Submission to the House Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Disability
October 2025
About
The Australian Multicultural Health Collaborative (the Collaborative) is the national multicultural health peak body.
Vision Statement: In a truly multicultural Australia, our health and social care system is committed to health equity, and works proactively towards sustained improvement in the physical, mental and spiritual health and wellbeing of our multicultural communities.
The Collaborative is an initiative of the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA). We provide a national voice, leadership and advice on policy, research, data, and practice to improve access and equity, address systemic racism, and achieve better health and wellbeing outcomes for Australians from multicultural backgrounds.
The Collaborative is representative, and membership based. Members include consumers and carers; health services and wellbeing/social care services; practitioners; and researchers. The Collaborative also welcomes as affiliates other national health peak organisations.
Introduction
The Australian Multicultural Health Collaborative (the Collaborative) welcomes the opportunity to contribute to the Thriving Kids Inquiry. As the national peak body on multicultural health, we work to ensure that Australia’s health and wellbeing systems deliver equity and inclusion for people of all cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
Australia’s children are diverse. Many grow up in families who speak languages other than English at home, who have recently migrated, or who are rebuilding their lives after displacement. For these families, navigating child health, education and development services can be complex, particularly when compounded by language, literacy, cultural and systemic barriers. Evidence shows that these challenges can delay the recognition of developmental issues, limit access to timely support, and ultimately affect children’s health, learning and life outcomes.
Too many multicultural children risk being left behind simply because services aren’t designed with them in mind. Thriving Kids must mean all kids no matter their language, culture or migration story. Parents can’t act on what they can’t understand, so information must be practical, accessible and trusted. Translated brochures aren’t enough; families need resources co-designed in their language, culture and context. Cultural competence should be a core skill for every health and education professional, not an optional extra, and bilingual navigators can be the bridge that helps families move confidently through health and education systems. A system that works for multicultural children will be a stronger, fairer system for every child.
This Submission responds to the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference (ToR) through a multicultural health lens. We highlight the importance of culturally adapted resources for parents, culturally competent workforces, and seamless systems that do not leave children behind because of their background or circumstances. Above all, we emphasise that equity must be built into every stage of program design, delivery and evaluation if all children are to have the chance to thrive.
In responding to the Inquiry’s ToR, the Collaborative has focused on what matters most for multicultural families raising children with developmental needs. Our evidence and community consultations show that while many families benefit from existing programs, multicultural children are too often left behind. The reasons are clear: resources that do not reflect their languages or cultures, a workforce not equipped for cultural safety, limited system navigation support, poor data on outcomes, and programs that fail to account for equity from the outset.
To ensure the Thriving Kids reforms deliver for all children, the Collaborative recommends five priority actions. These are practical, evidence-based steps that align directly with the Inquiry’s ToR and reflect both international best practice and the lived experiences of multicultural families in Australia.
- Provide resources that work for multicultural families Co-design child development information with communities, in multiple languages and formats, not just translation.
- Make cultural competence mandatory in training Embed cultural competence in all child health and education workforce training, from university to ongoing professional development.
- Fund bilingual community navigators Place bicultural and bilingual navigators in health and early childhood services to help families access and move between systems.
- Collect better data on ethnicity Introduce consistent national standards for ethnicity data so outcomes for multicultural children can be tracked and improved.
- Put equity at the centre of programs Design and evaluate Thriving Kids initiatives with an explicit focus on reaching multicultural families and those at risk of being left out.
Taken together, these five recommendations provide a blueprint for how the Thriving Kids initiative can deliver real equity for multicultural families. They point to the need for resources that reflect lived realities, a workforce equipped to provide culturally safe care, strong navigation support, better data, and an explicit commitment to equity in every program. The following sections expand on each of these themes in more detail, showing how the Inquiry’s ToR can be addressed through a multicultural health lens.
1. Supporting Parents with Information and Resources
For many multicultural families, the early signs of developmental delay are difficult to recognise and act upon. While evidence-based resources exist, they are often designed for a mainstream audience and rely heavily on written English. This makes them inaccessible to parents with limited English proficiency, low literacy, or unfamiliarity with Australia’s health and education systems. These barriers become even more significant when families try to navigate complex programs like the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), where understanding eligibility, assessments, and planning processes requires a high level of system knowledge and English literacy.
Translation alone is not a solution. Resources must be culturally adapted and co-designed with the communities they are intended to serve. Oral storytelling, visual formats, and delivery through trusted community leaders or bilingual health educators have proven far more effective in supporting parents to understand child development milestones and where to seek help.
