NSW Coat of Arms (Image credit: Floodstreet, via Wikipedia)
Update 07/07/2026: After receiving 105 endorsements, we handed in our submission by the deadline. The Committee’s usual practice is to accept and publish submissions, and we have therefore removed the previous version of our submission. Once the NSW Parliament publishes our submission, we will link to it, as the version of record.
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The New South Wales (NSW) Parliament is currently holding an inquiry into the Human Rights Bill 2025. The Bill proposes to establish a statutory human rights framework for NSW (for non-Australian readers, this is the state of which Sydney is the capital city). You can find more information about the Bill here.
Some members of our team have put together a short submission advocating for the inclusion of provisions that help ensure that people with limited English language proficiency are able to access and enjoy their human rights on an equal basis with others.
Our key recommendation is to include a clause that safeguards the rights of people with limited English language proficiency because, in the NSW (and Australian) context, access to many human rights remains substantially contingent on English language proficiency.
This work is licensed under a
This is an excellent initiative. Two suggestions:
(i) In remote and regional Australia access to interpreters is only going to be possible through telephone/videolink interpreting. This is important because otherwise the submission will be criticised for being unaffordable.
(ii) A likely criticism is that learning English is an implicit part of the social contract of migrating to Australia (this doesn’t apply to First Nations people). This criticism could be avoided by providing free (or perhaps means-tested) high quality English language teaching for both immigrants and First Nations people.
Thank you, Jane!
Re (i), we don’t advocate for a particular mode of interpreting, as long as the interpreter is appropriately qualified.
Your (ii) point is a bit more complicated because adult language learning is complicated. There is this mistaken belief that some people don’t want to learn English – although, as someone who has researched English language learning for over three decades, I’ve never actually met such a resister who lacked motivation and the desire to learn English. However, I’ve met plenty of people who weren’t particularly successful language learners. This is because adult language learning is difficult, it takes time, and outcomes are (in contrast to child language learning) highly variable. Many factors that are known to play a role in successful language learning are outside the control of the individual. However, life happens while newcomers are learning the language and the human rights of language learners should be no less than those of anyone else.
Australia does, in fact, offer free high-quality English language teaching for eligible migrants through the AMEP.
Thanks Ingrid, I am sorry I wasn’t clear enough, My first point was really about how to counter the argument that providing interpreting in remote/regional areas is prohibitively expensive. A parallel argument is made that, even though the basic human right of access to adequate housing is accepted, Australia can’t afford it. But in fact in the case of interpreting in rural/remote communities, telephone/video interpreting means that the cost comes way down. My second point is to emphasise the importance of protecting AMEP as part of supporting the linguistic rights of immigrants to learn the language of wider communication. Good access to interpreting and to English language learning/teaching go hand in hand. Having AMEP is great but it needs protection, especially in the way in some states it has been outsourced to for-profit providers. Perhaps regulation has improved this, but in the past when outsourcing began there was little attention paid to quality of delivery, resulting some very poor courses. (Note also that immigrants have access to AMEP but not mother tongue First Languages speakers). Finally, AMEP is much more accessible for people living in cities, but many immigrants are encouraged to go to regions where access to AMEP varies widely and may only operate through distance education. That can be daunting to some immigrants with low literacy levels and minimal internet access.
Thanks, Jane! The devil is always in the detail, of course, and sometimes the problems can seem overwhelming. That’s why it would be a good start to recognize that people with limited English language proficiency need specific protections so that they can enjoy their human rights on a fair and equal basis 🙂
Thank you for putting this submission together!
Thanks, Niru! Your support means a lot. The submission was one of those things that we felt it was our duty to squeeze into our overflowing calendars 🙂
Thanks for your endorsement, Niru!