources (public data, government commissioned reports, and media reporting) in each of the five key disciplinary domains. Selection of data was determined by each scholar’s expertise in their disciplinary field; these choices also reflect their diverse subjective histories and narratives of direct experience with CALD communities. The authors reported their selected sources to each other as critical interpretive collisions (Kincheloe, 2005). Such multi-perspectivalism (Kincheloe, 2005) leads to emergent interpretations more reflective of complex epistemologies and ontologies that reflect the challenges of marginalization for CALD communities. The reporting happened twice a month through online meetings. In the meetings, each researcher reported the sources they had found and summarized the contents, followed by a discussion whether to include a source or not. This prevented bias and added rigor to the process.

The review took place between April and July 2020 but was updated in December 2020 and June 2021. In Australia, the years 2020 and early 2021 were mainly characterized by public health messaging and interventions such as lockdown to curtail the spread of the virus. In 2021, more focus was seen toward vaccinations but also new lockdown measures to contain another wave of the spread of the virus. In 2023, a focus was on easing restrictions and returning life to normal. The review did not include detailed information about what happened after June 2021.

Limitations

The information used for this research was mainly collected at the start of the pandemic, and updated in December 2020 and June 2021. What happened after that was scantly included in this paper and this is one limitation of this study. Another limitation is that literature was drawn from several secondary sources in line with a bricolage approach. This was necessary because the COVID-19 situation was being experienced for the first time, and multiple perspectives were necessary. However, this is a limitation. The literature used was mostly drawn from the state of New South Wales, limiting the application of the review to the whole country. Lastly, very few of the sources were provided by CALD communities themselves. Including the voices of those being researched can decolonize knowledge and make it more culturally appropriate (Bennett & Green, 2019; Chilisa, 2012).

Results

Education

Government schools across the eight Australian states and territories educate approximately 65% of all students (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021b), and, within this, educate the vast majority of refugee students (New South Wales Department of Education, 2020). There were more than 11 000 students from former refugee families in New South Wales in 2020, with 1800 expected to enroll each year (New South Wales Government, 2020). Concentration of this vulnerable student population in socio-educationally disadvantaged schools, along with the governance complexity of Australian education, exacerbated the challenge of supporting vulnerable refugee and CALD communities during COVID-19 in three significant ways: government decision-making responsibilities, clear and consistent communication, and access to appropriate resources during remote learning.

While education is constitutionally a state and territory responsibility in Australia, a national response to COVID-19 was deemed essential. Consequently, the Prime Minister of Australia established a national cabinet in March 2020 consisting of himself and each state Premier and territory Chief Minister. A series of advisory reports were commissioned to assist national cabinet in making decisions about whether to keep students on campus, or move to remote learning (Brown, Te Riele, Shelley, & Woodroffe, 2020; Clinton, 2020; Drane, Vernon, & O’Shea, 2020). Consistent across these reports were warnings of disadvantage to socio-educationally and CALD communities such as those who provide schooling to refugee and migrant families.

As national cabinet considered how best to respond, confusion, and uncertainty developed regarding if, when, and how schools might switch to remote online learning. A desired national approach did not follow, with the decision of many non-government schools to commence remote learning before government schools (Baker, 2020, May 16). Inconsistent messaging from the Commonwealth and various state and territory education authorities added to the confusion (Tulich, Rizzi, & McGaughey, 2020, April 10). The absence of clear multilingual COVID-19 advice (Grey, 2020, June 29) further disenfranchised CALD communities. Some early communication attempts overwhelmed CALD communities with inconsistent and rapidly changing information (Dalzell, 2020a, June 24). Some multilingual translations were described as “nonsensical” (Dalzell, 2020b, August 13) or had major translation errors, with one example combining both Farsi and Arabic on the same pamphlet.

Resource inequities surfaced once the shift to remote learning commenced. For some highly resourced non-government schools, this shift was quicker due to their localized autonomous decision-making and extensive resource capacity (Laube, 2020, June 4; Ziebell, Acquaro, Pearn, & Seah, 2020).

By contrast, this optimistic view disguised the disparities in Australia’s education system (Baker, 2020, May 16) which included lack of resources and clear guidelines to schools as to when remote learning would commence. Many government schools reported less access to digital learning resources required for remote learning (Baker, 2020, May 16).

