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Victoria private schools under scrutiny

Anita Joshua

MELBOURNE: The recent attacks on Indian students in Australia have turned the spotlight on the mushrooming of private education providers Down Under over the past couple of years, with the Victorian Government undertaking a rapid audit of such institutions.

Sixteen of the 400 private institutions in Victoria are already found to have dubious credentials, and the State government along with federal authorities is planning to move quickly against them.

This was disclosed to Indian journalists here by Victoria’s Minister for Skills and Workforce Participation, Jacinta Allan, as one of the remedial measures being undertaken to address the issues that have made Australia’s growing Indian student population vulnerable to attacks.

All Indian students who have been attacked since May are enrolled in private institutes. Many of these do not offer support services, even on essentials like housing, as a result of which students head for cheaper quarters which are also prone to crime.

Several of these institutions are not strict about attendance, providing the Indian students — many of whom have to fend for themselves — the time to work more than the permissible 20 hours a week. They put in late hours, working as taxi drivers and manning convenience stores like 7-Eleven.

Sixty of the 400 such institutions in Victoria have come up in the past two years. Many of them offer cookery and hairdressing courses which require no academic credentials except minimal English language proficiency. That the demand for such courses is driven by the possibility of the students becoming Permanent Residents of the labour-poor country is acknowledged by Australian policymakers and Indian diplomats alike, earning these institutions the reputation of being ‘PR factories’.

Indians alone accounted for 41.4 per cent of the enrolments in the vocational courses offered by private institutions in 2007. The Indian student presence in Australia has grown significantly as a result of this ‘short cut’ to PR status, more so with the United States and Canada tightening their visa rules after 9/11.

From 8,000 in 2004, the Indian student community became 96,000-strong this year, and recognising the misuse of the student visa route, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship raised the assessment level of Indian applicants last year.

“Robbery main motive”

While the visible presence of Indians and their willingness to work hard might be resented by some fringe elements in Australian society, Victoria’s Premier John Brumby insisted that there was no racist element to the attacks. “Investigations and analysis of crime statistics do not show any pattern in the attacks. Most of them were attacked while returning home, and robbery was the prime motive. Even I would not move around those parts of the suburbs alone at that late hour.”

Echoing similar views, Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police Simon Overland said: “If racism was the reason for these attacks, then they would be more a victim of assault than robbery, as is the case here. We are not saying there is absolutely no racist element to the attacks but invariably the Indian student victims were robbed.

“In 2007-08, there were 1,447 instances of attacks on persons of South Asian appearance in Victoria. Of these, 512 were cases of robbery. And, many of these attacks have been by under-18-year-olds. This is low-level street crime.”

While the incidence of such attacks has been on the rise for the past couple of years, Mr. Overland suspects that the recent incidents are being used by elements in the student community to draw attention to other pressing matters, particularly the questionable standards of some private institutions and their failure to deliver on the promises made at the time of enrolment.

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