The Double Disadvantage: Closing the Rural Health Gap for Multicultural Australia

By Isobella Halcrow, Communications and Policy Officer

If you’re from a multicultural community, you probably already know how complicated Australia’s health system can be. Language hurdles, unfamiliar medical terms, cultural barriers, and a health system that doesn’t always reflect your lived reality. 

Now imagine dealing with all of that in a rural or regional town, where getting basic care can also mean long drives, limited services, and weeks waiting for an appointment. 

When you stack these rural challenges on top of existing cultural and language barriers, suddenly healthcare becomes a maze, and one that many multicultural communities are expected to navigate without a map. 

For around three decades, Australia’s migration policies have encouraged culturally diverse communities to settle in regional areas. But at the same time, investment in culturally responsive health care simply hasn’t kept pace.  

So, where does this leave multicultural communities?  

The layered challenges that multicultural people face in rural, regional and remote areas create what many call a “double disadvantage”.  

And when Medicare rules don’t account for these realities, the result is predictable: more preventable illnesses, more emergency visits, and more pressure on already stretched rural clinics. 

But there’s a window of opportunity to help shift rural health policy. 

The Senate Standing Committees on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport have launched a major inquiry into how Australians in rural, regional and remote areas access Medicare. Simply put, it’s a deep dive into how Medicare is working (or not working) for people outside major cities. 

The Inquiry is examining everything from bulk-billing incentives to telehealth, mental health access, and how Medicare rules impact small community clinics versus big corporates. 

While the Inquiry isn’t specifically focused on multicultural communities, that’s exactly why your voice matters. Multicultural experiences are often missing from rural health conversations. If they’re not shared now, they risk being overlooked again. 

Why this needs to be about you 

For too long, rural health policy has been written as if most people living outside a capital city share the same background, culture, language and needs. But this is far from reality. 

Regional Australia is diverse, multilingual, and home to communities whose stories rarely make it into policy rooms. This inquiry presents a rare national moment to change that. 

If we get this right, we could help to reshape Medicare into a system that reflects the real Australia. A country where cultural diversity stretches far beyond metropolitan postcodes.   

How can you get involved? 

The Collaborative is preparing our own submission to the Inquiry, and we want to understand your lived experiences. We’re running a survey for anyone from a multicultural background who lives or works in a rural, regional or remote area. It only takes 10 minutes, and you can learn more here. 

If you’d like to make your own submission directly to the Inquiry, click here. 

Isobella Halcrow is the Collaborative’s Communications and Policy Officer and brings experience in strategic communications, social policy research and advocacy in the not-for-profit sector.