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Cultural diversity andentrepreneurship: policy responsesto immigrant entrepreneurs inAustraliaJock Collins aa Department of Economics, University of TechnologySydney (UTS), Sydney, NSW, Australia; e-mail:jock.collins@uts.edu.auPublished online: 09 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Jock Collins (2003) Cultural diversity and entrepreneurship: policyresponses to immigrant entrepreneurs in Australia, Entrepreneurship & Regional Development:An International Journal, 15:2, 137-149, DOI: 10.1080/0898562032000075168

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Cultural diversity and entrepreneurship: policyresponses to immigrant entrepreneurs in Australia

JOCK COLLINSDepartment of Economics, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Sydney,

NSW, Australia; e-mail: jock.collins@uts.edu.au

Australia, one of the most cosmopolitan of contemporary western societies, has a long historyof immigrant entrepreneurship, with many ethnic groups significantly over-represented inentrepreneurial activities, particularly in the small business sector of the Australian economy.This paper addresses the changing policy context that shapes the rate of formation of – and thegrowth and expansion of – ethnic enterprises in Australia. At a macro level, changes toAustralian immigration and settlement policy and taxation policy indirectly impact on ratesof immigrant minority entrepreneurship formation and survival. At the micro level, policydevelopment that impacts directly on minority immigrant enterprises in Australia is very recentand largely undeveloped. This paper looks at immigrant entrepreneurship in Australia, includ-ing spatial dimensions, and at the impact of changing macro policy. It then reviews threekey areas of micro policy responses to immigrant entrepreneurship: the education and trainingneeds of ethnic entrepreneurs; policies designed to encourage unemployed immigrants tobecome entrepreneurs; and policy related to government strategies to improve communicationwith ethnic entrepreneurs. This paper concludes that there are few direct policy initiatives topromote immigrant entrepreneurship in Australia.

Keywords: immigrant; entrepreneur; Australia; spatial; policy.

1. Introduction

Immigration has had a profound impact on Australia during its two centuries of whitehistory. Australia is one of the few traditional settler immigration countries in thewestern world: since 1945, nearly 6 million immigrants have entered Australia. Todayfirst generation immigrants comprise 23% of the Australian population, a greaterproportion than any large industrialized country other than Israel (Organizationfor Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] 1998a). Australian immigra-tion history is also a history of immigrant entrepreneurs.1 The history of non-English-speaking immigrants – especially Chinese, Greek, Italian and Lebanese immigrants –has, for over a century, been linked to entrepreneurship. In 1947, immediately beforethe post-war immigration programme that was to change the face of Australiansociety was launched, more than half of the immigrants in the workforce fromChinese, Greek, Italian and Lebanese backgrounds were entrepreneurs in the sensethat they were either employers or self-employed.

This paper first briefly reviews the immigrant entrepreneur experience in Australiain order to identify some of the key nodes of policy intervention at both a macro andmicro level. It presents a glimpse of how federal, state and local policies have impactedon immigrant entrepreneurs in Australia, directly and indirectly, and at the policyinitiatives that have been developed in Australia to respond to the immigrant orethnic entrepreneurs.2 The policy areas covered in this paper include those designed

Entrepreneurship and Regional Development ISSN 0898–5626 print/ISSN 1464–5114 online # 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltdhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/0898562032000075168

ENTREPRENEURSHIP & REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT, 15 (2003), 137–149

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to: respond to education and training needs of immigrant entrepreneurs; supportimmigrant enterprise formation among the unemployed; minimize government redtape and compliance costs; and improve government communication with immigrantentrepreneurs.

2. Immigrant entrepreneurs in Australia

In Australia, over 95% of firms are small or medium enterprises.3 By 1994–95 therewere 887 000 small businesses – and 1 252 100 small business operators – in Australia.These small businesses employed 2.9 million people or just over one-half (51%) of allprivate sector employees and created about one-third of Australia’s gross domesticproduct (Small Business Deregulation Task Force 1996: 151, 153). Over the period1985–96, employment in Australian small businesses grew at an annual rate of 3.6%.This figure contrasted sharply with the slow employment growth – 0.7% per annumover the same period – in Australia’s corporate sector (Burton et al. 1995). Femaleentrepreneurs in small businesses contribute 10–15% of Australian non-governmentoutput and contribute 20% of private sector net employment in Australia (SmallBusiness Deregulation Task Force 1996: 13) and are increasing at a rate faster thanmale entrepreneurs (Roofey et al. 1996). Many ethnic enterprises are family businessesin which the wives and families of entrepreneurs play a key role (Collins et al. 1995).

