Sick of Union Bashing and Bene Bashing? Time for Student Bashing!

Student loans - the debt mountain

Surprise surprise! Debt laden graduates (and dropouts) are failing to pay back their huge, mandatory student loans (well, mandatory for those who don't want to strip their way through uni/don't have rich parents).

Considering that uni fees keep going up year after year after year, as do living costs, and considering that the government will give you money to live on if you are sick or jobless but not if you're improving yourself and your future earning prospects gaining a qualification, it's no wonder that my fellow graduates and I end up with a big old debt shit pile we can't be assed trying to push uphill.

Way back when I was at uni, one could buy a tee which said "'Education is an investment' - Quote from a baby boomer who went to university for free". That pretty much sums up how the student-loan endowed segment of the population feels about Borrower Bashing by the oldies, a la Kerre Woodham. We didn't want to get loans, we had to. We weren't 1/4 Samoan [my best friend had her student loan wiped when her educational provider found out she slotted neatly into a diversity box], we didn't have rich old aunties that quietly gave us the $15,000 for a standard 3 year degree, we couldn't find enough hours in the week to full-time study AND earn that kind of money (we couldn't even find enough hours in the week to earn enough to pay for rent and buses and food), and we were promised by everyone that we would never ever be able to find a job without at least a bachelors degree.

This isn't our world, grumbling oldies, this is yours. We don't like it much but it's all you left us with so we'll have to make do. We'll try and make it better if we get the chance but unfortunately there are too many grumbling oldies in the way, and by the time they are all dead we'll be grumbling oldies ourselves, resented by the younger generation with their iPhone implants and their crappy pop music.

So you'll have to excuse us if paying off loans that will otherwise go to baycorp, scrounging money for food and dealing with the price of petrol/public transport get in the way of paying the government back for money we didn't want to have to borrow in the first place.