One local comprehensive government coeducational secondary school, Warrawong High School, serves as an example (Table 1) of these differing experiences. In addition to a large CALD student population, the school provides intensive English language learning center for recently arrived refugees and migrants who are located across the wider Illawarra region which has a population approaching 300,000 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021a). Data from the most recent national census (2016) highlight that CALD communities, including Warrawong High School, entered remote learning less well-resourced to support it. Warrawong High School draws students from four low socio-economic surrounding suburbs, with 72% of its 558 students in the lowest quartile for socio-educational advantage. In 2019, 51% of the students had a Language Background Other Than English (LBOTE) (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2021). Only 59.2% is the students had access to internet at home, and this was low compared to 82.5% in New South Wales.

Table 1. Suburb profiles for warrawong high school drawing area.

	Parents both born overseas	Language spoken at home		Education completed		Internet at home
		English only	Non-English	Bachelor	Year 12
Warrawong	48.3	56.1	42.3	6.1	12.3	59.2
Port Kembla	38.1	66.3	33.5	10.5	10.4	65.7
Lake Heights	46.4	62.4	40.5	9.6	13.1	70.9
Cringila	65.9	40.2	60.2	5.4	17.1	65.9
Average	49.7	56.3	44.1	7.9	13.2	65.4
New South Wales	37.0	68.5	26.5	23.4	15.7	82.5
Australia	34.4	72.7	22.2	22.0	15.3	83.2

Australian Bureau of Statistics (2021a); all figures are percentages.

These data highlight two major challenges. First, the significant difference in internet connectivity at home limits the ability of students to access online learning materials. To compensate for this, the New South Wales Department of Education provided 8,440 USB dongles to government schools (Chrysanthos, 2020, June 24), despite there being in excess of 33,000 students without internet access across the state. Anecdotal evidence reported to us by families within suburbs around the Wollongong region shows dongles not delivered to some schools until nearly the end of the remote learning period, in stark contrast to the rapid pivot to remote learning highlighted above.

As a complement to this strategy, some government schools also provided offline packages (Chrysanthos, 2020, June 24) to assist low connectivity communities. The language data for Warrawong High School’s suburb profiles (Table 1), however, suggests this mode of learning also remains difficult for many students in CALD communities to access. The parent, language, and educational attainment data, along with the internet connectivity data, reflect Brown et al.’s (2020, p. 2) concern that families with lower levels of educational attainment face additional challenges when in remote learning environments. The consequential disadvantage that flowed, and likely continues to flow, for CALD communities remains significant.

At the same time, remote learning has brought some distinct positives, insights that can open opportunities for refugee and CALD families to connect more deeply with their school community. A renewed appreciation has emerged for the needs of building strong and connected local school communities (Petersen, 2020, April 22), for the dedication, commitment, and care of teachers, and for “faith in education as a collective public good” (Sefton-Green, 2020, August 26). For many families, including refugee and CALD families, the value of rich community connections available through a local school were, for many, made all the more significant by their removal from daily experience for a period of time (Baker, 2020, May 16). Such dislocation removed some of the supportive frameworks on which CALD families often depend.

Short periods (five days) of intense community lockdown (Murray-Atfield, 2021, February 12) returned in early 2021 (New South Wales Department of Education, 2021, June 23) that covers the mid-year school recess. Sporadic lockdowns continued beyond this period and created significant challenges of connectedness, and equity of access, for CALD communities.

Employment

In the 2018–2019 financial year, Australia’s refugee and humanitarian program accepted 18,762 people into the country, granting 17,211 offshore visas and 1,650 onshore visas (Department of Home Affairs, 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on this program, as only 11,504 people had been accepted by the program (as of April 17, 2020) with visas granted. This constitutes only 67.3% of the annual offshore target for the 2019–2020 financial year (Refugee Council of Australia, 2020).

Recently settled refugees and migrants in Australia face considerable challenges associated with resettlement. One of the major challenges is employment, as this has been identified as a critical area that not only provides much needed income but also provides a sense of psychological and social wellbeing, self-sufficiency, and independence (Abur & Spaaij, 2016; Correa‐Velez, Barnett, & Gifford, 2015). In 2019, the unemployment rate was higher for recent migrants and temporary residents than for people born in Australia (5.9% vs 4.7%) (ABS, 2019). Traditional barriers to employment of refugees include language, lack of local work experience, knowledge of workplace culture and systems, lack of appropriate services to support transition to employment, the resettlement experience itself, discrimination, lack of qualifications, insecure and casual employment, and visa restrictions (Refugee Council of Australia, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic serves as an additive effect to these barriers to the extent that it overshadows them. For example, it is estimated that around 22,000 refugees are at an increased risk of losing their jobs as a result of the pandemic (van Kooy, 2020). This is in addition to those refugees who are already underemployed or unemployed.

