Project Reflection
Written on November 13, 2008 – 8:19 am | by pallas
Is Melbourne a safe place for international students?
More and more international students are choosing to study in Australia, but there are many difficulties they must face, like racist attacks, high house prices and lots of rental competition, low-paid jobs, especially about safety, because according to documents from Victoria police headquarter that citizens of Melbourne are easier attacked on public traffic than Sydney, London and New York. According to the news from “The Sun-Herald”, the criminal rate of public traffic of Melbourne has increased 2.5% last year, however the number of traffic police partners has decreased to two polices. In 2007, the criminal rate of public traffic of London and New York has decreased 13% and 11% respectively, however our Melbourne has increased 2.5%. The average criminal cases on trains of New York are 6.5 per day, but there are 26 criminal cases on our Melbourne trains every day and 5 of 26 are related to violence and sex. Compare to London, the population of London trains are two times than Melbourne, however the criminal cases of London trains are fewer than Melbourne. If we compare Victoria public traffic criminal records to other states of Australia, for example New South Wales. There are 4766 public traffic cases happened in New South Wales in 2007, but this number in our Victoria is 9559 last year. In other words, the total criminal cases on public traffic in our Victoria are two times than New South Wales in 2007. Terry Moulder (spokespersons from the opposition party) said there are 211 train stations located in remote area and about 58 kilometers far from Flinders station, and he said, a number of women and older citizens lack of sense of security that live there.
Although the situation of public traffic of Melbourne is not very satisfied and the traffic criminal cases in Melbourne are more than London, Sydney and New York, the total criminal cases of Melbourne are fewer than other big cities. This means Melbourne is a beautiful and safe international city in the world. Why we focus on traffic problem? Because most of us come from oversea and we do not need to buy a car here, thus the most convenient traffic tools for us are trams and trains. Meanwhile, some of our students and friends also have experiences to be attacked or threatened on the public traffic line (trains and trams) from Flinders to Hawthorn and from Hawthorn to Belgrave.
According to the feedbacks we have collected, we find three aspects which should be considered by our government and society. Firstly, the criminal rates on public traffic in most international cities have decreased in last year except Melbourne. Meanwhile, our government still want to decrease the number of traffic polices. Next, most of international students of Swinburne use the trams and trains from Hawthorn to Lilydale and Belgrave to be their main traffic tool, thus how to protect their security well. Last but not least, from our survey, we find there are more and more teenagers involved in traffic criminal cases. Therefore, we have to point that the education system of Victoria and parents also needs to think about the traffic criminal problem and take their responsibility, we can not think this is only polices’ business. Why those teenagers did not go to school but involved in criminal cases. This problem really needs to be thought by parents and our education system. It is not right if we only throw it to police. Do the right thing and protect our traffic environment together.
About our website, I focused on someone using it, overall it is a good site, and there is good design, good theme, and good content. The customer can go to each page by clicking the clear button on the menu. The home page is an introduction about our project and NLC, the second page are five articles about five events related to international students living in Australia. The third one is the most important one because it including three interviews. One part is an audio interview by President of NLC, the other two are video interview by three international students. The last two sections are our team member and references. I think the only problem is the size of characters in text is a little small, reading is tired. So I want to change it and make the graphics finer, more match to the content.
Tags: major project
