Pod Rights Transcript - Episode 15 (Interview of Tammi Jonas)

Graeme Innes:  Hello and welcome to Pod Rights, a series of podcasts from the Australian Human Rights Commission.  I'm Graeme Innes, the Disability and Race Discrimination Commissioner.

In this podcast we’re looking at the question of international students’ safety and the recent incidents of violence against international students.  To talk with me about this issue is Tammi Jonas.  Tammi is the National President of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA) and has been involved in student associations and student politics for some years.  In these roles she’s been quite involved in this question of violence against international students.  Tammi is an expert in social media and a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies in Melbourne.  Welcome to Pod Rights, Tammi.

Tammi Jonas:  Thanks Graeme, it’s good to be here.

Graeme Innes:  Okay, so we’re all aware of the violence which has occurred against international students and that has been increasing in the last couple of years mainly in Melbourne and Sydney but certainly not exclusively in those two cities.  How do we know that international students are particular targets for this violence?

Tammi Jonas:  Well I mean have the statistics showing us that the people being attacked are often international students but I certainly don’t think that targets of racist violence are only international students, racist violence is anywhere that people want to be violent against someone who’s not like them but I guess international students being a particularly vulnerable group because of actual global knowledge and a lot of other kinds of systemic issues that they face makes them more likely targets.

Graeme Innes:  And as well as statistical evidence, does your involvement in the movement confirm the anecdotal information that the international students are experiencing these sorts of attacks?

Tammi Jonas:  What I'm getting anecdotally from being involved in student politics is not as many examples of actual violence but many examples of what’s being perceived to be racist behavior towards some.  So whether it’s the person on the street who calls them names or refuses to serve them in a shop or, more worryingly in certain university services, we hear students claiming that they feel they're being treated and discriminated against because of their ethnicity or their language differences or whatever it may be.

Graeme Innes:  What are the factors which you think place international students more at risk than other people in their community?

Tammi Jonas:  I think in terms of physical violence the real risk is will I problematically perhaps call the 'holy trinity of Hell' which is when you put the question around employment rights and housing issues and the lack of safety on public transport like that, put those three things together which we know international students have to, many of them, and that puts them in places where they are at more risk than your average local student’s going to be.

Graeme Innes:  And the international students are clearly confirming to you what they're telling to us which is that those three areas are problematic.  Can we talk about them a little bit one by one?  What are the issues around employment that you're hearing about from international students?

Tammi Jonas:  The obvious one is simply that – there are a number of issues around employment but the obvious one is between our restriction on work rights of international students.  I understand that there are other implications for the employment market in Australia if you open that up to everybody.  I also don’t think those implications are significant enough to be stopping students from having the right to work if they need to to survive, to pay the bills.  And so when we stop them having the same rights as the local students do to – it’s a basic human right to be able to support yourself and if you find that you're in a position where you don’t have enough money and so you need to work more but your visa says that you aren’t allowed to work and say you have to work illegally because you have to survive, who will make that choice, and in doing so they're in a position to be so easily exploited in the workplace and we know they are, the stories are everywhere of that kind of exploitation.

Graeme Innes:  Because they're being paid under the table they can be paid less money and they can be exploited in a range of other ways?

Tammi Jonas:  Precisely, and made to work other hours, that’s right.

Graeme Innes:  Okay, let’s turn to the second issue which you mentioned which is housing and accommodation.  What are the issues there?

Tammi Jonas:  The housing crisis is one, as we all know, is deeply affecting all of Australia, the capital cities in particular.  Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane are all being very hard hit by lack of housing and to international students it’s just a higher stakes problem for them because they’ve arrived from elsewhere without support networks and often end up paying enormous sums to stay in a temporary accommodation such as budget hotels and things.  While waiting to find accommodation, they don’t have a rental history in this country which most real estate agents require so often they’ll end up with basically dodgy private providers who will be less – I guess less demanding of those kinds of evidence that they're going to be good renters but they're providing no evidence that we can see that they're being good landlords so the places people – and if they have a little bit more money, they end up living in really -- 80% to 95% international student accommodations where they don’t have opportunities to be around the local students and actually most of those places that are being built by private providers are really built as anti-social spaces anyway, they don’t have opportunities to form a community with the people in those buildings, such as the ones up and down Swanston St nearby here.

