Episode 3

As a new millennium beckons, the streets of Cabramatta remain in the dark ages,
infested by drugs and crime but slowly the Vietnamese community, so quiet for so
long, find their voice.

The 8.04 ‘junkie express’ pulls into Cabramatta train station. By lunchtime at least one
thousand users will have arrived. It’s like this everyday. 100 dealers, many teenagers,
buzz around the streets. Self made entrepreneurs in a local black market economy of
drugs and gangland crime. The police struggle to keep control. It’s 1999 and
Cabramatta’s never had it so bad.

Asians and crime are indelibly linked in the minds of many. Political support for
multiculturalism is now a distant memory.

The only hope is that the community itself, so vilified and fractured, will somehow finds
its own way to overcome its problems. Slowly but surely they do.

A Parliamentary Inquiry is finally forced and for the first time the problems and needs of
Cabramatta are met head on.

The Vietnamese, so quite for so long, find their voice. Cabramatta becomes a community transformed. Australia, a continent changed forever.

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