Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is for the Prime Minister. Effective public health communication in a pandemic is essential. Can the Prime Minister confirm that translations of vital Commonwealth government COVID information in languages other than English are almost two months out of date? Eighteen months into the pandemic, who is the Prime Minister going to blame for this?

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One of the things that the government has done throughout the course of the pandemic is to engage early and on a continual basis with people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities. We have a CALD communication working group, which has been operating for much of the pandemic. It has been engaged in ensuring that materials are provided to CALD communities. That includes constant work to update materials as they're available. It also includes radio and television advertisement materials that are made available. These are updated on a continual basis. In particular, we work with communities to ensure that the language used is accurate. We're working with social media and television, we're working with advertising and we're working on multiple different fronts to ensure that messages are provided to culturally and linguistically diverse communities around Australia. Those are updated as quickly as they can be.

But, most importantly, one thing is very significant: the engagement that we have had across those communities with numerous activities in terms of community fora, meetings and engagement with leaders—working directly through those leadership groups. As the member knows from his own electorate, we have been working with religious leaders, social leaders and community leaders from all of the different culturally and linguistically diverse groups. We have also been providing direct references to state facilities and state information sites, which are updated on a constant basis as well with relevant local materials. These are the things that we've done.

We are so thankful to our culturally and linguistically diverse communities for the work that they have done. Right now in south-west Sydney, we are continuing to work with them to ensure that their role in leadership and in encouraging vaccination is seeing people staying at home, being tested and stepping forward for vaccination. We are beginning to see real and powerful results on that front.