Graeme Innes:  That’s a related problem to the housing problem, isn’t it?  That lack of opportunity to – if you like broaden the experience outside the quite insulated group of international students.

Tammi Jonas:  Absolutely, that’s right, the house galaxy is very critical to these questions about whether there are opportunities for local and international students to mix.

Graeme Innes:  And so it seems what we heard is that the international students once again they're at the bottom of the totem pole or the ladder or whatever you want to call it and so they're getting the tough deal.  Have you had stories as we have about women particularly who are being expected to provide sexual favors as part of accommodation arrangements?

Tammi Jonas:  I haven’t heard those stories very much through – I mean working in a postgraduate space I must say I think postgraduates often come with a little more knowledge and a little more – they're a little more savvy so the stories I’ve hear about that have come more from those in the private sector and really younger students but if through CAPA we’re not – no we’re not getting a lot of those.

Graeme Innes:  Sure, yes, exactly, I’d rather not have heard of it myself but we certainly have in Sydney and in Melbourne.  And the third of that holy trinity that you mentioned is the issue of access to public transport.  What are the problems there?

Tammi Jonas:  Well two-fold on this one.  I mean on the one hand we have serious issues with the safety of our public transport late at night and so in terms of the vulnerability and the risk factors for them travelling on the transport late at night again because they’ve been working at jobs long hours underpaid and so they have no – and they have to live further out in suburbs where they can afford to live so that, in excess, is where that all ties together.
But then there's the very obvious issue of public transport concessions for people who are contributing an enormous amount to Australia’s social capital as well as its economic capital.  And undergraduate domestic students are given public transport concessions in I think pretty much every state; postgraduates in Victoria are not so CAPA would like to see that changed as well; but international students are not at all in Victoria or New South Wales, that do worst, and there are others with various sort of ways they do it.  Lack of access to public transport concessions send a really bad message, I think, and it is read by a lot of international students as a racist policy.

Graeme Innes:  So the effect of what you're saying is that there are those indirect issues of racism but also racism is one of a range of factors which are impacting on international students which sort of lead to the violence at the extreme end of the problem?

Tammi Jonas:  Absolutely, and it becomes – and certainly depends on really what you could argue is if not necessarily racist, certainly systemic discriminatory policies.

Graeme Innes:  So Tammi what sort of actions could be taken to address these issues?

Tammi Jonas:  I think some of them are pretty easy but if you had the political will so I think on work rights - lift the restriction.  CAPA has had strong policy position for a long time that the 20-hour restriction should be repealed and international students should have full rights to support themselves by whatever means necessary.  I think that on public transport concessions it’s the same thing.  It’s not just political will that fund it, obviously, state governments and universities just keep passing the question back and forth about who will pay for these concessions and I think they're going to have to work at the table together to decide how they're going to fund it but I think they need to fund it.  Making public transport safe also requires funding.  It may mean that we have to improve our law enforcement presence at those sorts of – in those sites, those train stations in particular where we know there's a lot of violence or it may just mean we need more staff around there, just more people who are around to make them lively spaces where the violence is less likely to occur but making them safe I think is obviously critical.  In terms of housing, that’s a much harder question.  There simply isn’t enough.  Australia took a decision to increase international student population very, very rapidly.  We went from under 200,000 in 2001 to more than 600,000 now so we’re taking of space of less than two years we’ve nearly tripled the population and nobody thought “Where will they live?  Where will they work?  And how will we get them to all of those places?”  And even in the university said that they also didn’t necessarily think and do we have lecture theaters big enough for this kind of massive increase in the population.  So they're really infrastructure problems so they’ve got enough problems.

Graeme Innes:  What about the racism issues?  What do we need to do to try and minimize those in the view of international students, the organizations that you're representing?

Tammi Jonas:  Yeah, I think one of the most important things around racism is good leadership to be honest.
We have a really strong public voice against racism and I think that every time there's an attack against an international student, when we have state leaders and federal leaders who immediately say “Oh, but it wasn’t racism,” that’s not helpful.  I think that until we know what the motivation for the violent attack was, it’s better to say we can't rule out racism as the cause of the attack and we won't stand for that in this community, Australia doesn’t stand for that.  And more positive messages as well of saying “Oh we welcome diversity in this country.”  It has helped Australia grow as a nation, as a more cosmopolitan and kind place to have that diversity here.  I’d like to have far more public discourse around that sort of talk.

