Two new university accommodation blocks built in Sydney by Scape Australia will stay empty this year, as hundreds of international students fail to arrive for the start of the new university semester.
Co-founder and Chief Executive of Scape Australia, Stephen Gaitanos, told The Sydney Morning Herald that a new building to house 200 students that has just been completed in Darlington, inner Sydney, was originally scheduled to start welcoming residents this week.
These plans were made well before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but those plans are now up in the air after Federal Education Minister, Alan Tudge, said recently that the large-scale return of international students to Australian campuses may depend on the availability of an effective vaccine.
“It’s terribly frustrating to effectively have to mothball it,” Mr Gaitanos said to the SMH of the accommodation.
Scape Australia is also set to complete construction in June of another building in Redfern with 700 bedrooms, and has plans for student accommodation towers in Melbourne. All are expected to remain empty this year.
Last year, the Federal Government requested that each state and territory submit by November international student arrival plans through safe quarantine corridors.
The NSW government developed a plan to start returning 1000 students a week from the beginning of 2021, but Premier Gladys Berejiklian shelved that when the northern beaches was locked down.
Tighter caps on the number of Australians allowed to return to other states were also introduced as a temporary measure in response to more contagious strains of the virus.
Mr Gaitanos said the uncertainty in the position of governments had been “frustrating and inconsistent.”
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald.
