The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) has urged Taiwanese to make proper use of working holiday programs.
The ministry was responding to a report by Chinese-language Apple Daily that at least 1,000 Taiwanese women over the past nine years went to Australia on working holiday visas and engaged in the sex trade because of the lure of higher salaries.
A working holiday program is meant to offer people aged between 18 and 30 an opportunity to travel abroad to experience a different culture and expand their horizons, while allowing them to work to earn their living costs, ministry spokeswoman Anna Kao (高安) said.
Prostitution is legal in Australia and working in the sex industry after entering the country under the program is not illegal.
After receiving information from a Taiwanese backpacker in Australia, the paper said it sent a team to Perth, the capital city of the state of Western Australia, earlier this month and interviewed some Taiwanese women working in the sex industry there.
Taiwanese women were found to be providing sex at massage parlors, karaoke parlors and restaurants in Western Australia, according to a commissioner of Taiwan’s Overseas Community Affairs Council who lives in Australia.
Several of them had been involved in prostitution in Taiwan before going to Australia on working holiday visas, the commissioner said, while others may have been backpackers lured into the sex industry.
Citing data from Australia’s Department of Immigration and Citizenship, the ministry said that among all the working holiday travelers in the country, Taiwanese account for the second-largest group, behind only those from the UK.
Australia issued more than 35,000 working holiday visas to Taiwanese between July last year and June, an increase of 59 percent from the previous year, it said.
The Taiwan-Australia working holiday program took effect in 2004, allowing Taiwanese to stay for up to two years.
Since then, more than 100,000 Taiwanese have visited Australia under the program.
In Perth, a city with 2 million residents, there are reportedly about 3,000 Taiwanese working holidaymakers.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching