At first glance, Koorong Street, Marsfield, is a classic piece of Australian suburbia, a quiet cul-de-sac of large brick houses with front lawns, backyards, garages and driveways, all under a canopy of trees. It looks sleepy. It is not.
Signs of illegality are everywhere. Many lawns and gardens are unkempt. Many homes have shrouded windows in the middle of the day. Many main bedrooms are cut through the middle by a dividing wall. These houses are full of people, commonly eight per dwelling.
As I walked along Koorong Street with Alan Patrick, who lives nearby and started MARS, Marsfield Against Residential Suffocation, he showed me one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight homes - half the houses in the street - which are part of a huge black economy that has thrived under the state and federal Labor governments.
So much money is flowing through this underground economy that crime and systemic fraud have become part of the mix. Then there's the sheer scale of it. That's why, two Sundays ago, about 500 people gathered at Dunbar Park, which abuts Koorong Street, to protest.
The local state and federal MPs attended, as did members of Ryde council, but the most compelling speakers were two young Chinese women, both students, who told of the numerous exploitations by cowboy landlords who operate illegally within these streets.
Conspicuously absent from the rally was anyone from the Labor Party - state, federal or local, for reasons that will become obvious.
I don't think many people have a real sense of the scale of this black economy, which exploits Asian students living in Australia, or even the scale of the overseas student population in Australia. At any given time, there are about 600,000 foreign students enrolled at Australian tertiary institutions, according to figures provided by the federal government. They all need accommodation. More than a third of those students live in NSW, the great majority in Sydney, which has both a housing shortage and a housing affordability squeeze.
Because the NSW Labor government has failed to create sufficient housing, and the federal Labor government hit Sydney with the largest immigration program in Australian history during its first three years, Labor had no choice but to support the burgeoning growth of boarding houses, legal and illegal.
''On Ryde council, Labor has voted in favour of every boarding house application, without exception, while other councillors have often voted against them,'' Alan Patrick told me.
When the state MP for Ryde, Victor Dominello, a Liberal and a lawyer whose electorate includes Marsfield and adjacent Macquarie University, introduced a private member's bill to address the multiple problems rampant in the illegal boarding house industry, including the exploitation of tenants, tax fraud, overcrowding, and unsafe conditions, the NSW Labor government killed off the bill.
Federal Labor added to the problem. ''The Immigration Department is hopeless,'' a former police officer who has investigated the boarding house black economy told me. He asked not to be named.
''As soon as Labor came in it introduced new policies which were soft on student visa fraud,'' he said. ''Some of these boarding houses are turning over $3000 to $4000 a week, so it's a very big black economy. Organised crime has moved into this economy, co-ordinating with organised crime in China . . . Not everyone with a student visa is a student. Some use the system to come here and operate as sex workers. Some students are forced to become sex workers because they are on a debt bondage system, with a debt of $40,000 to $50,000.''
Students have always had to scramble to make ends meet. Most Asian students - and the largest number come from China, which has more than 160,000 students in Australia - are from societies with lower living costs and incomes. So tens of thousands of them are living in illegal boarding houses, like the ones that bristle in Koorong Street.
The equivalent of an entire city has been squeezed into existing housing stock. Macquarie University alone has 10,000 overseas students, and most must live off campus. Ryde council estimates there are more than 300 illegal boarding houses around the university. No surprise, then, that Marsfield, next door to the university, has too many boarding houses, legal and illegal.
The people who really got the attention of the protest at Dunbar Park, Marsfield, were the two young Chinese women who told of the abuses they had experienced inside this black economy. They were forced to move every 12 to 16 weeks as the landlords churned through a pipeline of clients coming from China. They acknowledged widespread fraud of various kinds, from false visa applications to tax avoidance.
They, like many students, live at the whim of unscrupulous landlords. In 90 per cent of illegal boarding houses, smoke detectors are disconnected and multiple rice cookers are plugged into one electricity outlet. These are fire-traps. Most of the students living with this black economy are just students getting on with their studies. But the unregulated, unsupervised scale of this industry is quietly abusive of the wider system.
After Labor is swept from office next weekend, Victor Dominello will re-submit his bill to clean up the industry. This time, the NSW government will take the issue seriously. This, in turn, should motivate the Tax Office to go after the millions of dollars of tax revenue that could have been harvested if NSW Labor were not so incompetent and disingenuous.
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