Challenges and Opportunities for the Australian Indian community
In the next 15 years, the Australian Indian community will be one of the largest ethnic communities in Australia when Australian born families will become a minority group. Population of Australia will continue to swell at a constant rate reaching 36 million by 2050. A significant proportion of this increase is likely to be filled by Indians. Being in such numbers will carry upon itself a lot of challenges, opportunities and responsibility. The question we need to ask ourselves is “Are we prepared for this responsibility?” Clearly at this moment we are not. As a community there is a need to organise and redefine ourselves so that we can blend ourselves better in the next decade.
Increase in numbers will put pressure on existing places of worship. In Auburn, you can see over 200 cars congregating on small spaces around the temple just on normal days, forget the festival days. The same could happen in say Revesby or Blacktown Gurudwara and the squeeze will increase in the coming years. We as a community should agree and be ready to move the festivities away from the temple to bigger grounds on such days. There will also be a need to build more places of worship for the community. Not an easy task when you see the opposition which some new mosques and Islamic schools have to face currently. The Indian community in all likelihood may fight the same battle which the Middle Eastern community is fighting currently. And the scenario will mean the community will need deep pockets to fund legal battles. It will also mean more unity and cohesion within the cultures and sub cultures of our community.
Many of the students from India are coming from smaller Indian towns and are not fluent in English, which hinders their interaction with the Australian society. Some established older generation migrants from India have raised concerns over the quality of people migrating from India and their arguments have been valid that there should be courses for them to help them understand Australian culture. The vagueness comes when asked to clarify who will fund these courses and the answers can be different depending on whom you ask this question. There is a need to educate the new comers and there is a market to build courses around this. Some of the entrepreneurs from the Indian community are in a much better shape to start and market these courses.
As we increase in numbers so will our problems. As a community we generally follow the convention of obsequiousness and giving respect to elders which often has the effect of non encouragement of whistleblowers in our community. As we find more people coming in, there will be more whistleblowers in our community who will complain and question, genuine and non genuine issues and we need to adjust to the new culture.
Traditional and established leadership in our community will face challenges as new youthful elements from India come into live in our society. Their tolerance of accepted practices will be less and they will more likely gel and morph into new clusters and build alternate leadership. One of the apparent things lacking in our community at this stage is the lack of unified and accepted leadership.
Providing leadership for the Australian Indian community is the biggest challenge we face and if we fail to unite, the leadership will be thrust down our throats by political parties. The dispensation of having such a big community without any leadership in political circles will not be allowed to continue. Our numbers will demand that we be given representation in political system. If we fail to unite we will have second hand leadership being forced upon us.
As the nation’s population changes colour, there will be a rightful demand to have a person from one of the ethnic communities represent Australia’s highest office. An Australian Indian as the Queens Representative and Australia’s Governor General is a tough scenario to imagine but it is not impossible.
Are we prepared for this?
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