Every Tuesday morning, a small community room in Box Hill fills with the lively chatter of a Chinese-English language exchange group. But what’s going on here is often much more than just an opportunity to brush up on conversational skills.

Today’s guest is a community organiser from Environment Victoria, and as members share thoughts on nature, energy use and climate change, it is clear this gathering is facilitating political engagement.

Language and cultural barriers are key obstacles preventing greater involvement of Chinese Australians in political campaigns like climate action, says Minwen Wu, founder of the Box Hill English Corner.

The upshot is that the concerns and diversity within this increasingly powerful voting bloc is often misunderstood and misrepresented, experts say.

Finding ways to invite Chinese Australian voters into more nuanced engagement on issues like climate was what drove Wu to start the English initiative five years ago in Box Hill, where 46 per cent of residents have Chinese ancestry.

“Everything for us is learning, you know, because language, vote, ballot paper – no one [has] ever seen a ballot paper in China.”

With their growing electoral influence, Chinese Australian communities drew heightened attention from candidates throughout the 2025 Federal Election campaign, following decisive Labor swings in key seats during the Coalition’s 2022 defeat.

While that result was broadly seen as a public mandate for climate action, the swing among Chinese Australians was largely attributed to a backlash against the Morrison government’s anti-China rhetoric.

This year, Menzies – now home to the highest proportion of Chinese Australian voters in the country – fell to Labor for the first time. Early analysis of similar Labor swings in electorates with sizable Chinese influence also links the continued shift away from the Liberals to ongoing perceptions of the party’s hostility toward China.

But experts warn against casting Chinese Australians as single-issue voters, arguing this risks sidelining broader concerns and undermining campaign efforts to connect with a significant voting bloc.

“Chinese Australian voters and sentiments tend to be overly caricatured and essentialised in political discourse,” says Dr Xiang Gao, discipline convenor of political and international studies at the University of New England.

“Generally [they] share voting habits, community feelings and political efficacy in a similar fashion to most Australians… with the provision that many first-generation Chinese have little concern for politics but are more embedded with their communities,” she explains.

Gao’s research into Chinese Australian voting patterns in 2022 found that Chinese Australian voters, particularly second- and later-generation, widely echoed the broader population’s concerns about Scott Morrison’s stance on climate change.

However, a 2022 Lowy Institute survey of 1200 Chinese Australians did show that climate change was generally seen as a less serious threat to Australia’s interests compared to perceptions within the broader population.

Asked to label key issues a “critical”, “important” or “not important” threat, respondents were nearly half as likely as the broader population to classify climate change as “critical”, a trend mirrored across six of eleven other key issues including foreign political interference and military conflict over Taiwan.

This gap may reflect communication barriers rather than apathy, says Dr Corinne Ang, co-founder and CEO of Asian Australians for Climate Solutions (AAfCS).

A Malaysian-born migrant and practicing dentist in Adelaide, Ang first engaged in environmental advocacy after confronting the plastic waste generated in her clinic.

But it was while letterboxing during the 2022 election in her Sturt electorate – where nearly 10% of residents are of Chinese ancestry – that she realised the climate flyers she was distributing were targeting Anglo-Australians.

“It just hit me like a light bulb, wow, you know, we’re not connecting with these people.”

She says terms like “biodiversity” and “net zero emissions” don’t always resonate in Chinese communities, where climate messaging must relate to more tangible concerns like energy bills, insurance costs, air quality, or health.

“The climate movement is very progressive… but for whatever reason there’s this failure to engage with multicultural communities… it is largely quite ‘white’”.

That disconnect became clear to some campaigners working to engage voters in Melbourne’s eastern marginals. The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) began outreach in Box Hill in 2018 after identifying the area’s tight electoral contests, according to ACF councillor Elizabeth Reen.

Initial attempts to connect with Chinese Australians in Box Hill – then part of Chisholm, now redistributed into Menzies – gained little traction until ACF volunteers started attending English Corner.

“We invited [participants] to join our monthly nature walks in local parks,” says Reen. “These have been very popular… for most of the last two years we have had more people from English Corner at our walks than others from the broader Australian population.”

The partnership highlighted the need to tailor messaging for the community, she says.

“‘Save our Big Backyard’ doesn’t mean much to people who have always lived in high-rise apartments”.

Wu says ACF’s involvement in English Corner has also helped participants feel more grounded and civically engaged.

“Before ACF, I basically did not know many names of like birds, plants, et cetera,” he explains. “Getting involved with environment, climate, is very good to raise our awareness as a community member… with this kind of activity, we make sense of living in Australia.”

The collaboration has laid the groundwork for other environmental campaigners to engage with the group, says Wu.

Environment Victoria, for instance, has worked to connect with more multicultural communities through promoting Renew Australia for All’s campaign, which advocates for government investment in solar energy upgrades for every household, says community organiser Peizhi Jiang.

At his English Corner table talk, participants expressed strong support for the upgrades. But Jiang, a Chinese-born Australian himself, says translating this support into action is a very different matter for first-generation Chinese migrants, where broaching political issues requires culturally thoughtful framing.

“Their understanding of protecting the environment is mostly around waste recycling, tree planting, saving energy… that’s the environmental messaging in China. But in terms of political action, that’s a huge gap,” he says.

And for those ready to take political steps, he emphasises significant hurdles.

“Barriers like language, cultural or maybe understanding Australian politics… things like writing a letter to your MP, those are high barriers for migrants.”

Which is why Ang says leaders wanting strong climate action must listen to the diversity of voices of Asian Australian communities, whose messaging and needs do not always echo that of mainstream Australia.

“There is much to learn from our communities about sustainable living, whether from our forefathers or innovative ideas from our homelands,” she says.

“If we are to hit the emissions targets that science dictates that we do, we have to bring all communities along, including the Asian Australian communities… we are simply too large a population to ignore.”