Many of Australia’s post-war immigrants have moved into entrepreneurship. Theethnic diversity of Australian society is thus reflected in the ethnic diversity ofAustralian entrepreneurship, although the link between immigrant status and entre-preneurship is an uneven one. Census data from 1996, as table 1 shows, indicates thatsome immigrant groups, such as the Koreans, Greeks, Italians, Israelis, Cypriots andLebanese, have higher rates of entrepreneurship than the Australian-born. Whileimmigrants born in England, China, New Zealand, Canada and Pakistan haverates of entrepreneurship similar to the Australian average, other immigrants (thoseborn in Taiwan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Turkey) have lower thanaverage rates of entrepreneurship. A similar pattern emerges among female entrepre-neurs in Australia when gender dimensions are considered.

Immigrant entrepreneurs in Australia are distributed across all the industries, witha particular presence in the retail industry where ethnic niches have emerged. Forexample, Italian immigrants have developed an ethnic niche as owners of fruit andvegetable stores: while they comprise less than 2% of the total population, the Italian-born comprise 22.2% of the total employers and 18% of the self-employed in fruit andvegetable shops in NSW. Similarly Greek entrepreneurs own one in five of the busi-nesses in the ‘fish shops and take-away food and milk bars’ industry and also compriseless than 2% of the total population (Collins et al. 1995: 81–83). Many immigrantentrepreneurs have restaurants in Australian cities and towns. For most of the post-war period Chinese restaurants and cafes have been a feature of the Australian sub-urban and country town landscape (Chin 1988) and most suburbs and towns had aGreek milk bar to sell sweets, drinks and meals.

Australia’s immigrant entrepreneurs play a significant role in the economy andsociety and are thus critical to economic growth and employment creation. A surveyof 1500 entrepreneurs in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth found evidence that ethnicminority entrepreneurs, particularly those born in Asia, had a higher rate of involve-ment in international trade than non-immigrant entrepreneurs (Collins 1998).

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Despite contradictions – such as instances of the exploitation by immigrant entrepre-neurs of co-ethnic and family labour, including illegal immigrant labour –the sheersignificance of employment and trade generated by immigrant entrepreneurs demon-strates why policies designed to increase the rate of formation, survival and success ofimmigrant enterprises are so important.

The Australian research on immigrant entrepreneurship (Lampugnani and Holton1989, Kermond et al. 1991, Lever-Tracy et al. 1991, Stromback and Malhotra 1994,Collins et al. 1995, Collins 2002) shows that there is an increasing diversity of the pathsthat new immigrants take to entrepreneurship: unemployment, manual labour, pro-fessional labour (doctors, etc.), corporate primary sector jobs (glass and accent ceiling)and business migrants (rich migrants who are already established as entrepreneurs). Italso points to a diversity of class background among and between birthplace groups ofimmigrant entrepreneurs (Collins 2000) and a great diversity of educational achieve-ment (Collins et al. 1997). This points to the need for a diverse, complex policyresponse to immigrant entrepreneurship in Australia today.

The Australian research into immigrant entrepreneurs also stresses the importanceof considering the gender dimensions of entrepreneurship (Roofey et al. 1996). Thishas to do with the fact that an increasing number of female immigrants are becomingentrepreneurs, and that most male immigrant entrepreneurs are married, with thewife taking a key role in the business. However, none of the policy developments inAustralia surveyed below address the issue of gender in any direct way, leaving openthe question of how governments could or should respond to gender aspects of entre-preneurship.

At the same time, many immigrants, especially the second generation, move intothe professions and establish practices as doctors, dentists, accountants and lawyers.

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Table 1. Rates of entrepreneurship in Australia, selectedbirthplace groups, persons (1996 national census).