Unemployed refugees in Australia are entitled to the same social security payments as residents and citizens, which amounts to around $610 per fortnight for a single refugee living in shared accommodation. As a response to the economic impact of COVID-19, the Australian government introduced a JobKeeper payment, a scheme to assist businesses retain employees by providing wage subsidies for businesses and not-for-profit organizations (Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, 2021). This scheme, administered by the Australian Taxation Office, is only applicable to those who are on a permanent visa, employed full-time, parttime, or on a fixed term, and not for casual employees (Australian Taxation Office, 2020). This disadvantages the majority of refugee workers who are mostly employed on a casual basis and/or are on Temporary Protection Visas or a Safe Haven Enterprise Visa. The inevitable loss of employment in this group has far reaching implications on their ability to support their families, pay rent, and thus keep their housing, as well as afford the resources required to provide support for their children’s education from home. With the end of the JobKeeper scheme on March 28, 2021, there will be even more pressure on existing businesses that have employed refugee and CALD workers to keep these workers employed, especially if a business has not recovered sufficiently to be financially viable.

CALD communities have been subjected to pressure to pursue work in highly unregulated areas of fruit picking across rural communities in Australia (Kamal & Theodosiou, 2020). However, with this type of employment subjecting employees to harsh working conditions, and in many cases low wages, lobby groups are advocating for significant structural reforms within this area of work before CALD people willingly place themselves into this type of employment (Jackson, 2020).

Other employment-related challenges experienced included unavailability of employment services. Most agencies providing job seeker services closed due to the pandemic, meaning that, while more people lost their jobs, services to help them seek new jobs also stopped. Later, services reopened but most were delivering services remotely over the internet or phone. This reduced opportunities for some job seekers with limited access to internet (see Table 1). The challenge of working from home further exacerbated these challenges. Some employees were required to work from home for extended periods of time, adding pressure to accessing domestic space for work as well as competing for access to the internet.

Housing

The imposition of social distancing measures created additional challenges for CALD households due to their size and spatial configurations. Two of the four suburbs referred to in Table 1 show significantly higher proportions of smaller residential dwelling sizes compared to the wider Australian population. While 23.9% of Australian residences are reported to have only two bedrooms or less, the proportion of similar residences are significantly higher in Warrawong (32.5%) and Port Kembla (30.6%) (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021a). The combination of remote working and learning thus created additional stress for families in these situations (Muir, Murphy, Hicks, & Beasy, 2020).

Homelessness, and the possibility of becoming homeless, was another potential challenge. As some family members lost their jobs and income because of the pandemic, this caused more challenges for some families due to a shift in people needing to seek accommodation with extended family, peers, or CALD community associates at the risk of becoming homelessness.

An upward trend of international students across universities having to relocate is also evident, a consequence of their inability to maintain employment to support accommodation costs in respective urban and peri-urban localities (Wright & Duke, 2021). Such students may already be working extensive casualized hours across various sites of employment to pay for their course fees, whilst keeping up with the basic costs of living (Olmos, 2020, December 14). The New South Wales government responded by putting a six-month freeze on evictions due to failure to pay rentals, offering free legal services and providing assisted free accommodation for 20 weeks to avert the situation, but did not provide job seeker payments (Study New South Wales, 2020). The accommodation was provided to students who were most in need. While these supports assisted students, they might not have been enough to compensate for income lost due to lockdowns. Further, course fee commitments remained in place. Therefore, many have sought to relocate to more rural and regional townships to keep up with the cost of living, on the basis that they are still accessing their course requirements remotely.

Social connectedness and mental health

Social connectedness loosened during the pandemic with concomitant impact on mental health issues like loneliness, stress, trauma, fear, uncertainty, and depression (Smith & Lim, 2020). This loosening also stresses social and psychological support systems. Related to this, people from CALD communities often have traumatic experiences due to their past events (New South Wales Teachers Federation, 2020), and thus COVID-19 has the potential to trigger trauma and compound mental health challenges.

