By Eva Hussain

Multiculturalism is one of our favourite national stories but if you spend time in aged care, you see something that does not match the speeches. The people who lived multiculturalism first are ageing and their languages are slowly but surely disappearing inside the system.

Recently I presented a cultural safety workshop to more than 60 staff and managers at PolCare and Polish Community Services of Victoria. It was a genuinely lovely group to work with. People shared stories, challenges, real questions and a level of care that you do not always see in busy community organisations. Their commitment to their clients was obvious in every conversation. The session was fun, honest and practical, and it gave me another chance to learn directly from people who deal with the realities of aged care every day.

One issue came up again and again. Language. 

Staff told me that almost no organisations produce resources in Polish, even though the need is huge. One exception is Palliative Care Victoria, thanks to the leadership of Tonina Gucciardo Masci, its Community Engagement Manager. Tonina has been driving the creation of resources that are co designed with the community, not just translated after the fact. We have had the privilege of working with her over the last few years to produce materials across multiple community languages. These resources are not just well translated by our NAATI certified translators. They are made for the community by the community, and that is exactly what cultural safety looks like in practice.

I was also told something that genuinely shocked me. The current centralised system for aged care translations run by the Department of Health and Aged Care that was meant to make things more efficient and transparent is not working at all. Staff said it is slow, with wait times of up to 3 months for basic materials. The process is clunky, the quality is inconsistent and organisations like PolCare end up having to edit the translations themselves because they sound like they have been produced by AI and people cannot use them. When frontline workers are rewriting official translations just so families can understand them, something is seriously wrong. And organisations like Palliative Care Victoria who truly care about what goes out to the community come to Polaron Connect instead.

What makes this even more frustrating is that we have seen what good practice looks like. A couple of years ago, we worked on a major translation contract for the Department. Every single translation was checked by the community before it went out. Nothing was rushed, automated or pushed through without proper review. The budget for the new contract that went to another organisation was supposed to be more than 50 million, which means the system has the resources to do this properly. Somewhere along the way, something changed. Quality dropped, community review disappeared and the people who rely on these translations are now paying the price.

This is exactly why cultural safety is so important. It is not a slogan or a checkbox. It is the difference between people having access to information they can understand and people being left out of their own care. When language is ignored, cultural safety collapses.

So why are other organisations not following this lead? Why are they accepting three month delays and unusable translations when the sector has already proven that community driven, high-quality work is possible?

Let’s look at some numbers.

Across residential aged care, 36% of residents were born overseas. Among residents with lower English proficiency, 45% rely on their strongest language for everyday communication. Italian, Greek and Cantonese are the most common, but more than 60 languages are recorded nationally. Many of these languages are spoken by only one or two people in an entire aged care facility. 21% of residents who speak one of the top twenty community languages are the sole speaker of that language in their home.

That means one in five people who have limited English and rely on their preferred language never hear another person speak it.

This is not multiculturalism. Let’s call it what it is: linguistic isolation.

And here’s the part the public debate keeps missing. The languages most at risk aren’t the newest, emerging ones. They’re the oldest ones such as Italian, Greek, Polish, Maltese, Albanian, Croatian or Serbian, amongst others. These languages built suburbs, factories, small businesses, clubs, churches and neighbourhoods, they shaped the Australia people like to call multicultural.

But inside aged care, these communities are becoming linguistically fragile.

If you look at who is actually in aged care, the picture is clear. Among residents aged eighty and over who were born overseas:

Italian speakers make up 8–10%, Greek speakers make up 6–8%, Polish speakers make up 2–3%, Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian combined make up 2–3%, Maltese speakers sit at 0.5–1%, Albanian speakers sit at 0.3–0.5%.

These are not tiny numbers – these are thousands of people across the country.

Now let’s look at how many of them are alone.

For Italian and Greek, lone‑speaker rates sit around 15–20%. For Polish, Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian, lone‑speaker rates climb to 30–40%. For Maltese and Albanian, lone‑speaker rates reach 50–60% in some regions in other words, half of all Maltese or Albanian speakers in aged care may be the only person in their entire facility who speaks their language.

And this is where the multiculturalism story starts to crack. These aren’t small communities, they’re communities that arrived in the 1950s, 60s and 70s and contributed to Australia for decades. Yet once they got older, they’re treated like historical footnotes.

Across Australia, there are about 5,600 people employed as interpreters and translators. The median age is 51. More than 74% work part time. The interpreter workforce is ageing, and the decline is sharpest in older European languages.

Italian interpreters have declined by 38% over the past decade. Greek interpreters have declined by 34%. Polish interpreters have declined by 31%. Maltese interpreters have declined by 29%. Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian interpreters have declined by 30–33%.

The median age of interpreters in these languages sits between 56 and 59, many are close to retirement. I should know! I’ve been a practicing interpreter for over 25 years now and sit in the over 50s aged bracket nowadays. Younger generations may speak these languages socially but are not credentialled. The pipeline is thin.

Inside facilities, the picture is similar. Only 15–20% of aged care homes report having any staff fluent in Italian. Only 10–15% report staff fluent in Greek. Fewer than 5% report staff fluent in Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Maltese or Albanian. Many rely on someone who speaks a bit, which is not enough for dementia care.

Research on dementia shows that 60–70% of bilingual people with moderate to advanced dementia experience language regression. Many revert to the first language they learned, especially under stress or illness. For older migrants, that first language is often Italian, Greek, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Maltese or Albanian, not English.

Someone who used English confidently for fifty years can lose access to it completely. Their emotional and cognitive world shifts back into the language of childhood and early adulthood. If no one around them speaks that language, their attempts to communicate are easily misread as behaviour or decline instead of what they often are: communication in the only language that still feels accessible.

When we look at settlement patterns, the story becomes even clearer.

Post‑war migration brought large numbers of people from Southern and Eastern Europe to Australia. Italians and Greeks were among the largest groups, alongside Poles, Croats, Serbs and others from Central and Eastern Europe. Many were resettled into industrial and regional areas, often with low existing cultural diversity. There they raised their families, built suburbs, factories, churches, clubs and small businesses. They worked in manufacturing, construction, food production and textiles. They lived in tight community networks where heritage languages were used every day.

ABS settlement data shows that even decades after arrival, Southern and Eastern European migrants are more likely to speak a language other than English at home. English proficiency often improved in work and public life but remained weaker in older age, especially for women and those in manual labour.

Fast forward to now. The post‑war migrants are in their eighties and nineties. Many have moved into residential aged care. Their strongest language under stress is often the one they grew up with, not the one they worked in. And looks like the system they rely on no longer recognises those languages.

This is where multiculturalism, as a national story, falls apart. It celebrates diversity in the present while neglecting the people who lived it first. If multiculturalism is going to mean anything beyond a slogan, it has to include the people who built it. It has to show up in aged care, not just in speeches.

That means mapping languages properly. Not just preferred language, but who speaks what, who is bilingual, who is a lone speaker and how language shifts over time. It means planning for established languages, not only emerging ones. It means bringing speech‑language pathologists into dementia care as standard. It means training staff in language history, not just cultural awareness. It means building real standards for linguistic responsiveness instead of relying on luck. It also means working with interpreters and treating interpreting as an essential service.

Australia’s multicultural story is long and layered. But aged care shows the part we’ve neglected. The oldest communities are becoming the most fragile not because they’re small but because they’re forgotten.

If we want multiculturalism to mean something, we have to start here.