TRANSCRIPT:
In the lead-up to this year's federal election, issues of community safety, polarisation and faltering social cohesion are coming to the fore.
Kon Karapanagiotidis from the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre says the migrant and refugee communities he works with are feeling increasing division.
"We're working with refugees who feel a rise in hate crimes, in racism, in feeling like they're not welcome and wanted here. It's hard enough being a refugee, not by choice, coming to a new country trying to rebuild your life. Our community feels under threat, they feel under siege, they feel they're not welcomed and they're not safe here."
These concerns are reflected in the indicators of social cohesion measured by the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute.
They've been mapping social cohesion in Australia annually since 2009 - and Australia scored a 78 in their most recent report, the equal lowest score since the survey began.
Scanlon Foundation CEO Anthea Hancocks has told SBS News trust in government and positive attitudes towards people who belong to organised religions are on a downwards slope.
"The percentage of people who have negative attitudes towards formalised religion has increased. So, peoples views about Hindus and Sikhs and Jews and people of the Muslim faith and Christianity -- all of those have dropped."
The report has made it clear that conflict in the Middle East has placed more pressure on attitudes, with 34 percent of Australians now saying they have a negative attitude towards Muslims, and 13 percent saying they have negative attitudes towards Jewish people.
But the Scanlon Foundation has also found experiences of discrimination and mistreatment are being increasingly reported - one in three Australians born overseas from non-English speaking backgrounds reporting discrimination in the last 12 months.
While the federal government has recently passed new laws designed to tackle hate speech and hate crimes, senior lawyer from the Human Rights Legal Centre Arif Hussein says he believes the laws are not comprehensive enough.
"The current laws that are being introduced, they are a patchwork. They are very limited and they are to criminalise certain types of vilification instead of all types of vilification."
Mr Hussein believes legislation needs to be strengthened to ensure social cohesion and protect all people from racial discrimination.
He says he'd like to see amendments that make it illegal for someone to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate someone because of their race or ethnicity.
"We think that reforming section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, so that 18C covers all attributes, which it doesn't right now. And then in addition to the immediate reforms to 18C that can be done straight away, a national human rights act would also ensure that our laws are built on comprehensive human rights protection."
The latest McKinnon Poll from the Susan McKinnon Foundation offers some more insight into the state of social cohesion in Australia.
Their poll from November 2024 found a majority of people feel the country has become more divided on key political, social and economic issues when compared to five years ago.
Mr Karapanagiotidis says multicultural communities are particularly fearful about the rhetoric Australians may hear in the weeks before the election, specifically if political leaders adopt anti-immigration sentiments.
"What we're seeing are people feeling unsafe, people feeling threatened. We are seeing, just as we speak now, another federal election that's about to be announced that's going to be run on, predominantly, demonising, dehumanising and degrading migrants and refugees, scapegoating poor people for our cost of living stresses and making them the fall guy for everything that ails us."
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised to run a positive campaign once the election is called.
He has told Nine's 60 minutes program he wanted to lift up Australians rather than be involved in a series of negative attacks between the parties, and what he's called "punching down".
Mr Karapanagiotidis says he believes political leaders should place more importance on bringing communities together.
"Social cohesion, if we think of it as this thing that is both extraordinarily powerful but extraordinarily fragile, that is, if we don't defend it and celebrate it and talk about it as a strength of our community, it can very quickly be seen as a burden and as a threat."
