Professionals Australia says the Federal Government is ignoring its own economic advice by burying a second Deloitte report that confirms chronic underpayment in the translating and interpreting sector is already wasting billions of taxpayer dollars every year.
The new Deloitte analysis, quietly posted online without any sector briefing, warns that sub-optimal interpreting is costing between $738 million and $1.3 billion per year and is projected to blow out to $1.6 to $2.0 billion annually by 2035 if the Government continues to do nothing.
Professionals Australia CEO Sam Roberts said the findings confirm what workers and communities have been saying for years. Underpaying translators and interpreters is an expensive false economy that is draining funding away from frontline health, education and community services.
“This Government has now paid Deloitte twice to tell them exactly the same thing. If you keep underpaying translators and interpreters, the public will keep paying the price through higher hospital costs, longer court delays and unnecessary waste.
“Yet instead of engaging with the translating and interpreting sector, they’ve chosen to bury the second report on a government website, hoping no one would notice.
Mr Roberts said the new report follows an earlier Deloitte study commissioned by the same department, which warned of escalating clinical risk, legal system failures and avoidable service blowouts when professional interpreting is not provided.
Despite commissioning both reports, the Government has failed to act on the findings of either. It has taken no steps to address the collapsing workforce that delivers essential communication in hospitals, courts, aged care facilities, emergency services and every major Federal government program.
“When the government's own economic advice says that addressing wages and improving conditions in the translating and interpreting sector would actually save taxpayers money and result in better outcomes for CALD communities, this complete failure to act represents an enormous missed opportunity.”
A shrinking workforce and ballooning costs
Mr Roberts said that the Deloitte report found in 2021, only around 5800 people in Australia reported translating or interpreting as their primary job, serving over 700,000 people with low or no English proficiency.
“Once unpaid travel, split shifts and casual hours are factored in, the effective hourly rate falls to around $35 an hour, which is over 30 per cent below comparable professions, leaving more than 70 per cent of practitioners earning less than the minimum wage.
“We know that younger workers are already walking away from the sector. Deloitte shows a 26 per cent collapse in early career practitioners between 2016 and 2021, with projections showing the national workforce shrinking to as few as 4570 interpreters by 2035 if nothing changes.”
As the workforce collapses, service failures grow. Deloitte links sub-optimal interpreting to:
- longer hospital stays
- more re-admissions and misdiagnoses
- delayed or collapsed legal matters
- duplicated government assessments
- reduced workforce participation
- increased crisis interventions across services
Mr Roberts said that once these direct and “flow on” impacts are combined, the annual cost of failures is already as high as $1.3 billion, and trending towards $2 billion under current policy settings.
“Taxpayer dollars that should be strengthening hospitals and schools are literally being burned cleaning up avoidable failures.
“Every year the Government delays, more money is siphoned away from frontline services and poured into fixing mistakes that never needed to happen.”
Deloitte confirms the solution: fair pay saves money
Mr Roberts said that in its improved wages and conditions modelling, Deloitte shows that lifting pay by around 50 per cent over four years, largely through secure employment and proper entitlements, would stabilise and grow the workforce to around 6940 practitioners by 2035.
“Under this scenario, the projected cost of sub-optimal interpreting in 2035 drops to about $1.2 billion, delivering cumulative savings of $2.8 to $5.3 billion over a decade.
“The Government has the evidence: improving wages and conditions saves money.
“Fair pay is not a cost. It is a budget repair measure. You fix the workforce, and the system stops bleeding billions that could have been much better spent elsewhere.”
Government failure to act
Mr Roberts said the Government’s decision to quietly bury the report rather than release it to the forum was extremely disappointing, demonstrating a lack of commitment to genuine reform.
“Deloitte has told the Government twice how to solve this crisis. Instead of presenting the report to the stakeholder group that has been engaging on this issue in good faith for three years, they uploaded it to a website and quietly walked away.
“That tells translators and interpreters one thing: nothing will change unless we force it to.
“We know how to fix this. The Government knows how to fix this. It’s in their own reports.
“Translators and interpreters should join Professionals Australia, sign our open letter to Minister Aly and demand real reform.
“Translators and interpreters make a critical and vital contribution to their communities, and that contribution should be recognised through fair pay and decent working conditions.
“Public money should also be going into hospitals, schools, and aged care, not being wasted because the Government refuses to pay language professionals properly.”
Professionals Australia is calling on the Federal Government to immediately:
- release the Deloitte report publicly
- commit to lifting pay and working conditions
- embed minimum standards through procurement reform
- properly fund language services as essential public services
- work with the sector to build a sustainable national workforce
Contact details:
Media contact: Darren Rodrigo 0414 783 405