Birthplace Rate of entrepreneurship (%)

Over-represented

Korea 12.5Greece 11.5Italy 11.2Israel 10.7Cyprus 10.3Lebanon 9.1

Similar representation

England 8.8China 8.1New Zealand 7.8Australia 7.6Canada 7.0Pakistan 6.3

Under-represented

Turkey 5.8Singapore 5.7Vietnam 5.3Taiwan 5.0Sri Lanka 3.6

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Those professionals who go into private practice become entrepreneurs in the sensethat they are employers operating a small business. This paper does not consider thepolicy implication of this subset of Australian immigrant entrepreneurs, other than tomention that the access to professional qualifications through Australian tertiaryeducation or the recognition of overseas qualifications are the major barrier of entryfor immigrants to these sites of professional entrepreneurship (Mitchell et al. 1989).Finally, this paper does not pursue the policy implications of issues related to acces-sibility to finance for immigrant entrepreneurs, although this issue, like all thosementioned above, are clearly areas where policy could make a difference.

3. Spatial dimensions of immigrant entrepreneurship

There are important spatial dimensions to immigrant entrepreneurship in Australia.The first relates to the relative importance of immigrant entrepreneurs in eachAustralian State and Territory. In 1991, for example, first-generation immigrantsowned 38.6% of small businesses in Western Australia, 28.9% of all small businessesin Victoria, 27.7% in NSW and 27.5% in South Australia (Australian Bureau ofStatistics 1995: 13). When second generation immigrants are also considered thispresence of immigrant entrepreneurs increased considerably.

The second spatial dimension relates to the role and location of immigrant entre-preneurs in large Australian cities. Australia is one of the most urbanized countries inthe world, with 85% of people living in centres with more than 1000 inhabitants(Stilwell 1993). Immigrants have reinforced this trend and are more likely to live inlarge cities than other Australians, with a level of urbanization of over 90% (Castleset al. 1998: 37). This means that most immigrant entrepreneurship occurs inAustralia’s large cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.Sydney alone takes over 40% of Australia’s annual immigrant intake, including themajority of Australia’s immigrants from Asia and the Middle East.

Immigrant entrepreneurs have been the vanguard of the process of the developmentof ethnic precincts in the inner-city areas and suburbs of large Australian cities such asSydney (Collins and Castillo 1998) and Melbourne (Collins et al. 2001). The mostobvious example of this in the downtown central business districts of both cities isChinatown. It is also particularly evident in the ethnic precincts that have emerged inthe inner city ring of suburbs – such as Little Italy (Leichhardt in Sydney, Carlton inMelbourne) and in the emergence of ‘Asian’ ethnic precincts in the middle suburbs –Bankstown in Sydney, Richmond in Melbourne – and outer ring of suburbs –Cabramatta in Sydney and Springvale in Melbourne – that have emerged as thecities have grown in both population and geographic spread (Burnley 2001).

In all instances, it is the ethnic character of the business enterprises on the streets ofthese shopping and eating precincts in Sydney and Melbourne – often reflecting pastrather than present patterns of immigrant settlement – that convey their contempor-ary ethnic character. In the Chinatowns and inner city suburbs, ethnic communitiessuch as the Chinese and Italians have long since moved on and out to other middleand outer ring suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, leaving the enterprises themselves,and the entrepreneurs who continue to own them, to be the flag-wavers or markers oftheir ethnic character. There is also a process of ‘ethnic succession’ occurring in thehigh streets of Sydney and Melbourne suburbs, with relatively newly-arrived immi-grants from places such as Vietnam replacing earlier Greek immigrants as shopkeepers

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in suburbs such as Marrickville in Sydney and Richmond in Melbourne (Burnley2001: 223–242).

These ethnic precincts in Melbourne and Sydney have emerged partly through(changing) immigrant settlement patterns and partly through policy interventionby local government and State authorities. This is evident in the development ofChinatowns in Melbourne and Sydney. In Sydney’s case the Sydney City Councilled the redevelopment of Dixon Street in 1972 by introducing porticos, lanterns, andwaste bins with ‘traditional’ Chinese symbols. In the 1980s, developments includedthe developing of Dixon Street as a pedestrian thoroughfare, the erection of Chinesedragons at the Paddy’s Market end and the planting of Chinese trees along thestreetscape. Chinatown was also linked to the new Darling Harbour developmentvia Chinese Gardens (Fitzgerald 1997). According to Anderson (1990: 150), thisredevelopment of Sydney’s Chinatown was driven by the fact that Sydney plannerswere envious of San Francisco developments and thought their Chinatown shabby bycomparison. In Melbourne in 1975 the City council authorities launched a 5-yearredevelopment plan of Chinatown, the first attempt by the city to develop an ethnicquarter. Improvements began with arches and clusters of Chinese lanterns to ‘inject’more of a Chinese image. In 1983 another redevelopment, initiated by the VictoriaTourist Commission, led to the enactment of the Chinatown Historic Precinct Act in 1985.Designed to preserve but also to enhance Chinatown, the Act specified the area’sboundaries and physical properties and led to the creation of a Precinct Committeeto oversee any developmental changes and to manage New Year celebrations(Anderson 1990).

