Please read this if you or your kids are travelling to or in Australia

[Guest Unregistered]

On behalf of Rosie Ayliffe whose daughter Mia was brutally murdered in Australia last month I would like to urge anyone who is or whose sons and daughters are planning overseas travel - particularly in Australia - to read this.

 

Trips to Australia seem to be the ultimate in teen 'walkabouts' - about the farthest you can get from your parents without a rocket! Its exciting, its amazingly beautiful and it challenges your independence to the max. But young people who have swooned and surfed through their first year face a huge hurdle in staying for another - the requirement to complete 88 days labour - often in agricuture - in order to qualify for their second year. It was during the first few days of this work that Mia was killed.

She was killed by a fellow traveller...not by the snake or spider that her mother feared in the cane fields in which she was working - totally unprepared and unprotected. No - she was killed during the long, hot, unstructured evening period where desperate young people are stuck in small towns with no entertainment competing against each other for hard labour in order to continue their dream. The fact that this fight to stay happens to benefit Australia's struggling agricultural market is by the by...the system is obligatory, unregulated and frankly, highly dangerous.

Rosie is campaigning for support from the British Government to lobby Malcolm Turnbull (Australian Prime Minister) to properly regulate the employment of largely foreign travellers to work in this way for their ticket to stay; to control the agencies and farms that place young people and critically the hostels that accommodate them.

PLEASE give your support to this petition. For Rosie. For Mia. Perhaps for your young ones who some day want to travel far and wide and feel safe.

l.facebook.com/l.php…

Follow Rosie on twitter.com/RosieAyliffe

To hear Rosie talk on BBC Women's Hour click www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07w5y3b"

Malcolm Turnbull: Persuade Australian Government to implement regulation of obligatory farmwork service

My daughter Mia was working under extreme duress in a highly charged and aggressive atmosphere at a hostel in Townsville when her life was tragically cut…

https://www.change.org/p/malcolm-turnbull-persuade-australi…