THE MEANING OF OZ - All you need to know!

I get a kick at how second generation immogrants from Asia pick up the local accents. My one fishing buddy is a third gen chinese guy who lives in lower Eastern Shore and hes got an Eastern Shore accent (sort of an ELizabethan ENglish and a southern drawl mushed together)

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You've gotta trust me on this, hinge.
We have actually genuinely had a huge influx of recently arrived young Indians, via various study schemes over recent years.
Heaps of them have settled in my suburb.
They don't dress or act all that much differently to locals of similar age.

The Italians were much earlier & much more established arrivals.
Sadly many of the old originals have died, or moved out of the area with their upward mobility offspring.

Me too, farmer!
I know what you mean.
Though it is not always just second generations that sound like Australians.
I used to see Muslim girls in veils as "the other", some sort of symbols of purity or something, hard to explain....
But then I taught them for years & years!
They all have Australian accents. Say nothing of saying much the same things when they get crapped off!
In fact their interests are not all that much different to those of Australian girls of the same age.
The difference between them & other girls of the same age is their parents' culture & expectations.
The same as it was for me, as a child of migrants.

There's a very well known media chef here called Luke Nguyen. He's absolutely delightful & a lot of fun & I love his cooking shows (about Vietnamese food).
But whoever heard of a Vietnamese called "Luke"?
Say nothing of one who sounds so Australian?
He is both Vietnamese & very Australian at the same time.
I really love how such things happen here.

Pretty cool Olgs, but a tv ad with Paris Wells singing would have been more significant.

I will trust you Olgs, I live in the boons, but trust me, the changes to student visas and the Indian perception that they will get bashed in Melbourne means the numbers of South Asian faces you are seeing is plateauing.

I remember a vietnamese girl at Kaleen fruit and vege in Canberra - had the thickest strine accent I'd heard for ages. Mate.

Thanks for your trust, hinge.

And I agree with you, too ....
I think the influx of overseas students from India, etc, may have reached its peak & plateaued already ....
Which may not be such a bad thing.
The circumstances in which the student visa/citizenship migrations happened were pretty extraordinary: bogus "vocational" & other courses, some in institutions which didn't even provide any courses, just certificates to meet citizenship requirements (outrageous!), exploitation by dodgy "migration agents", serious government cuts to funding of tertiary courses on the basis of the expected windfalls from the exorbitant fees paid by foreign students .... & yes, some very unpleasant race-based incidents, as well ....
It was a pretty wild & woolly time here, I can tell you!

You mentioned Canadian migration earlier.
Perhaps that was more a Qld/northern Qld thing?
I'm sorry, I didn't understand what you meant when I first read your post.

Remember Con the fruiterer?

Heh, that greek thing was so Melbourne. In Sydney we had more italians and maltese

Mostly a joke, but I do run into a lot of expat Canadians up here, more than Yanks which seems odd given their relative populations...

Jeez, I'm gullible, hinge.
I was quite convinced that there'd some extraordinary influx of Canadians to Qld!
You shouldn't do thing like that!

BTW, I have a dropbear for sale to a good home...

The company I work for has started a help desk / support service for a couple of programmes we are running, some of our own, and others on behalf of a professional association.

We now employ over 20 people in this support area - and almost all of them are Indian! Most of them have Australian qualifications, but not permanent residency. I have no idea why there are so many Indians in support areas - perhaps they don't get ruffled with stupidity like others. Almost all those who came for interviews were Indian. Of the employees - 2 x Sri Lankans, 1 x African, 1 x Filipino, 1 x Chinese; 1 x Australian! All the rest are Indian!

Seriously considering ...
So what's your your best offer, hinge?

Heh, so the Indian guy I get when I call the phone/IT/insurance/banking company might actually not be outsourced!

Well, prices are falling all the time...

A bargain possum!
Just what I've always wanted!

I think Melbourne received by far the largest boost of Indian nationals of all the states. Pretty sure I'm correct about that. (The theory being that new arrivals to Oz tend to locate themselves in areas where there are already lots of others from their countries of origin.)

And living in one of the "high influx" suburbs/areas, I can tell you that just about every petrol station/convenience outlet is now operated by Indians, also a lot of Indians now working in the local supermarkets, driving taxis etc ....
I'm in no way complaining about this, don't misunderstand, they seemed to have moved in and established themselves with few problems for themselves, or the locals. And given the relative short period of time in which this happened, it was a pretty amazing transition, really.

But what initially confused me was that was the purpose (according to the government) of all these new workers & students we were importing was for study, or to overcome existing skill shortages here.
I never saw petrol stations or supermarkets as fitting into that "skill shortage" category.

I think, what the government was actually doing was running a defacto immigration policy to boost the economy during the recession ... under the guise of tertiary study & training programs (like in hairdressing & cooking!) . In effect many of these new arrivals paid for their work visas & citizenship through very expensive courses, quite a few of them bogus.
So we ended up with quite a bit of bad feeling & confusion in the community, & quite a few disgruntled & ripped of Indian nationals & with no one (but the government, apparently) really understanding what was going on & why.
I think, if the government's intention was to boost our immigration intake (while cutting back the number of refugees at the same time) at that time it should have been much more upfront about what it was actually trying to achieve.

Not really disagreeing with you, except to say when you say government the approach you describe was initiated, or at least sustained by the Howard govt, and Labor have only just cleaned up some of the shonks and made the visa stuff much harder, which coincided with the bashings of Indians in Melbourne which means subcontinent enrolments have dropped massively, even in Brisbane.

I tend to think of the student visa laxity being a sort of underhanded trade protection action - pretty sure Education outperformed tourism on the last annual terms of trade, trailing mining of course. Particularly weird as real term funding for tertiary education went backwards under Howard.

I saw it as a shameless money grab on the part of government.
Perpetuated by desperate tertiary sector/TAFE sector opportunism, in the face of severe cutbacks to education funding.
They had become very dependent on those overseas students' fees.
I also think Labor should have acted much earlier than it did. Quite a bit of this occurred on its watch.

The Indian bashing episodes by yobs in Melbourne were shocking, disgraceful, to be sure. And yes, racially motivated.
But I seriously think the reactions by the Indian media were sensationalist & other-the-top. Say nothing of racist, as well. Possibly more racist than they were accusing of Australians of being.
Did you read/see many of the Indian media reports?
I made a point of doing so at the time.
At one stage there were claims that the Victorian police were not taking the attacks seriously, not trying hard enough to find the perpetrator of an attack, because the victim was Indian.

There were incidents of criminal activity in Melbourne (say nothing of interstate) which involved Indian perpetrators .... which were played down by our local media, in the hope of calming the situation. We tend to be very touchy about these things, I think you'd agree.

I am in no way excusing violent racist Melbourne yobs, please understand. I don't approve or tolerate them anywhere. But with so many more Indians in Melbourne, in relatively small pockets of the city, It was not surprising (sadly) to me that they also became victims of crime & violence.

The thing that disappointed me about various Labor government representatives' trips to India to smooth relations with the two countries is that they seemed to focus more on trade & loss of a lucrative earner, more than anything else.