Concern was raised about the vulnerability of women from CALD backgrounds who often have multiple roles in families, including providing care and earning income (New South Wales Teachers Federation, 2020). The concern was about their roles increasing and the possibility of gendered violence triggered by loss or lack of income and change in routines due to distancing and travel regulations.

Many community-based services drastically changed their service delivery approach due to COVID-19. What was previously made available for CALD communities to access via an in-person approach within various locations, becomes more difficult as workers within the human service sector are working from home (Cortis & Blaxland, 2020). Many services shifted to providing health, social, welfare, and other forms of wellbeing support remotely via telehealth or video services. For newly arrived community members, this creates further challenge in obtaining timely support that may have been previously provided via face-to-face contact. The need to access such support via reliable internet access outside the home (see Table 1 for low home-based connection rates), alongside other resources at the same time, e.g., translators, has become more onerous and time consuming.

Collective cultures that rely on community engagement with the broader community have also been affected. These include CALD communities that may depend on faith-based communities as part of their social connectedness, social support, and access to resources to assist in physical, psychological and spiritual wellbeing. As restrictions continue to vary limits on the number of people who are able to gather in public, and within households, the personal and private nexus that underpins people’s wellbeing has been relegated to strict legal mandates. For many, this may be a means to an end in limiting the impact of the pandemic, however one negative consequence is to dislocate the balance many collectivist cultures rely on for their sense of self and purpose.

Public health information

In the early stages of response to the emerging pandemic, public health information and directives were communicated through a broad array of communication channels (television, radio, online, social media). While the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), a specialist multicultural and multi-lingual broadcaster, provided some radio, television, and online services, official public health information was initially distributed mainly in English language, making them less accessible to people from CALD backgrounds (New South Wales Teachers Federation, 2020). For example, digital formats were not accessible to older populations who used to receiving a word of mouth or hardcopies at temples or gatherings (Vlajlal, 2020). CALD communities appeared not to be prioritized but were an “afterthought” (New South Wales Teachers Federation, 2020) while others said communication was “ad hoc” (Vlajlal, 2020). Language barriers were not adequately considered. In April, 2020, leaders of fifteen CALD-conscious community organizations wrote a letter to the Australian Minister for Health to express deep concern about the efficacy of early pandemic communication strategies. Their letter highlighted two concerns: first, that information was not getting through to CALD communities, and, second, it was consequently unclear what these vulnerable community members were required to do. The letter concluded that these actions were “leaving them vulnerable as community transmission of the virus begins to climb” (New South Wales Teachers Federation, 2020, pp. 2–3). The report further showed concern about messages that were not tailored for CALD communities, and thus possibly not understood. Community organizations and leaders willing to get involved and assist were not given such opportunity, hence an available resource was not utilized (New South Wales Teachers Federation, 2020; Vlajlal, 2020). In Victoria, the Islamic Council was ready to use experience gained from providing food during 2019–20 Australian bushfires crisis, but as one leader said, they were not engaged (Wild, 2020). They queried why volunteers and leaders from their faith community were not included in efforts to communicate how best to manage the virus, despite being well skilled and experienced in tailoring messages which reflect and enhance the community’s values. This devalues the contributions of community leaders, religious leaders, volunteers, or multicultural health workers who, as trusted messengers, are “acceptable and accessible to the target community” (Wild, 2020). A related concern was that female members were uncomfortable working with male messengers or health workers (Wild, 2020). This underlines the importance of gender sensitivity during times of critical communication.

As the pandemic progressed, some translations were provided to support people in Victorian CALD communities that were labeled as hotspots. These included the communities of Brimbank, with populations of Vietnamese, Italian, and Chinese origin, and of Darebin, with people of Greek and Italian origin (Vlajlal, 2020). These communities appreciated the translations, but also hoped that future information could be further contextualized and the messaging improved (Vlajlal, 2020) to be clear, concise, and understandable.

Public health communication through mainstream Australian media was complemented by social media platforms, however accessing appropriate information appeared not to be prioritizing the needs of people from CALD backgrounds (New South Wales Teachers Federation, 2020). This information only started to be shared throughout some CALD communities when members within these communities took to more targeted social media platforms, such as WeChat, used by the Chinese community, and WhatsApp, used by several African communities. Other communities used Facebook video, while others relied on telephone communication. Video conferencing was also used by some community organizations, including churches. This mediated information substituted for the lack of government sponsored communication.

