By Casey Neill
Discrimination is plaguing South Sudanese people living in Greater Dandenong, a new study has found.
Monash University Professor Andrew Markus prepared the Australians Today report for the Scanlon Foundation, which was released on Wednesday 24 August.
The multiculturalism-focused study was the largest of its kind in Australia and involved 10,000 online surveys, 50 focus groups and 280 in-depth interviews.
Prof Markus said that in Greater Dandenong “the overall picture is a positive picture”.
“The main issue that comes up is the discrimination,” he said.
He said that in suburbs including Dandenong, Noble Park and Springvale, 84 per cent of South Sudanese people reported experiencing discrimination.
“It’s really quite high in that area,” he said.
“That’s really up at the top end of that scale.”
One Sudanese man told the survey that people were “surprised” when they encountered him when he first arrived.
“But living in Noble Park I’ve just seen a change, I’ve seen the wave of changes from no Sudanese, not a lot of Sudanese people, to having Sudanese people… running a few businesses in the area,” he said.
However, across the country South Sudanese people reported the highest level of discrimination of any group, at 77 per cent.
Three per cent of third generation Australians reported unfair treatment at work, compared to 32 per cent of South Sudanese.
Again, only 3 per cent of third generation Australians indicated they were not offered a job, compared to 55 per cent of South Sudanese.
“It seems that differences of skin colour are a significant issue for many Australians, for whom there has been little interaction with very dark skinned people,” the report said.
In the survey more generally, Greater Dandenong ranked 90 on an index of the prevalence of social cohesion issues where 100 was average.
“Greater Dandenong is below the average rather than above the average in terms of the problems what we’ve looked at,” Prof Markus said.
Where the municipality struggled was on the “neighbourhood” front, which covered whether respondents felt able to have their say on issues and that people got on well together, were willing to help their neighbours and were treated fairly by police.
“On that indicator, Dandenong gets one of the worst scores,” Prof Markus said.
It received the best score – 58 – for ‘belonging’, which referred to satisfaction with life, happiness over the past year and a sense of belonging in Australia.
