Fair Trading (Sarah)

Yesterday, the ISS (International Student Services) team had a meeting with a community liaison office from the New South Wales Fair Trading Commission. At first, I was a bit lost as to what exactly the purpose of the meeting was. However, I soon realized that due to my automatically "priviledged" existance in the USA, I have neglected to consider a very important issue that faces numerous international college students (whether in Australia or the States) - the issue of fair trading.

When international students arrive here at Macquarie University, they face many challenges beyond just studying hard and performing well in their courses. Number one, there's the language barrier for those whose primary language is not English. This leads to a plethora of communication obstacles, and requires a great deal of patience from the professors and student affairs professionals working with them. In addition to this already daunting issue, is the challenge of finding a place to live, purchasing goods such as cell phones, computers, etc., and just living day to day.

Things that we (or at least, I) rarely think about back home are rights and responsibilities related to fair trading. Sure, in the USA (and in Australia) we may understand that we have "rights" but we don't always remember that with those rights come many, many responsibilities. One issue that Macquarie international students deal with often relates to accommodation/housing scams. Although Macquarie University does have on-campus housing available, the majority of Australian universities were not developed with this concept in mind. Many students from overseas (especially those in Europe) come to study here but live in off-campus housing. Sometimes they attempt to organize this ahead of time, before departing home, and due to their vulnerability, end up being scammed. Other students, such as those from China, come to Australia not knowing what it is to have those specific fair trading rights because their home country's government does not operate in the same way.

Therefore, the purpose of our meeting yesterday was to plan even more ways in which we can get the message out there to international students that they have rights and responsibilities when it comes to fair trading within Australia. If they feel they are being scammed with their housing, they need to know where to go and who to talk to in order to have it sorted out. If they purchase something from a store, they need to be reminded to keep their receipts in case that purchase breaks and needs to be refunded. These are all such simple, obvious things to me that I never even thought about before because I've grown up in a country where, not only do we have rights, but we know what they are.

I told Cristina about this after work yesterday, and mentioned how ignorant I felt for not even considering this before. She said, yeah we feel ignorant, but only because we're so educated...interesting point.

-Sarah