Guest Blog 11

Kimberly Katie discusses being an expat over the last three years in Australia.

Experience living in Australia as an American during COVID-19

By Kimberly Katie

My experience being an expat in Australia wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been, but I could for sure see how it was a nightmare for others. 

I was lucky to be in a city called Darwin that was hardly affected by Covid. However, there were a lot of scary moments wondering, “What if?”. As an American in Australia on my specific visa (working holiday visa, also called visa 462), you have to work in hospitality for a period of 6 months to earn another year in the country. 

When COVID got announced, I was at around the 4-month mark, so I was a bit worried about having to go home sooner than I wanted just because I wouldn’t be able to accumulate the 6-months requirement if my restaurant was forced to shut. To be honest, I don’t feel the Australian government valued temporary foreigners enough. And they had to learn how valuable temporary expats are the hard way. 

Even though some people were not able to make their 6-month requirement working in hospitality because their venue was forced to shut down (or if they were doing farm work– which also counts– and they were forced to stop), the government was clear that you’d be out of luck.

Australia had zero interest in being lenient with the requirements to help out foreigners. In other words, they were adamant on, “6 months of work or get out”. 

They also gave temporary expats no funds at all, so if they lost hours, there would be no compensation. In fact, some of the rules they did pass actually hurt temporary expats. For example, they basically paid restaurant owners money to roster citizen workers, so essentially, it cost owners $0 to roster citizens. On the other hand, if they wanted to roster temporary expats, restaurant owners would have to pay for them. So, of course, restaurant owners would want to give the citizens all the hours. Why would you pay $200 to roster the foreigner for 8 hours when you can just roster the citizen for free? 

This truly worried me, but thankfully for me, a few citizens at my job left and I was not affected by this in the end after weeks of stress. 

So, needless to say, a ton of backpackers could not meet the 6 month rule either because of money or simply not meeting the 6-month requirement and so many backpackers left.

MANY. 

And guess what happened? 

There was a severe shortage of farm workers and hospitality workers across Australia. Australia started spending millions to advertise and incentivize Australians to work in hospitality or in the farms, but of course, Australian citizens weren’t interested. Not going to lie, it was kind of funny being hit by all the ads and reading the news articles about millions of dollars being spent on advertising and incentives.

Finally, Australia’s government started giving temporary expats a solution to stay longer by working hospitality (COVID visa), but by then it was too late. Many backpackers were gone.

All in all, I didn’t really feel taken care of by Australia during Covid, but I was fortunate enough to work in one of the few restaurants in my city that stayed open throughout.