2. The Effectiveness of Current Programs
Mainstream programs that identify and support children with developmental delays, autism, or other support needs do not always reach multicultural families. Even when services are available, families often face barriers at the point of entry: navigating complex systems, confronting stigma around disability, and encountering providers with limited cultural competence. In the case of the NDIS, many families report confusion, delays, and inconsistent access to interpreters, which makes it harder to secure early intervention supports.
Programs that employ bicultural or bilingual workers, peer navigators, or that are delivered in partnership with community organisations have consistently demonstrated higher engagement and earlier identification of concerns. For this reason, evaluation of program effectiveness must go beyond clinical outcomes to ask: who is being reached, who is being missed, and why?
3. Equity and Intersectionality
The ToR rightly highlights First Nations and culturally and linguistically diverse children. For multicultural children, inequities stem not only from language barriers but also from a web of social, cultural and systemic factors. Some families are excluded from Medicare
and early intervention programs because of their visa status. Others may delay seeking help due to stigma or cultural perceptions of disability. Children from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds often face additional trauma and disrupted early development. Those who reach the point of seeking NDIS access often find the process overwhelming, with rigid systems that fail to adapt to cultural or language needs. These overlapping forms of disadvantage make it essential to take an intersectional approach — one that recognises the combined impact of cultural background, migration experience, socio-economic status, and geography on children’s development and wellbeing.
4. Workforce Capacity and Training
A consistent theme in our work is that the child and family workforce is underprepared to provide culturally safe and responsive care. Most training programs for maternal child health nurses, GPs, allied health professionals and early childhood educators include little or no structured education in cultural competence. As a result, service providers may unintentionally perpetuate stereotypes or fail to recognise the role of family, community and culture in decision-making.
To meet the needs of all children, cultural competence must be treated as a core professional skill, embedded in pre-service training and reinforced through ongoing development. Investment is also needed in bicultural and bilingual navigators, who can act as a bridge between families and services, and in community health educators who can deliver trusted information in culturally appropriate ways.
5. Learning from Best Practice
International experience offers valuable lessons. In the United Kingdom and United States, the systematic collection of ethnicity data has allowed governments to identify inequities and target resources to the communities most in need. In Taiwan, cultural competence training is a required unit for all nursing programs, leading to measurable improvements in patient care.
Australia has already seen the impact of community-led, multilingual health promotion during the COVID-19 pandemic, which reached millions of people who otherwise may not have engaged. The challenge is to embed these lessons into long-term policy, rather than treating them as temporary or exceptional measures.
6. Creating Seamless Transitions
Transitions between services are critical junctures for children with support needs. For multicultural families, these are often the points where children fall through the cracks. Moving from maternal child health to GPs, to allied health, to schools requires not only multiple referrals but also a level of system knowledge that many families do not have. For those with limited English, digital literacy or health literacy, the journey is even more fragmented. This fragmentation is compounded when children move in and out of the NDIS, as families are required to navigate two separate systems that do not always connect.
Seamless transitions require more than better referral pathways; they require system navigators, consistent communication in families’ preferred languages, and stronger integration between health, education, settlement and social services. Only by addressing these gaps can we ensure that every child, regardless of background, is able to thrive.
Conclusion
The Thriving Kids Inquiry presents an important chance to reshape how Australia supports children with developmental needs and their families. For multicultural communities, this is not a marginal issue but a central one: without culturally responsive systems, too many children risk being overlooked, misdiagnosed, or supported too late.
Our submission has outlined five practical, evidence-based recommendations. From co-designed resources and mandatory cultural competence training, to bilingual navigators, better ethnicity data, and equity as a core design principle. These recommendations are grounded in both international best practice and the lived experience of families in Australia.
We have also highlighted the barriers that multicultural families face at every stage: recognising early signs of delay, engaging with mainstream programs, navigating fragmented systems, and moving between health, education and social services. For many, these challenges peak when engaging with the NDIS, where processes are complex, language support is inconsistent, and families often
struggle to secure the support their children are entitled to. Without targeted assistance, the very program designed to provide certainty and support can become another barrier.
At the same time, we have shown that solutions exist: culturally adapted resources, bicultural workforce roles, co-designed programs, and policies that embed equity from the start. If implemented, these changes would not only improve access and outcomes for multicultural children but strengthen the entire Thriving Kids agenda. A system that works for those most at risk of exclusion, including in complex programs like the NDIS, is a system that works better for everyone.
The Australian Multicultural Health Collaborative stands ready to partner with government, services, and communities to make this vision a reality. Together, we can ensure that every child, regardless of language, culture, or background, has the opportunity to thrive.
Australian Multicultural Health Collaborative
Unit 1, Level 6, 54 Marcus Clarke Street
Canberra City, ACT 2601
t (02) 6282 5755
e admin@multiculturalhealth.org.au
s @cald_health
multiculturalhealth.org.au
FECCA
An initiative of The Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia