Good luck with that, Jieh-Yung.

"I would like to call on all political parties to be more inclusive and open up their doors."

But it isn't clear from your article that those doors are presently closed.

You cite a number of reasons why people from non-English speaking backgrounds do not get involved, including "limited English language skills, the lack of interest in civic engagement and the lack of understanding of the political process", "many new arrivals are not fully aware of their rights and responsibilities", "the cultural and traditional mentality that migrant and refugee communities have", "political and civic life is seen to be an unstable career for individuals to undertake" etc.

Your recipe for resolving this seems to be that it is the responsibility of "someone else" to fix it, presumably (although you don't make this clear) from outside the migrant community.

If those doors are indeed shut, maybe it would be more productive to focus your attention on those who are doing the shutting.

Otherwise, I would venture that your punchline might have been better framed as:

"I would like to call on members of all migrant communities to become more involved with Australian political parties".

The timing of the release of this article is very unfortunate in light of the weekend revelations of Teresa Gambaro. She surely cannot be held up as a shining example of the benefits of cultural diversity to Oz politics!

Quite the contrary, we all ready have far too much of special interest people in the minorities gaining the balance of power, & thus the tail wagging the dog in Oz.

I believe that only those who are second generation born in Oz should be eligible for an elected office, or employment in the public service, & particularly in education.

I almost agree with Hasbeen, but I think that only someone born in Australia should be able to hold the highest offices of PM and leader of the Opposition (alternative PM). Oops - there goes Julia and Tony.

While it is good to encourage immigrant people to be active in politics, I think the push should be on being more inclusive of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders - Australia's first peoples - in the government.

NZ has seats specifically for Maori people, why not Australia?

I hope the author is not suggesting we promote people into politics for the wrong reasons? So we ease them into politics because they are from a special interest group, and not because they actually want to better our society.

We have enough of those now, the ALP is full of Union officials who see their career path stretching from union leadership (or the ABC) to Federal politics and some of those people are certainly self interested. As some others of course, our speaker is a case in point for instance.

That's why the ALP has a problem, no plan, just a bunch of career union officials who are there and don't really know what to do, except get more for themselves. We don't want more of that.

People get voted into parliament, (outside the ALP, where it is a reward, nothing to do with the community), because they are seen to be representative of their constituencies and want to better their society. So you would expect those people to be able to communicate with their constituents surely?

The ALP regularly use minority or special interest groups in politics. The ALP effectively managed Chinese people in McKew's campaign against John Howard? "The Maxine Support Group is a group of mainly Chinese-Australian older professionals" The Monthly. The local Chinese community was targeted heavily, money poured in from the unions .. but they didn't keep it up and now Maxine is gone - shows just how much the ALP cared about the local constituency once they got JH out.

We have many people in politics for various reasons and I don't think coming from a non english speaking background as valid criteria. Mind you, with the way our nanny state goes, it will probably enforce on us a quota before long .. sigh.

Listening to any senate debate; it is clear, that our politicians come from many backgrounds and diverse nationalities! I can't understand why anyone would be interested in politics; but if they do want to "serve", at least they need to be able to talk to their constituents.
It's is not clear that appointing Maori reps to allocated seats; has been a raving success; and, possibly even counter-productive?
Proportional representation is all we've ever needed to stop marginalising minorities?
Or indeed, take the power from the back room power brokers and return it to the people, who ought to be the final arbiters; in any GENUINE democracy, of who is preselected or sits in which seat; or, represents which electorate!
Our present system allows someone to represent a seat, who 80-90% of the voters have rejected!
Learn our language; join a political party; and, make your presence felt, with intelligent debating skills!

Jieh-yung Lo writes "The perceptions of members of parliaments and councillors for the majority of migrant and refugee communities are still Anglo-Saxon men in their 50s and 60s with very similar education and career backgrounds. We have to start changing this!"

This article can be summed up in one sentence: "There are too many English speaking white people who have power, the English speaking whites must therefore be held back so non-English and non-whites can attain power."

The sub-text is actually racist. Although many won't bat an eye lid because racism against whites is perceived as acceptable.

These "Anglo-Saxon men" are there because they earned their position; you know, they were elected. I find it quite offensive to insinuate that they are parliamentary members by some kind of devious, cunning plot. They are there because they worked hard to get there and the Australian people voted them in.

Jieh-Young Lo "I actually have the honour of representing two communities – first and foremost the residents of Monash and, in addition, the wider Chinese community."

Shouldn't you be just representing Australians regardless of ethnicity?

Imagine if an Anglo-Saxon councillor stated he "in addition" represented the Anglo-Saxon community? He would lose his job overnight by the moral condemnation of journalists and bloggers everywhere.

This double standard must rectified.

While 1 in 4 Australians are born overseas, it is a fact that the biggest contributing nations to our immigration intake come from Britain and the old Empire, such as Ireland. It is inevitable that they would have British names. Simply taking a look at the names on a list will not reveal their background- I have known of a few Asian people whose names have been distinctly Anlgo-Saxon because of a marriage in the distant (and not so distant) past.
What I find interesting is that the author identifies problems with English as the main reason for immigrants failing to participate in the political process, but that any measure to insist on the compulsory acquisition of those skills would likely be challenged by the author as being racist.
Indeed, the whole article reads like a 'poor fella me' tale where most, if not all, of the factors that contribute to a lack of engagement seem to be with the immigrants themselves but it is up to the rest of us to do something about it.

Multiculturism was one of the greatest rorts ever perpetrated on the Australian people, and multiculturism was recently declared a failure by a number of European leaders.

So why was that?

I would think that there is a yearning in each individual for a culture, and with a multicultural society, there is No Culture.

So lets have Australians only as our leaders, and not someone trying to represent several different cultures at the same time.

In essence, end immigration so the country can move forward and develop its own culture.

Cultural diversity in political parties and democratic institutions is an important challenge for Australian democracy. Australia must learn to harness the power of its cultural diversity by making it easier for new immigrants and new voices to contribute to the national debates and transformational projects.

Efforts need to be made by the Australian Parliament to empower communities and young emerging leaders in particular to become engaged in the political process in meaningful ways. Knowledge is power.

The Australian Macedonian community is encouraging young leaders to join political parties and to stand for office at local, state and federal levels. The response from the major parties and the Greens has been positive even though there is still a lot more that can be done to make cultural political inclusion a top priority for them.