Busted toilets, bed bugs and crowded apartments: International students’ horrific living conditions

Many of the half million international students studying in Australia have found that their living conditions are much worse than in their home countries.

Broken toilets, bed bugs and overcrowded apartments are just some of what they have to put up with. A student says his flat is ‘a thousand times worse than Bangladesh’.

Australia’s wider rental crisis has also been exacerbated by restrictions on the hours foreign students are allowed to work, limiting their ability to provide a nicer place to live.

When engineering student Rafiul Hossain was about to leave Bangladesh for Sydney, he knew from online searches that it would be difficult to find accommodation.

He hoped to find at least a place to live close to his Macquarie University campus in northern Sydney, but ended up in a “barely livable” unit in Lakemba – about an hour away by public transport.

His flat had a broken door, a broken toilet and a bed with bugs crawling over it.

Hossain said his native Bangladesh is known as a third world country, ‘but the place I am currently staying in is a thousand times worse than Bangladesh.

“After two days of long flights, I was hoping to get a good night’s sleep, but ended up in a bed full of mites,” he told the The Sydney Morning Herald.

Mr Hossain’s flat had a broken door, a broken toilet and a bed with bugs (pictured) crawling around it

Another international student, Anna, paid $180 a week to share her first apartment in Sydney CBD’s Haymarket with 11 others – four people per room in bunk beds.

They couldn’t open the blinds because building management would sometimes fly drones to see how many people were living there, as the building was known for people renting it out to more than allowed by law.

A survey of 7,000 international students found that a quarter shared a bedroom with someone who wasn’t their partner, and 3 percent were “hot-bedding.”

Hot-bedding is where several students share one bed on a grid.

While the research was conducted before Covid, the problem is likely to be even worse now as students flock back to Australia amid a rental crisis, where national vacancy rates have hit a record low of 1 per cent.

A major factor in preventing foreign students from finding a better place to live is cost, which is not helped by the limit placed on the number of hours they can legally work.

The pre-pandemic limit of 40 hours every two weeks has been raised to 48 by the federal government, but Indian student Kartika Dilip Kharat said an extra four hours a week won’t make much of a difference.

The Macquarie University master’s student pointed out that Sydney is an expensive place to live and that she ‘would like to work as much as possible’.

She said there should be no restrictions on the number of hours foreign students can work, as it helps them pay their fees, accommodation and expenses.

Not only students want to be able to work more hours, employers too, including Ken Rosebery, former director of The Cheesecake Shop.

Sydney-based Indian student Kartika Dilip Kharat (pictured) would like to work more hours than the 48 hours per fortnight she is limited to

In a contribution to the Senate Economic Reference Committee, he wrote, “What is the government doing to try to determine proper working hours for a student?

“They don’t do it for domestic students,” he said. “It seems like you are punishing both the foreign students and the employers without any benefit.”

The work restrictions may also lead students to take cash-in-hand jobs to get around the limits.

But this often means they are paid well below minimum wage and are unlikely to complain if it affects their visa.

An agreement between the Fair Work Ombudsman and the Ministry of the Interior allows student visa holders to report being underpaid without fear of their visa being cancelled, even if they have violated their conditions.

But fewer than 200 international students took advantage of the amnesty.

A survey of 2,472 college students by the Migrant Justice Institute found that 77 percent of them were paid below minimum wage, while 26 percent were paid $12 an hour or less.

The institute’s co-executive director, Bassina Farbenblum, said: ‘If international students are too afraid to come forward because they think it will affect their visas, nothing is going to work’.

And nothing is likely to change for the foreseeable future as international students are very attractive to Australian universities due to the huge fees they pay.

For example, at the University of Sydney, international students pay about $48,000 a year for a bachelor’s degree in business administration, but local students pay less than a third of that – $15,142.

Fees paid by overseas students make up 38 percent of the University of Sydney’s total operating income and 77 percent of all student income.

Natasya Zahra, an Indonesian woman who studied in Sydney, said the cost for international students compared to what domestic students are charged leaves a bad taste in her mouth.

“I feel like studying and living are almost two separate experiences in Australia,” she said.