Immigrant enterprises in Australian cities are not confined to the ethnic precinct,with many ‘breaking out’ (Barrett et al. 1996) of the ethnic precinct or niche to serveconsumer demand in more mainstream suburbs. Sometimes the same immigrantgroups of entrepreneurs exhibit patterns of concentrating in the ethnic niche andbreaking out into ‘non-ethnic’ locations. This is most obvious in the case of Chineseentrepreneurs who own restaurants in Sydney. Some are located in Chinatown, butmany others (the majority) are located in Sydney’s suburbs. Mapping the location ofChinese restaurants in Sydney by reference to the Sydney Yellow Pages – the businessphone listings – reveals a growth in the total number of Chinese restaurants in Sydneyover the period from 1969 to 2001: 1969–70¼ 71; 1976–77¼ 112; 1980¼ 470;1984¼ 550; 1990¼ 607; 1995¼ 612; 2001¼ 558. In the 1950s and 1960s, most ofthese restaurants were located in the city or inner city precinct. However, in thepast three decades they have spread out to all of Sydney’s municipal areas. In 1971there were Chinese restaurants in just over 100 Sydney suburbs. By 2001, only 34 ofSydney’s 256 suburbs did not have a Chinese restaurant.

4. Macro policy responses to immigrant entrepreneurship

As the OECD (1998b: 41) argues in its report Fostering Entrepreneurship, the most widelyused sense of the term entrepreneurship relates to the creation and growth of newsmall businesses. In this sense, most policy initiatives related to government attempts‘to encourage the start-up, growth and survival of small business through a range ofenterprise support measures’. However, this approach to entrepreneurship is verynarrow, at least with respect to immigrant entrepreneurs. Waldinger et al. (1991)have argued that it is the interaction between the group characteristics of new immi-

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grant groups and the opportunity structures that they faced once in their new countrythat shapes the rate and character of ethnic entrepreneurship in that country.However the Waldinger model does not give sufficient weight to issues related togender, racialization, the family, social class and globalization (Collins et al. 1995).In addition, as Kloosterman and Rath (2000) point out, the interactive model ofWaldinger and his colleagues does not give sufficient emphasis to the role of thestate and the way in which formal and informal regimes of regulation from differentlevels of the state apparatus shape ethnic entrepreneurial outcomes. They call for a‘mixed embeddedness’ approach to the study of ethnic entrepreneurship, and stressthe importance of understanding how direct and indirect regulations – as well as theirlevel of enforcement – shape entrepreneurial behaviour in different ways in differentcountries.

This ‘mixed embeddedness’ approach leads to a better understanding of immigrantentrepreneurship in Australia and the way in which federal, state and local govern-ment authorities develop a range of institutional structures, policies, practices, pro-cedures and by-laws that directly or indirectly shape the opportunities for immigrantentrepreneurs. According to this approach, macroeconomic policies, includingimmigration policy and taxation policy, help to shape the contours of ethnic entre-preneurship in Australia.

For example, Australia introduced an Entrepreneurial Migration Category inNovember 1976 (The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia 1991: 15) thatallowed immigrant entrepreneurs with detailed business proposals and capital to enterAustralia as migrant settlers. No minimum was set, but $200 000 was the rule ofthumb. The entrepreneurial category was renamed the business migration pro-gramme in November 1981. In order to qualify under the programme applicantshad to demonstrate a successful business record, have substantial assets (between$300 000 and $850 000) that could be transferred to Australia and intend to per-manently settle in Australia and establish a business in Australia (Borowski 1992:2). In later years, this policy was renamed yet again to the business skills categoryafter further anomalies in the programme were identified. Since 1981, more than16 000 immigrants and their 69 000 dependents have entered Australia under thisentrepreneurial category, with the majority coming from Asian countries.

