Many of the marginal seats that Labor won have a high percentage of migrants living there.
Opposition leader Bill Shorten was greeted Monday in the Sydney seat of Lindsay like he had won the election.
The seat was won by Labor's Emma Husar with a swing of 4.5 per cent.
The seats of Macquarie and Macarthur - areas that have a high multicultural population - were also won by Labor.
Tsvirko Kazz, the English editor for community newspaper El Telegraph Weekend, said Labor's messages resonated more with migrant communities.
"They were more accessible, more effective and their leaders were on the ground more," she said. "We saw Bill Shorten in the west more, and Malcolm Turnbull was just there on election day in Penrith and Parramatta.”
Senior sources within the Liberal party told SBS the leadership did not spend time focusing on cultivating the multicultural vote.
And MPs didn't have the resources to counteract Labor's foreign language ads.
The ads on Medicare in languages other than English was an unprecedented step by Labor.
Eugenia Grammatikakis, Acting Chairperson from the Federation of Ethnic Communities Council of Australia, said the ads had a positive affect because they meant people who didn’t speak English could still be communicated to.
Liberal sources also said Labor's Medicare theme was more relevant to multicultural voters than the Coalition’s theme of innovation and jobs and growth.
In June, Bill Shorten held a media conference just for ethnic Australian journalists in a bid to resonate with non-English speaking voters. He also appeared live on SBS World News, while Malcolm Turnbull declined SBS’s invitations.
