Talking Point: Hopes and dreams shattered

DAMON THOMAS: Thousands of students have travelled around the world to call Tasmania home, and now they are losing their jobs and access to support.

International students who came to Tasmania to study are finding themselves in a difficult situation.

THEY came in their thousands from lands far away, wide-eyed in their enthusiasm and nervous in their apprehension of what they would experience.

These were the students from all over the world enticed to Tasmania, a land at the end of the world to further their studies at a time of the explosion of international education on the world economic stage.

And Tasmania got its fair share too, at any one time it’s now hosting more than 13,000 international students keen to work, live and study in our island state.

The balance between domestic students and international students has always been a tense one, one of accommodation and one of fostering and encouraging diversity.

In the main our students through surveys have shown that they have a genuine fondness for studying in our island state and feel that they are welcome here.

In some isolated cases that sentiment is exactly the opposite.

They are well represented too in the numbers providing voluntary service in a host of organisations all over the state.

Town and Gown at the UTAS Graduation, Launceston. Picture: CHRIS KIDD

Many of those students, in fact the vast majority have expended thousands of dollars to come and study here and to learn valuable skills to equip them and their communities into the long future.

For those that stay on to live here their skills and enthusiasm is a great asset to the state.

While there will always be challenges and obstacles to a free-flowing education, the global crisis has affected this cohort of Tasmanian citizens perhaps disproportionately.

Dependent for the most part on affordable accommodation, inevitably (despite being required when they apply to be self-sufficient) the great majority are in reality dependent for their very living on the part-time jobs and support they receive.

Last week’s unavoidable shutdown of all but essential services has hit domestic and international students hard.

However as the lines waiting at Centrelink offices grow they are remarkably empty of our international students whose very ability to live hangs in the balance.

Denied the opportunity to earn a few dollars extra income and now unable to fly home even if they had the resources to do so, the students are facing a very uncertain future.

While the Federal Government understandably wrestles thousands of issues every hour the issue of critical support for these foreign students, unable to easily get support from their home country will rise as a singular issue of great complexity.

The answer, the resolution, the help and the assistance will not come easily.

The Council of International Students Association for its part is lobbying at the federal level for international students to be entitled to welfare, for tuition fees to be reduced or waived and for rent subsidies or rent freezes. Hopefully at a policy level the plea will be successful.

For now, as an immediate measure, we as the Hobart community need to look for those solutions, to offer help and assistance to the degree that our welcoming community is able but then to find a more lasting solution.

Opportunities to study online, opportunities to somehow, for those who are forced (and able) to return home to study online and yet still be counted as having studied in Tasmania are the types of options that must be on the agenda.

We cannot let the situation get out of hand with students desperate for our help and begging publicly for support on the streets.

But at the forefront we must care and we should care as it was us that invited them to live here in the first place.

Damon Thomas is the executive director of the Association for International Education Providers in Tasmania. He is an alderman and former lord mayor of the City of Hobart.