Again at the macro level, changes to immigrant settlement policies in Australia alsoimpacted on immigrant minorities and on their opportunities in the labour force andsociety at large. In the first three decades of post-1945 immigrant settlement, thepolicy of assimilation meant that federal and state governments in Australia did notprovide resources to help new immigrant minorities in areas such as education, health,social welfare and the law. Racial discrimination in the labour market blocked immi-grant mobility in the workforce, encouraging many immigrants to start up a smallbusiness (Collins et al. 1995). Multiculturalism replaced assimilation in the mid-1970s.This change meant that not only were the cultural and linguistic backgrounds ofimmigrant minorities to be respected, but also that a raft of policies and programmesto assist immigrant minorities to settle were introduced in areas such as language,education, welfare, the labour market and the law (Collins 1991). For example,policies to assist in the recognition of overseas-acquired education and qualifications(Mitchell et al. 1989) and the Adult Migrant Education Program were introduced.These policies made it easier for immigrant minorities to overcome linguistic andcredential barriers to entry to many areas of the Australian labour market.

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Taxation is another example of a federal policy that impacts on Australian immi-grant entrepreneurs. For example, the introduction of a new Goods and Services Tax(GST) by the Howard government in the late 1990s meant that all businesses hadto register for an Australian Business Number (ABN) in order to get onto the GSTloop. However, levels of enforcement vary, with many ethnic enterprises avoiding orevading taxation (the so-called ‘black economy’). At the state government level, theextension of the hours of opening of businesses to include late night opening andSaturday and Sunday opening over the last few decades has opened new niches formany immigrant entrepreneurs who are willing to work long hours 7 days a week. Forexample, Vietnamese immigrants began to exploit a market niche by opening hotbread shops that provide fresh bread on Sundays, a day when traditional bakers areclosed. The levels of enforcement of these by-laws that regulate opening hours alsovary considerably, with many immigrant entrepreneurs working longer hours than arestrictly allowable. At the local government level, recent alteration to municipal by-laws has allowed dining on the footpath in Australia’s major cities. As a result, cafesand restaurants have spilled onto the footpaths of downtown and suburban Australiancities, with immigrant entrepreneurs playing a major role in this emerging ‘cafesociety’ in Australian cities.

Starting up a new business enterprise in Australia is much less regulated than inmany northern European countries such as Austria where individuals must apply forspecial licences even to sell flowers in restaurants and bars, and they need the approvalof a particular organization to engage in most forms of production or service(Haberfellner forthcoming). There is no individual identity card in Australia, redu-cing the level of state surveillance of immigrant business activities and the degree offormal state regulation of businesses. In addition, immigrant entrepreneurs inAustralia are free to join or not to join Chambers of Commerce or ethnic businessassociations. Like the USA, virtually anyone can establish a private business inAustralia. This demonstrates how policy responses to ethnic entrepreneurship indifferent countries must reflect the different regimes of regulation that differentcountries exhibit.

5. Micro policy responses to immigrant entrepreneurship inAustralia

There has been a wide range of initiatives introduced by governments to support smallbusinesses in Australia, but in a recent review of these programmes by the OECD(1998b: 141–167) not once was there a consideration of immigrant entrepreneurs per se.The following section considers three areas of government policy and practice thatimpact directly on immigrant entrepreneurs: education and training for immigrantentrepreneurs and their workers; helping unemployed immigrants to become entre-preneurs; and policy issues related to red tape and communication between immigrantentrepreneurs and all levels of government.

5.1 Education and training of immigrant entrepreneurs

One key policy area relating to entrepreneurship is education and training. Mostsmall business entrepreneurs in Australia do not invest in education and training:

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the literature suggests that only 18% of small businesses committed funds to voca-tional education and training for themselves or their employees (Employment andSkills Formation Council 1994: xiv). Inadequate or inappropriate education andtraining is generally viewed as a barrier to hamper the move into entrepreneurshipin the first instance – particularly for immigrant women (Kermond et al. 1991) – and abarrier to the growth and survival of existing entrepreneurs. One Australian studyfound that ‘small business owners appear to operate in an ad hoc and isolated fashion interms of business development and management, and limited use is made of supportagencies or education’ (Bureau of Industry Economics 1991). Another study (Coopersand Lybrand 1994) highlighted the need for vocational education and training (VET)providers to respond to the specific training needs of immigrant minorities engaged insmall business activities. The study recommended that, since most small businesspeople thought that the courses they had undertaken were too general to be useful,the training response to the small business sector should be based on a finer segmen-tation of this particular client group. Ethnic minorities and women were identified assegments of the small business sectors who needed to be responded to in their ownrights (Coopers and Lybrand 1994: 12).