Another strategy to spread health information in CALD communities is to work with community leaders, although this approach was not initially utilized. The advantage of working with community leaders is that they tailor messages to suitable media, and thus communicate in ways that CALD communities can access and understand. After the initial ineffective communication strategies, evidence emerged that communication bombarded CALD communities (Smith & Judd, 2020). Although this information was important, it resulted in communities getting into panic mode and highlighted again a lack of coordination by service providers (Smith & Judd, 2020). Wild (2020, p. 1) reinforces the necessity “to involve [these] communities in COVID-19 response strategies, tailor messaging to community values, and choose trusted messengers to deliver it,” highlighting both what was lacking and what needs to be done to improve outcomes for vulnerable communities.

Discussion and implications

Each of the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic detailed above reveals underlying structural disadvantage, marginality, and power asymmetry as noted by Wickramage et al. (2018). These collectively expose more gaps and vulnerabilities, disrupting the hope of smooth transition for people from CALD backgrounds. Smith and Judd (2020, p. 3) argue that while COVID‐19 has the potential to impact everyone in society, these impacts will be felt differentially. At base, these are questions of equity. Truman et al. (2009) suggested some principles to guide intervention with CALD communities during a pandemic. It seems Australia did not do well in most of them. The principles include engaging, including local institutions, addressing community concerns cultural competence, being prepared for pandemics and employing positive approaches to assess needs and vulnerabilities.

Observations and reflections indicate the challenges experienced by CALD communities emanate from the lack of adequate pandemic response planning and the lack of resources needed for housing, education, and health during an extensive and ongoing public crisis (Gostin & Berkman, 2007; Wickramage et al., 2018). Smith and Judd (2020, p. 5) conclude that what is happening during the pandemic:

demonstrates the power of privilege in a pandemic. It indicates that those most vulnerable will be the hardest hit. The health promotion community must ensure that considerations of health equity and social justice principles remain at the forefront of pandemic responses.

Authors acknowledge that Australia remains a nation with one of the lowest death rates per capita from COVID-19, but this disguises a reality that vulnerability has increased for communities already experiencing stress. This pandemic highlights that safety nets supposedly set in place to help communities in their time of need are less secure, and many CALD communities are falling through. This corresponds with previous findings by Itzwerth, Moa, and MacIntyre (2018) that by 2018 Australia did not have adequate pandemic response plans at several levels. Because the transition experience of new migrants to community, school, workplace, or community services may be a vulnerable period in their lives (Griffiths, Sawrikar, & Muir, 2009), families from CALD backgrounds often require additional support to help them transition successfully into Australian society (Ochala & Mungai, 2016; Peralta, Cinelli, & Bennie, 2018). Reflections show that, across a range of domains, CALD community elders, leaders, and workers are working especially hard to keep up with the various needs that shift and reconfigure to respond to each new outbreak event. Recently, an immediate and total two-week lockdown in New South Wales (New South Wales Government, 2021, June 26) underscores authors’ concerns about the impacts of such ongoing disruption on CALD communities.

There are some critical lessons from this discussion to guide more effective responses in future pandemics, or similar large-scale community health crises. First, effective communication has to be prioritized even when public health information is required to be spread rapidly. The messaging has to be clear, concise, and in an understandable language. Second, community leaders and organizations need to be engaged as early as practicable, because they offer the best opportunity to provide accurate and effective communication. Third, services to assist with transition in employment and education need to be strengthened during such crises to prevent CALD communities from experiencing disadvantage through their transition journeys.

Limited educational opportunities impact employment opportunities, and this is linked to poor housing and mental health outcomes.

Conclusion

This paper has described and reflected on the experience of some CALD communities in Australia during COVID-19 through education, employment, housing, social connectedness, and public health communication. Observations and reflections show that services and information did not reach CALD communities as quickly or effectively as they did for the wider Australian population. This reinforces the power of privilege and supports the view that CALD communities were an afterthought. This structural disadvantage and marginality also led to disruption of transition services, exposing more gaps and vulnerability. Each Australian state or territory continues to face new challenges exacerbated by altered patterns of transmission and impact of new viral variants. The situation of CALD communities during these early phases of the pandemic teaches us that Australian schools, community agencies, government services, and researchers must consider consciously the needs of CALD communities as they prepare and deliver ongoing crisis responses. Improving communication and participation are key considerations. If this occurs, no community needs to be an afterthought.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.