A ''bamboo ceiling'' is preventing Asian
Australians from taking their share of leadership positions
In a speech delivered in Perth on Thursday, Dr
Soutphommasane said while children of Australians of migrant backgrounds
outperformed the children of Australian-born parents in education and
employment, the nation's cultural diversity was not represented in positions of
leadership.
''Equality of opportunity isn't enjoyed in equal measure in
all spheres,'' Dr Soutphommasane said. ''Our efforts in opening the doors of
power to all who knock are more questionable.''
Dr Soutphommasane said while nearly half of all Australians
were either born overseas or had a parent who was born overseas, and about one
in 10 Australians had an Asian background, only a handful of members of Federal
Parliament had non-European ancestry, and less than 2 per cent had Asian
ancestry. Of 83 secretaries and deputy secretaries of federal government
departments, only three had Asian origins.
Asian Australian were also badly underrepresented among the
management ranks of business and executive positions at leading universities,
he said.
Dr Soutphommasane acknowledged other business leaders of
non-Asian backgrounds, such as Irish-born Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce and
former Telstra boss Sol Trujillo, who has Mexican ancestry, had also been the
victims of racial prejudice, but questioned whether Asian Australian faced
greater hurdles than those from other backgrounds.
''Is there a bamboo ceiling that exists in the same way
that a glass ceiling exists for women?''
Dr Soutphommasane said an optimistic view was that the
underrepresentation of Asian Australians in leadership positions was due to the
fact that large-scale Asian immigration hadn't started until the 1970s and
Asian-Australian leaders were still in the ''pipeline''. But he said a more
critical view was that the situation replicated a ''pattern of invisibility''
relating to Asian Australian within Australian culture. He said in the media,
Asian faces were largely confined to presenting cooking programs. The
stereotype of Asians as law-abiding, hard-working and studious disguised a more
negative view of Asians as passive, acquiescent and subservient.
Referring to the indentured Asian labourers of the 19th and
early 20th century, Dr Soutphommasane said Australia needed to avoid the
creation of a new class of ''professional Asian-Australian coolies in the 21st
century - a class of well-educated, ostensibly overachieving Asian Australian,
who may nonetheless be permanently locked out from the ranks of their society's
leadership''.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/bamboo-ceiling-blocking-asian-australians-says-commissioner-20140710-3bq45.html#ixzz37ClxRC64
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