One national survey of the educational profile and needs of ethnic entrepreneurs inAustralia (Collins et al. 1997) confirmed the finding that ethnic entrepreneurs investedlittle on education and training. Most of those entrepreneurs who did invest in train-ing spent less than $1000 a year on training themselves and less than $5000 on trainingtheir staff. The ethnic entrepreneurs surveyed stated that the major areas of educationand training that they themselves needed were in computing, financial management,personal management, marketing and import/export. The survey also revealed thatwhile more than one-quarter of ethnic entrepreneurs just had a primary schooleducation, another quarter were university graduates and postgraduates. Some hadexcellent English, others less so. This suggests the need for a variety of responses fromthe education and training sector to cope with these different educational back-grounds.

The major constraints to participation in training, according to the ethnic entre-preneurs surveyed, were the cost of the training itself and the opportunity cost ofthat training in terms of the time it takes the entrepreneur and/or workers awayfrom the business. Other key constraints identified were the lack of knowledge of –or availability of – suitable courses and distance to courses. Childcare was not men-tioned as a constraint as frequently as might be expected, but it was twice as importantas an issue for women entrepreneurs than for male entrepreneurs. There was strongsupport for Internet-delivered courses among the ethnic entrepreneurs. More thanone-half of small business owners surveyed reported that they were willing to invest innew computer technology to enable them to access Internet training.

In terms of providing training for workers, there is a fundamental contradiction:bosses are reluctant to invest in the training of their workers because once trained theymight leave for a better job. For this reason most immigrant entrepreneurs prefer thattheir workers have the required skills already. This lack of trust between workers andtheir employer appeared to have some foundation. Collins et al. (1997) also surveyedemployees of immigrant entrepreneurs and found that one of the key reasons thatthese employees wanted to undertake education and training was so that they couldindeed move on to a better job. This paradox partly explains why there is a gapbetween the attitudes and practices of ethnic entrepreneurs with regard to educationand training. They strongly agreed that education and training was critical to their

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business success, but they were reluctant to invest in it in case their trained workerswould look for greener pastures opened up by their new training credentials.

5.2 From unemployed to ethnic entrepreneur

A perhaps less glamorous and less expected path to entrepreneurship in Australia is viaunemployment. One federal policy initiative designed to help unemployed immigrantminorities move into entrepreneurship is the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme(NEIS). Under the NEIS unemployed people can take advantage of business trainingand of immediate access to (future) unemployment benefits to help them establish abusiness enterprise. This is designed to help the cash-poor unemployed in the setting-up phase. A NEIS pilot programme for immigrants (Department of Employment,Education and Training 1995) found that in 1994/95, immigrant minorities comprised20% of the people who had started their own businesses through the NEIS. This ratehad increased to 30% by November 1995. Barriers to immigrant minorities in acces-sing and participating in the NEIS mainly flowed from the low level of Englishlanguage and literacy skills that some possessed. This caused a variety of problems:a lack of awareness of training opportunities; difficulty in competing with otherimmigrants for NEIS assistance; a reluctance to participate in mainstream ‘classroomstyle’ training; difficulty in establishing networks within the broader community; anddifficulty in approaching financial institutions for loans.

A review of the NEIS scheme (Department of Employment, Education andTraining and Youth Affairs 1995) noted a lack of cultural understanding of thosemanaging and running the programme and the presence of a stereotypical view thatimmigrant minorities were too difficult to assist. It recommended that marketingstrategies that utilized links with local migrant organizations and used a combinationof English and community languages be introduced and called for greater measures toensure that curricula and staff are culturally and linguistically sensitive.

