We're engaging with our culturally and linguistically diverse customers in partnership with the skilled educators at the NSW Ethnic Communities Council.

We're asking educators to do a series of up to 15 interviews with newly arrived people (< 2 years in Australia) and people from established or emerging communities (around 15 years in Australia) to support our program of engagement for Jemena’s business plan for the new regulatory period. Then we're engaging with these educators across a series of workshops to bring these insights to life.

To ensure a mix of cultural representation we landed on the following:

• Tamil
• Nepali
• Assyrian or Arabic
• Vietnamese.

These communities have been identified as target groups based on data obtained from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the Department of Home Affairs (DHA).

A survey of our Customer Forum shows us we have good representation from diverse communities. This led us to shift our focus to ensure a broader cultural spread within our specific forums.

After liaising with the ECC, we understood that as a subset of CALD communities, new arrivals are particularly vulnerable in terms of changes to policy and cost from government or organisations. This is because of a number of factors, including that these individuals may not understand why changes are being made, they may not know how to read bills or understand price change, and they receive their information from friends and connections, rather than directly from the source organisation. New arrivals may also be more sensitive to any price changes. These points are also referred to in the work conducted by the ECC – CALD Best Practice in in a consumer centric energy market.

To further refine our approach to CALD new arrival engagement, we began researching the data and we looked at a number of dimensions: languages used at home, the top five countries of birth for new arrivals (2021-22), and the top 10 countries providing the most permanent migrants in 2021-22. We took these language groups to our partners, the ECC and gained their insight into these languages and cultural groups within NSW. Their advice on vulnerable communities helped us refine our approach to engage with this group.