Australian-Chinese voters' concerns and priorities
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Australia’s compulsory voting system ensures that all eligible citizens have a voice in the country’s democratic process. In recent years, Australian-Chinese communities have become an increasingly influential political force, with their concerns becoming more visible in key electorates.
The last federal election in 2022 saw a significant shift in support from the Liberal Party to the Australian Labor Party among Australian-Chinese voters, prompting the Liberal Party to make regaining this support a central focus for the upcoming election this year.
What factors are shaping Australian-Chinese communities' voting preferences? What are the key issues they face as the next election approaches?
The Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS:ACRI) hosted a panel discussion to address these questions and more. The discussion was followed by audience Q&A.
Panellists included Ms Erin Chew, founder of the Asian Australian Alliance; Mr Osmond Chiu, Research Fellow at Per Capita; and Professor Wanning Sun, UTS:ACRI Deputy Director. The panel was moderated by Chinese politics, language and culture expert Linda Jaivin.
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Speakers
Ms Erin Chew
Ms Erin Wen Ai Chew is a social activist, freelance writer, entrepreneur and thought leader who has dedicated a good part of the last 10 years in addressing social issues impacting on the Asian Australian community. In 2013, Ms Chew founded the Asian Australian Alliance which is a network that focuses on empowering and advancing the voices of the Asian Australian community and advocate on relevant common issues. With the leadership of Ms Chew, the Asian Australian Alliance has been leading the conversation on issues of racism and representation, Asian Australian LGBTIQ issues, issues around domestic violence against Asian Australian women and mentoring the Asian Australian youth.
In November 2024, Ms Chew presented a paper at the Asian Australian Media, Culture and Society conference titled 'Re-defining Sinophobia in a contemporary Australia', and is currently working with other academics and individuals to produce an academic paper on this topic.
Mr Osmond Chiu
Mr Osmond Chiu is a Research Fellow at the Per Capita thinktank. He has worked in policy roles for over a decade and has written for Guardian Australia, Sydney Morning Herald and Canberra Times.
He served as a Reference Group member for the Commonwealth Government’s recent Multicultural Framework Review and has previously been recognised as one of the 40 most influential Asian Australians under 40 for his work in the public sector/government category.
Professor Wanning Sun
Wanning Sun is Deputy Director at UTS:ACRI and a Professor of Media and Communication in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS. A fellow of Australian Academy of the Humanities since 2016, she is currently a member of the ARC College of Experts (2020-2023). As an academic researcher, Professor Sun is best known for her ethnography of rural-to-urban migration in China, and for her study of transnational and diasporic Chinese media. She has produced a significant body of research on the politics of inequality in China. This work can be found in Maid in China: Media, Morality and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries (Routledge, 2009), Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media and Cultural Practices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), and her co-edited volume, Love Stories in China: The Politics of Intimacy in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2020). Her latest book on this topic is Love Troubles: Inequality in China and Its Intimate Consequences (Bloomsbury, 2023). Over the past two decades, she has spearheaded global diasporic Chinese-language media as an distinct area of research, with the publications of her first book Leaving China: Media, Migration, and Transnational Imagination (Routledge, 2002), and three edited books on this topic. Professor Sun also writes a column for Crikey.
Moderator
Ms Linda Jaivin
Ms Linda Jaivin is the author of The Shortest History of China, named 2021’s No. 1 book on China by fivebooks.com, the upcoming Bombard the Headquarters: China’s Cultural Revolution and eleven other books. She is also a widely published cultural commentator, essayist and literary translator (from Chinese) specialising in film subtitling.