5.3 Government communication with ethnic entrepreneurs

Another area of policy development for immigrant entrepreneurs relates to the issue ofred tape at the interface between immigrant entrepreneurs and all levels of govern-ment and other regulatory bodies. According to the OECD (1998b: 21) ‘streamliningadministrative requirements and better co-ordination between public agencies wouldreduce the burden [of compliance costs]’. Many policy initiatives for entrepreneurs inthe small business sector of OECD countries such as Australia have concentrated onthe need to reduce the administrative burden and compliance costs of regulation andgovernance – so called ‘red tape’. The OECD estimates that the paperwork involvedin establishing an enterprise in Australia takes about one week. This is similar to thesituation in the USA, Japan and Sweden, and is considered to be ‘a straightforwardmatter’ (OECD 1998b: 20). However, red tape doesn’t end there, with businessenterprises required to respond to a range of government administrative, regulatoryand reporting requirements. Compliance costs have been estimated to amount to asmuch as one-third (32%) of the profits of small enterprises in Australia (OECD1998b: 149).

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The first attempt to investigate the adequacy of existing government communica-tion strategies for ethnic or immigrant entrepreneurs, funded by the FederalDepartment of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, was conducted in Sydney in1999 in conjunction with the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia(Collins et al. 2000). The brief was to investigate the perceived adequacy of existinglevels of communication between government departments and ethnic entrepreneursand to identify ways in which these could be improved.

Three focus groups of ethnic entrepreneurs revealed that the majority was notsatisfied with the existing attempts of relevant government departments and agenciesto communicate their policies and procedures. Many ethnic entrepreneurs complainedof the difficulty of having to work their way around the bureaucratic maze of legis-lation, red tape and policy developments that impacted on their businesses. Whilemost ethnic small businesses needed to engage with a range of government depart-ments and agencies at the federal, state and local government level, they complainedthat these different levels of government themselves appeared not to communicateeffectively, creating problems and uncertainty for small businesses.

Only a minority of ethnic entrepreneurs had used the Internet for accessing govern-ment information. Generational issues were important here: younger and more edu-cated ethnic entrepreneurs used the Web with ease, while older first generation ethnicentrepreneurs were very apprehensive about the Web. Those who did use the Webwere generally satisfied with their attempts to find the government information thatthey needed. Ethnic entrepreneurs pointed to successful examples of governmentdepartments and agencies using ethnic newspapers, ethnic radio and ethnic television.Most ethnic entrepreneurs thought that government departments could make betteruse of the ethnic media: while all ethnic entrepreneurs spoke English well, it was in allcases their second or third language. They diverged on whether communications fromgovernments should be in languages other than English. Some desired foreign lan-guage translations of government policy and procedures while others did not.

In addition to the focus groups of ethnic entrepreneurs, focus group meetings werearranged with federal, state and local government stakeholders in each of the threeregions of Sydney. The intention was to get the viewpoint from government agencieswith a brief that includes ethnic entrepreneurs in order to identify ‘best practice’models of these government agencies. Some agencies have introduced innovativeand effective strategies to communicate with small businesses. For example, a numberof government departments started the Government Business Education Network. Abrochure outlining what government departments do and contact numbers was pro-duced (although only in English) and a Website was developed, although none of theethnic entrepreneurs consulted mentioned any knowledge of this important resource.

Many of the government departments and agencies that were most successful andinnovative in their attempts to communicate with ethnic small businesses were theones that had embraced the elements of productive diversity (Cope and Kalantzis 1997)in their own organizations. That is, by recognizing linguistic and cultural skills whenhiring staff, government departments and instrumentalities improved their ability todeal with their immigrant minority clientele more effectively. Most governmentdepartments who ran, in their eyes, successful campaigns used ethnic media in theircampaigns and developed strategies that viewed ethnic small business as a hetero-geneous, rather than homogenous, entity.

For example, at the federal government level, the Australian Tax Office introduced aspecial ‘ethnic tax line strategy’ and used Vietnamese-speaking tax officers to respond

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to inquiries on ethnic radio. At a state government level, the NSW Department of State

and Regional Development produced Chinese, Greek and Italian language booklets forone information campaign. While the booklet was popular with the Chinese-speakingpeople, it was a failure in the Greek and Italian communities, despite efforts topromote the booklet in these communities. Clearly, one size doesn’t fit all. Finally,at the local government level, the South Sydney Waste Board developed strategies ineleven Local Government Areas to promote Waste Board information to the minorityimmigrant public. This strategy stressed the need to respond to differences within andbetween different ethnic communities. As one official put it: ‘they’re all different . . .we can’t just make a translated pamphlet. Some communities use radio a lot more. Wetreat them as separate’.

