Australian Human Rights Commission: Racism Severely Undercounted, Urges National Anti-Racism Data Plan in 16 Recommendations
The Australian Human Rights Commission released a scoping report in Sydney on October 28, Data for change: A national approach to anti-racism data, finding that data on race and racism in Australia is fragmented or collected inconsistently, meaning people's experiences of racism are being severely undercounted or erased, limiting understanding of the full nature and impacts of racism. The report makes 16 recommendations to governments, civil society organisations and business.
'We hear about the devastating impacts of racism from communities every day. But many experiences go unreported or uncounted, and our systems often do not capture the full picture,' Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman said. 'This is not about collecting more data to prove racism exists. We already know it does. It is about making inequality visible, holding institutions to account and giving communities greater agency over their data to drive real change. We all have the right to safety, respect and dignity, but for many people, racism denies them these basic rights. We cannot fully dismantle racism if we cannot properly measure it.'
The recommendations include developing a National Anti-Racism Data Plan to coordinate data collection, use and management across Australia; reviewing national government standards on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identity and cultural and linguistic diversity data; and embedding Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Indigenous Data Governance across data systems.
The Commission said stronger data can drive change, prioritise community needs, measure change and hold governments and institutions to account. More than half of Australians were born overseas or have a parent who was, and more than 350 languages are spoken in Australia, in addition to 167 Indigenous languages.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 堪培拉的「多元文化澳大利亚」城市步行活动。Gabecollett 摄，CC BY-SA 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / The Multicultural Australia City Walk in Canberra. Photo by Gabecollett, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