Graeme Innes:  Now a couple of months ago you participated at the First International Students Conference that was held in Hobart.  Were these the issues that came out of were there other issues that came out of that conference?

Tammi Jonas:  All of these were canvassed and discussed.  There were also things like the changes to the skilled occupations list, people are concerned about the rapid changes to migration pathways in the country, in particular how it’s impacting on the students who’ve already arrived.  And again it’s sometimes perceived to be racist because particular groups apply more in particular areas, vocational areas in particular, and so some people will end up reading that as racist policy, others will read it as other kind – I guess elitism and so they're concerned, I guess, about how it’s impacting on students who are already here.  The other problem that was raised quite a lot I guess was the question about what are the opportunities for more interactions between international and local students and international students from different ethnicities.  Right now there's just not a lot of sort of inter-ethnic interaction available between – whether it’s between an Anglo-local and a Chinese student or between a Chinese student and an Indian student, they can go in any direction at this.

Graeme Innes:  Have international students been consulted enough on this issue do you think in terms of finding solutions, working through ways to find resolution?

Tammi Jonas:  I do think that international students are being consulted, I think it’s perhaps a bit more at heart than is preferable.  There was a Students’ Round Table last year, and International Students’ Round Table by Dewar and I think that was positive and there were 1300 applicants for 31 spots at that Round Table.  So you’ve got a diverse range of people that would give their views of their experiences and those are good things but the lack of a picked representative only for international students in the past three years has been a huge gap in their voice and so government and university and other sector kind of bodies have not known how to go to for voice and so CAPA has continued sending international students quite strongly.  It’s always been part of our brief.  The NUS now has an international students officer which they didn’t previously so that there's a voice in that undergraduate space, and now that we have re-established a picked voice for international students I think that we’ll see a less ad hoc approach to consulting and we’ll see a much more systematic use of the voice that’s being elected by the students themselves.

Graeme Innes:  And that was just a result of the Hobart Conference?

Tammi Jonas:  It was very, very exciting and happy outcome to establish.  When we adopted the new constitution and elected the first president it was pretty exciting stuff.

Graeme Innes:  Yeah, absolutely.  So what are your thoughts on a compact for international students?  Is this an area that the foreign issue – that the commission’s been flapping a little bit as have other people and what sort of things might it contain?  Would it cover the sorts of issues that we’ve dealt with here?

Tammi Jonas:  I think so.  I think I love the idea that it’s coming from the commissioner in particular obviously because then it’s something that could be framed in a human rights discourse and so – and we know that human rights goes both ways since there are responsibilities that a student has once you come here to sort of do what they came here to do to their best attempt but I think questions about duty of care would be really helpful in such a compact way that universities are better at it probably than most of the small private providers.  All of the providers really need to think about what their duty care is to people that – I mean essentially, of course it’s an exchange and it’s a commercial exchange, you have money and you get to do a degree here.  But it’s about education and education’s about the public good and part of the public good surely is the people in your institutions, you have a duty of care to them.  Now to what extent that goes?  That wouldn’t go below can compact to some extent, like you're not saying every student will be given housing but to say that we will support students because we understand they're in a vulnerable position when they arrive, we will support students too by survivability and their chance to find housing that is safe and equitable.  Those kinds of things would be wonderful to have such a compact.

Graeme Innes:  Well we’ll be doing some further workshops on that in the near future through the commission wanting to obviously have students as having a major voice on this issue and perhaps putting some of these to government if that’s the will of students and their representatives of organizations so that should be very interesting work.

Tammi Jonas:  Good news.

Graeme Innes:  Tammi thank you, it’s been most valuable to hear more about the experience of international students who are, after all, guests in our country.  And thank you also to all those listening to Pod Rights.  Remember this podcast is for you.  So if you have a suggestion of someone with whom I should talk or a comment on the podcast please email me at podrights@humarights.gov.au or find me and message me on Facebook or Twitter, just search for Graeme Innes.  Also, nominations are now open for this year’s Human Rights Awards so check the details on our website at www.humanrights.gov.au and keep your podcatchers ready for the next in the series because human rights is for everyone, everywhere, everyday.  I'm Graeme Innes, goodbye for now.

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