A number of policy implications for local, state and federal agencies emerged fromthese consultations. First, government agencies need a whole-of-government approachand a better sharing of resources to improve inter-government co-operation beforeapproaching ethnic or immigrant small businesses. Second, diverse strategies arerequired, both within and between ethnic groups. This is to respond to the diversebackgrounds – class, education, language, and business – of ethnic entrepreneursthemselves. These strategies should acknowledge centrally the time-poor aspects ofethnic entrepreneurs’ lives. Third, the ethnic media should be a critical component ofgovernment strategies to communicate with ethnic small business. Fourth, one of themost important aspects of any strategy to communicate with ethnic small business isthe identifying of, and tapping into, existing minority immigrant networks, formal andinformal. To this end, governments could consider working more closely with ethnicbusiness associations and ethnic community organizations in planning and operatingmulticultural marketing campaigns. Fifth, in many instances, ethnic small businessrequests for a one-stop-shop or whole-of-government contact are merely a matter ofintroducing media campaigns to tell ethnic small business what is already there. Sixth,new initiatives for a whole of government approach could be introduced, such asan ‘Ethnic Business Expo’ in each of the capital cities that is advertised widelyin the ethnic media and includes bi-lingual and/or multi-lingual capacities whereappropriate.

6. Conclusions

Despite the importance of immigrant entrepreneurs to the Australian economy and tothe Australian immigration experience, the policy response to immigrant entre-preneurship in Australia has been very underdeveloped. At the macro level, theintroduction of a business immigrant category and the introduction of multicultural-ism and changes to taxation policy have helped to shape the group characteristics of,and opportunity structures for, new immigrants in Australia. This in turn indirectlyimpacts on the rate of ethnic enterprise formation. Much more research in needed intothe way in which direct and indirect policies at different levels of government –and their different levels of enforcement – currently impact on immigrant minorityentrepreneurs in Australia. This paper has addressed only a few dimensions.

There are also important spatial dimensions of immigrant entrepreneurship inAustralia. This is particularly evident in large metropolitan areas, where the emer-gence of ethnic precincts such as Chinatown have in part been shaped by immigrantsettlement patterns and in part by local and state government policy. The potential to

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link the cultural diversity of cosmopolitan cities such as Sydney and Melbourne tonational and international tourism via a promotion of their ethnic precincts has onlyjust began to be addressed by policymakers in Australia.

At the micro level, this paper has shown that there is a strong case to improve ethnicor immigrant entrepreneur access to education and training and to improve existingattempts by all levels of government in Australia to communicate with ethnic entre-preneurs. Some policy initiatives – such as the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme –have helped some unemployed immigrants to become entrepreneurs. More initiativesare required to respond to the gendered nature of ethnic enterprises in Australia.There appears to be little if any policy development in Australia specifically designedto respond to the needs of female immigrant entrepreneurs, nor policies that respondto the ‘family’ nature of many immigrant enterprises. There are many other avenuesfor policy intervention that could be explored, including policies related to accessof immigrant entrepreneurs to finance as well as policies related specifically to profes-sional ethnic entrepreneurs.

It is also important to restate that the diversity of paths to immigrant entrepreneur-ship in Australia suggests that policies must respond with diversity rather than a one-size-fits-all policy approach. In addition, while immigrant entrepreneurs are in manyways like their non-immigrant counterparts, their language differences and differentsocial and community networks suggest that strategies designed specifically for immi-grant entrepreneurs may well be more effective than general policies that hope thatimmigrant entrepreneurs will be caught up in the general policy net.

Notes

1. The terms immigrant entrepreneurs and ethnic entrepreneurs, although not identical (Collins et al. 1995:35–38) are used interchangeably in this paper.

2. Following Light and Rosenstein (1995) this paper adopts a very ‘loose’ definition of entrepreneurship thatsimply includes all those who are in self-employment (including own account workers and employers).

3. Defined in Australia as those firms employing less than 20 people, other than in manufacturing, wherethe employment is less than 100.

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