Melbourne, Australia - Standing up to the Bullies

For the most part Australians are very friendly and welcoming people. They are usually always up for a bit of craic and are quite similar to the Irish in terms of their sense of humour and liking for a night in the bar. However this is not to say that everybody I have met in this wonderful country have provided pleasant encounters. What follows are two examples of how certain people down here try to con backpackers. But unfortunately for such people this particular traveller was not one to be fooled. Out of respect for the other parties involved I will not be mentioning their names here, not that they actually deserve such consideration.

First up, the landlords. Within a few days of arriving in Melbourne I found a place that I was happy to move into. The rent wasn't too expensive, I had my own room, all bills and Internet included, and situated very close to the trains and trams. However it didn't take me long to realise that the two landlords were not experts in the field of property management and were clearly on a get rich quick scheme. Anytime something broke in the house (a very regular occurrence) they were usually pretty slow about getting such problems rectified and would usually try to fob us off with some sort of nonsense. However regardless of the extremely poor maintenance I was starting to get nicely settled into my new accommodation and was prepared to put up with a lot of the landlords annoying habits. However, then disaster struck. During one February evening, out of absolutely nowhere, came severe flash floods which reduced Melbourne to chaos. Ok, it was nothing in comparison to the horrible scenes from Queensland that we have witnessed on our television screens, but at the same time it was the worst I had ever encountered personally. Three and a half hours were spent travelling home from work as a result of trams breaking down and after such a torturous journey I was greeted upon arrival with the most unwelcome gift of all - my room had got soaked!

Yes, while I was on my way home from work my room got flooded due to the heavy rain breaking through the extremely dodgy roof, soaking my bed and about 40% of the carpet in the process. The next morning I eventually got through to one of the landlords and proceeded to give him an earful and he quickly arranged for somebody to come around and fix the roof. However no consideration was given towards the wet carpet which was ever so quickly providing an ideal habitat for mould and bacteria to thrive. I made a request to have the carpet either cleaned or replaced, to which the landlord rather arrogantly stated that he fully intends to let the carpet dry naturally. Despite my many references to the room being unhealthy to live in under such conditions he stood firm and fully intended to do nothing about the problem whatsoever.

Enough was enough and I made the journey into Consumer Affairs Victoria to find out my rights with regards repairs. The very helpful lady informed me that I needed to fill out a non-urgent repairs request and if the problem wasn't attended to within 14 days then the landlord would be in serious trouble. I also found out that the deposit I had paid at the start of my lease had never been lodged with the Bond Authority, which is a serious offence under the Residential Tenancy Act. After I communicated this information to the landlord, he then proceeded to tell me that I would have to leave the premises within 28 days. He was basically trying to evict me simply because I was stating my rights. Something didn't seem quite right about all of this as a minimum of 60 days notice needs to be provided to a tenant when giving a notice to vacate for a lease of less than 6 months. Again I consulted Consumer Affairs, who informed me that everything they were trying to do was illegal. When I told the landlord this he then tried to evict me immediately "for my own safety" as the room was "not fit for human inhabitation". Unbelievable. This chancer kept changing his story every time I slapped him in the face with a piece of legislation.

At this stage I was well and truly sick of all the rubbish he was throwing at me and so I spoke with a representative in the complaints department. After informing him about the details of the case he then phoned the landlord regarding the various issues. According to the representative, the landlord was absolutely petrified and started to panic over the phone. He admitted that he knew that his reasons and methods for trying to evict me were completely illegal but that he was angry at the time and so wasn't thinking logically. To cut a long story short, within the space of a few days, I managed to turn an immediate notice to vacate into a brand new carpet and got my deposit lodged safely with the bond authority. Too many backpackers down here just accept what landlords tell them and are too afraid to state their rights and so settle for any sort of rubbish as a result. But in reality if people just stand up for themselves and use the law to their advantage, then chancers like these two guys do not have a leg to stand on.

If you think these guys were bad then wait for the next story. Upon arriving in Melbourne I was shocked at how expensive everything was here. The Euro was struggling badly against the Australian Dollar and so I needed to start earning local currency as soon as I possibly could. For this reason I accepted a poorly paid call centre job so I could stop living off the Euro and in the meantime look for a proper form of employment. I ended up lasting 5 weeks in this place (much to my own amazement). The rate of pay was 17 dollars an hour, but even stranger was the fact that instead of being paid as an employee under a Tax File Number (TFN), I was actually hired as a contractor on an Australian Business Number (ABN). Something seemed odd about this but for awhile I didn't bother questioning it. However after a few weeks my patience started growing thin with how dishonest everybody who worked within the organisation seemed to be, with most of the sales representatives, who are based in India, full on lying to customers in a pathetic attempt to make sales. The whole operation was nothing but a scam and after 5 weeks I was happy to leave.

The following week, myself and a friend from home, who was also working in this organisation, took a journey into the Fair Work Ombudsman to make enquiries about the work practices that were being adopted by this business. After discussions with two representatives we were informed that we should never have been hired as contractors but rather casual employees. To be a contractor you usually are required to dictate the hours of work, the rate of pay, write up invoices and provide your own materials to the place of work. None of this happened during my 5 weeks. I was trained to do a job that I was supposedly being contracted to do, I was told when to go on lunch, where to sit, when I could leave, if I needed to stay longer, and provided no materials to my place of work except for my brain.

We gathered all sorts of complex information from the Ombudsman for Fair Work. As a casual employee I should have been entitled to a base wage (16.58 per hour in this instance) plus 25% casual loading for a casual employee + 15% shift loading when a shift finishes between 7pm and midnight (which was about 90% of my shifts), along with 9% superannuation added on top of all this for good measure. Including superannuation my hourly rate should have been $25.30, a far cry from the $17 dollars I was being paid. Once all the information was gathered, myself and my friend carefully drafted a professional looking email stating all the facts behind this "sham contract" and attached a spreadsheet calculating the total amount we were each underpaid. Over the course of just 5 weeks I was underpaid by $1,157 and my friend was shafted over 8 weeks by an amount just under $2,000. In the email we gave them 7 days to provide us with a satisfactory response and to credit our bank accounts, otherwise it would be necessary for the Ombudsman for Fair Work to intervene on our behalf and investigate work practices within their organisation further. Lets just say the money was sitting in my account within 48 hours!!

It is known fact that backpackers get dreadfully underpaid in Australia but for some reason people just seem to accept this treatment and not bother to do anything about such injustice. Again people are too afraid to state their rights and easily get scared away when such employers mention that they will get their lawyers involved. The fact of the matter is that what these guys were doing to the two of us was highly illegal and like the landlords above had no leg to stand on at all. Now I have $1,157 extra in my bank account which will go along way towards my trip around the West Coast later in the year. More people should do the same.

I hope that by writing this blog that people who are thinking of moving to Australia over the coming months and years will be made aware of some of scam artists that exist and to not be afraid to exercise the law for ones own protection. It is there for a reason.

That's all for now.