International students have been one of the most affected during the pandemic.
Sean Simpson is a solicitor at Redfern Legal Centre's International Student Legal Service NSW, a free statewide legal service delivered with support from with Study NSW, Fairwork Ombudsman and CIty of Sydney.
He outlines a range of resources that are providing help to international students in NSW during the crisis, highlighting the website https://www.study.sydney/programs/covid-19-response-and-resources.
"That particular website has a significant amount of information around what is being done by the state government," Mr Stimson said. "It touches on crisis accommodation. It touches on the ability for students to access free legal advice through our centre, Redfern Legal Centre.
The NSW Government's $20 million package for international students stranded in Australia due to the COVID-19 pandemic includes:
- a temporary crisis accommodation scheme delivered through quality student accommodation and homestay providers
- increased support via RLC's International Legal Service NSW and availability of 50,000 free subscriptions to RLC's multilingual app, My Legal Mate
- a dedicated 24/7 international student support hotline (13 77 88) offering free advice and information about medical, mental health, legal, emergency and other support.
"With project or scheme as large as big crisis accommodation, I think it was fundamentally important that they ironed out all of the issues, or potential issues, for those applicants and I think that's probably taken some of the time to actually have it rolled out to the international student community," Mr Stimson said.
Listen to the full interview here (2ser, 6 July 2020)
