(Transcript from SBS World News Radio)
A more streamlined approach to job seeking services is one of the items on the wishlist for Victoria's migrant communities, ahead of next week's state election.
Victoria has the highest jobless rate on the mainland, of around seven per cent.
And as Greg Dyett reports, refugees and members of the state's new and emerging communities are among those finding it especially difficult to get a job .
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While health, education and public transport rank as the key issues in Victoria, unemployment also represents a major challenge for whoever takes power after November 29th.
Parsuram Sharma-Luital came to Australia in 2002 as a refugee from Bhutan.
He wants to see the creation of a central agency to help refugees and other new arrivals get work.
"If there is an agency who can direct, who has liaison with all the employers including the cleaning and the hospitality and when the new and emerging community people, unemployed people arrive to their place they have options. Okay, you don't have to go through lot of resume writing and details. If you want to work there is a job for picking, packing, cleaning, hospitality."
Opposition leader Daniel Andrews says he's keen to hear more of these proposals.
"I would of course be only too happy to sit down with representatives from some of the newly arrived communities, some of whom had only a very small number coming to our state four or five years ago, things have changed. I think a listening ear, I think the ability to take the time to listen and understand but that is very important, but that one stop shop, that may well be the key to better access and accordingly better outcomes."
Both major parties say they regard multiculturalism as one of the state's key strengths.
Victoria's Minister for Multicultural Affairs and Citizenship, Matthew Guy, says more money than ever before is going into multicultural affairs.
He says much of this is being targetted into programs that combat discrimination.
"I think it is important that we do focus on threats to unity, threat to harmony. You have to put your money where your mouth is on some of these programs, that's why I say the government is putting more money than ever before into this area. But having said that, it is also not just about money, it is also having a presence and having a very strong and consistent voice from government that says that irrespective of wherever someone is from, that intolerance will never be tolerated in our society.
But Colleen Hartland, a member of the upper house for the Greens with responsibility for multicultural affairs, says not enough is being done to support people from migrant backgrounds.
"It's about access to education for young people especially newly arrived communities, it's access to healthcare with interpreters. It's access to the things that make daily living easier whether you're an elderly Polish person and you need a homecare worker who speaks Polish, whether you're a young person who's just arrived and six months in an English language centre is not going to be enough. You might need two or three years to bring you up to the same educational level as everybody else in your age group."
One of the key migrant lobby groups is the Ethnic Communities' Council of Victoria.
Director Ross Barnett says the ECCV would like the next state government to provide more support to agencies that monitor discrimination to help change negative attitudes.
"We have got a lot of evidence that can work, that people's attitudes can change when they're presented with an appropriate message and so I think it just needs to be a broader program. That has been the case in the past and you've probably seen there's been examples of high profile individuals coming out against discrimination in various areas of our community such as sport and those things work, we have evidence that those things can work so we need to ramp that up and I think governments need to address it just a little bit more strongly than they have in the past."
