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Mobilising ethnic communities

George Wojak.

George Wojak, on ethnic communities.

Created:

1994

Date Added:

17 July 2002

Source:

Interview for Making Multicultural Australia, 1994.

Format:

mov (Quicktime);

File size:

--

Length:

31 secs

Transcript

GEORGE WOJAK
Chair of the Ethnic Communities’ Council of NSW, 1982-84, and of the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia, 1984-88

Firstly we had to learn how the whole system worked, how the bureaucrats worked, how the politicians worked. And surely, we had a lot of people with that knowledge or part knowledge who (whose role) it was (the) transfer of information basically through discussion- how to approach, what to do and how to form our policies. It was a learning time for many of us.

CONTINUATION OF INTERVIEW AS TEXT

I must say that I, being a professional engineer, I had very little idea about social work or language policies or anything like this. But through discussions and through exchanging our views and ideas it started to jell and surely enough we approached certain politicians.

We learned the way that democracy works through lobbying power of other organisations and we felt that if the Country Women's Association can do it, the RSL can do it, we can do it. We learned from those organisations too.

Interview for Making Multicultural Australia, 1994.