I finished my BSc Hons in 1994, and at the end of ’94 spent my last money on a one-way ticket to Perth. I stayed there until June of ’95, then I got word I had a scholarship for PhD from Canterbury, so I came back and took up the scholarship in October of that year. I am now about to pull finger out and get the thesis finished, disappear off into the middle distance, and work for a mining company raping the planet in order to pay off my enormous student loan.

It’s not that big. It’s only thirty-six thousand.

By using the student loan system, the Government has ensured they will not see me spend my most productive years in this country. I am going to go overseas so I can get the money to pay it off, but I probably won’t come back to pay it off until a couple of decades have passed, by which time I probably will have passed my most productive working period.