Seven languages for migrant phone service

By MATHEW DEARNALEY


A rainbow coalition of multilingual telephone staff is fielding more than 50 calls a day from migrants and Maori looking for jobs or benefits advice.

Several migrants are on a team of 17 Work and Income staff answering calls in seven languages as part of a $21.2 million regional migrant and refugee strategy officially launched in Auckland last night.

The languages - available to callers on separate 0800 numbers - are Samoan, Tongan, Maori, Hindi, Mandarin, Cantonese and Arabic. These will be augmented in coming months by phone lines for Khmer, Punjabi, Vietnamese, Farsi and Somali.

Work and Income says the call centre is part of an early intervention programme to provide services to all migrants regardless of whether they have met a two-year residency criteria for eligibility to most welfare benefits.

The service began operating two months ago and received 1866 calls in its first seven weeks.

Other parts of the four-year funding package announced in the Budget include literacy and driving training, specialised migrant case managers, and seconding Work and Income staff to Auckland migrant community centres.

Social Policy and Employment Minister Steve Maharey said though about 50 per cent of the general pool of job seekers left the unemployment benefit within six months, only 15 per cent of Work and Income's migrant and refugee clients achieved similar success.