Welcoming address from Stepan Kerkyasharian, Chairman of the Commission, at the 20th Annual National Multicultural Marketing Awards

02 November 2009

Not wishing to openly congratulate ourselves for the last twenty years of these awards, we were struck by the release a few days ago of the UNESCO World Report on cultural diversity.

The report does make some excellent recommendations for international understanding of the benefits and challenges presented by cultural diversity.

However those recommendations tell us simply that we, in this state of New South Wales, are years ahead of UNESCO, in understanding the power of diversity.

For instance, one of its key recommendations is that "consideration should be given to establishing a national mechanism for monitoring public policies as they relate to cultural diversity".

Well…there are people in this room who will remember that 25 years ago the New South Wales Government introduced a programme to be called EAPS, which would be a mechanism that would "bring systematic reform and change to the attitudes of the bureaucracy towards the provision of services to better meet the needs of a diverse population, in terms of ethnicity, language and religion".

That sounds to me very much like "establishing a national mechanism for monitoring public policies as they relate to cultural diversity".

Some of you will also remember that the then Ethnic Affairs Commission was charged with responsibility for promoting this policy of EAPS.

By 1989 the Commission decided to go public with that role and planned a seminar for public servants at Randwick Race Course under the title "Marketing for a Multicultural Society". The event was booked out. The Premier and several heads of government agencies participated.

 I said at that seminar that "marketing for a multicultural society is not just a nice desirable exercise but an unavoidable necessity".

"Our strategies", I said, "therefore, must take into account the cultural and linguistic diversity of the market place in order to be effective".

Remember that was in 1989.

At the seminar, I gave as an example of what was already happening in New South Wales - a new gambling programme being run by the TAB, which had produced a set of booklets in community languages on how to place a bet, and had also set up a phone-tab service which could take bets on the phone in Cantonese.

I gave another example that day, much less commercial than the operations of the TAB, which was about the first moves by the Legal Aid Commission to provide multilingual information to clients about their right to an interpreter at all stages of the legal process.

So, even then public service managers were making professional efforts to market their services to the whole community, irrespective of their culture or language, whilst also ensuring that the services provided were appropriate to all.

We decided that those smart people in the public service should be acknowledged for their efforts and that they should also be held up as models for others to follow.

So the Multicultural Marketing Awards were born!

We had our first dinner like this in 1990. The grand winners were the Sydney Opera House, the prize being accepted by the public servants who had successfully marketed and staged the National Folkloric Festival at the Opera House. The fifteen entries received that year were from private industry, local government and, state and federal government agencies. One of those entrants who received the runner-up award was American Express, for a programme to encourage more people of Chinese background to take up their credit cards.

That was, remember, 1990. Even then I think American Express would have been known as a multi-national company.

Now, back to the UNESCO World Report on Cultural Diversity released last week.

In a section headed Cultural diversity and the business world it said:

Multinational corporations are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of diversifying and customizing their products in order to penetrate new markets and meet the expectations of local consumers'


They sure are, but they've been doing it here for twenty years, and we've been talking about them and their wonderful projects at this event here every year for twenty years.

Ok, so much for the self congratulations. But after twenty years, well ahead of the game, we are entitled to a little pat on the back.