The general consensus in class seemed to be ‘if it doesn’t affect my everyday life I’m not going to care about it’. That complacency is a slippery slope in today’s society though. We think that we live in a free country and that our rights are protected. But all we have to do is look at other countries and what they’re introducing to see that that’s not the case. I’ll use two recently introduced laws as example.

1. The anti-terrorism laws that have been introduced in the US. The general belief is that citizens of the US are ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and have ‘right to a fair trial’. They have the ‘right to an attorney’. However the new laws state that someone suspected of terrorism can be detained without notice and without counsel. There need not be a warrant. They can be interrogated without anything to check the interrogators. Is this our free society? One where the privacy of our phone conversations and e-mails and our very freedom can be taken away simply because we are suspected of something, true or not?

2. The sedition laws currently in place in our beloved Australia. This takes away one of our other most basic rights – our freedom of speech. Journalists for example can be arrested for sedition simply for expressing their opinion. It need not be libel. It need only be something that the government don’t want heard at the time.

I can’t look at these examples and say that we don’t need a bill of rights. Something simple, that is above all other laws and above even our constitution. Something that can only be changed by the vote of the people not by the vote of politicians. (I’m not saying that they’re the enemy. Only that this document should require the full weight of Australian opinion, not merely a sample group based on who was popular at the time.)

What rights are we entitled to? I can’t say I would be able to name all of them off the top of my head, but some basic ones come to mind.

1. Right to due process

2. Right to free speech

3. Right to live in a democracy

4. Right to freedom of religious practice

These are basic human rights. They are infringed upon every day in almost every country. Some of them are infringed here, in Australia. The lucky country. And where does it stop? Sure, it’s just one small law that is a problem now. But soon enough it will be two. Then three. Our rights will be chipped away so gradually that by the time it starts to ‘effect our everyday lives’ it will be too late. The changes will be law and we will be forced to live with them, with no other choice.

Why wait until then? If it never happens, that’s wonderful. We still have a legal document that reminds every day of basic human rights and defines our moral stance as a country to other nations. If, however, things like this do start to occur we can rest safe in the fact that our Bill of Rights, something that cannot be changed without our consent, will give us the vision and starting point we need to stand up and collectively say ‘this isn’t right’.

I am a university student. At this point, a week into the new year it is my only occupation. And yet, despite the fact that we are only one week into the semester I am already thousands of dollars in debt. I have over two thousand dollars in tuition fees that are deferred until I earn a certain income. I have $900 dollars on credit card that covered only textboots and the required electronic equipment that needed to be purchased for the courses that I am doing this semester.

Over the course of the year we can expect this price to double, considering that the costs outlined above were only for this particular semester.

So the average student can expect a debt of at least six thousand dollars per year simply for tuition, books and equipment on a basic degree. The amount of course goes up depending on which degree you’re doing – if you feel smart enough to do engineering, law, medicine or any of those fancy-pants subjects you’re going to be even worse off.

So why do we do it?

For one thing it is supposed to earn itself back after a certain amount of years. Without the degree your job choices are limited. You are restricted to a certain ‘level’ of career choices and unable to advance past a certain point without further training. These basic jobs earn far less than the specific ones you are able to chose from once graduated. If you want any form of financial security, the ability to travel or raise a family, to buy a nicer house or have a better car, even to live without daily struggle, you need one of these ‘higher level jobs’.

And today, that means buying them. It means buying them with time and with effort. And most importantly, as it didn’t even recently, it means buying them with large amounts of money.

I think there’s another reason, as well, as less tangible reason why we’re willing to pay this much money to attend a learning institution. It is supposed to be an experience. Something that one almost ‘has’ to experience. Without such not only are we considered less intelligent or less skilled, but we feel that we have missed out on something. Missed out on what I suppose could be considered a stage of life because we made other choices with our lives.

So I admit it. I’m a 23 year old who traded a secure, if basic, job in order to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a university degree. I’ll let you know when I start to regret it.

I am ahead at this exact second. But it will require constant vigilance to stay there. That is something they don’t tell you. It’s glorified. Like childbirth – they don’t mention that you throw up and crap while being watched by at least 4 different people with a video camera capturing the moment for posterity. (No, I don’t know this from experience. I’m praying I never will.) With uni they make it out to be a balance. You’ve got work and you’ve got play. You’ve got busy times and quiet times. The beginning of semester being a quiet time for example.

They lied. The idea is to make you crack. They take your forms and put you in debt to the government. Then it becomes a game. If you crack before the census date you win. You can apply to not be charged for the courses you are enrolled in as you didn’t participate in them. However if you crack and go insane after the census date they win. They keep your money and don’t have to deal with the responsibility of teaching you.

Those who survive the first semester are hit harder the second. Every year afterwards gets increasingly harder to get through. Those that make it to the end are heros in the eyes of their former comrades and enemies in the eyes of the educational institution. Sure they get your money. But they had to work for it, damnit! And now there is one more person out in the workforce, one more battle-wearied warrior that is competition for jobs they might be interested in when they tire of acadamia.

Will I survive it? At this rate I’m not sure. But I’m damned well going to do my best to ensure they have to WORK for my money.

Backstory:

The boy’s cousin moved in with the family a few months ago (just after new years) because she was moving interstate and wanted to find a full-time job and an apartment of her own. It was only supposed to be for a little while, since…well, she was finding a job and a place to live. Hence she wouldn’t need permanent accommodation, just a temporary stop point. And considering I had done exactly the same thing when I moved here there wasn’t a lot I could say. In fact I was kinda happy there was going to be someone else in the house who had some kind of understanding of what I was going through with all of it.

Except that I had the job and apartment thing down within a week. I arrived on Sunday, started my job Monday week, moved into my apartment Tuesday week. So I was in the house for all of 10 days before I moved on with many thanks. (Yes, I’ve moved back in now, but that is an entirely different agreement with entirely different terms). While I understood that his cousin most likely wouldn’t have my luck (or persistence I suppose), I kinda expected something slightly more than this.

What is this?

1. She hasn’t found a job. In fact she stopped trying after the first couple of weeks because she was having so much fun doing nothing all day.
2. She has kicked us all out of our own living room for almost all of the day because that is where she is sleeping and apparently that means she owns the space 24/7 not just during sleeping hours
3. She is lazy. Which means that whenever any of us are doing the things we need to do, she has miraculously gone for ‘a run’ or needs to ‘update her resume’. So we’re cleaning her crap up as well as ours.
4. She is so self-absorbed I can’t believe it. She is 22 and she still sulks when the conversation is not on her. (Note, this is not just meaning a conversation she is involved in, but one that is focusing on her – her life, her friends, what she’s done, what she wants to do)

But today…today took the cake.

She went on a trip over the weekend. I rejoiced. I had a her free weekend and it was wonderful. I could go into the living room to sit down. Me, the boy and the boy’s brother were able to watch movies there without her complaining, we were able to actually walk through the house without her sulking. Heaven.

But then of course she came back. And I got slammed with a huge workload with university this week. I respect that she, like most human beings, needs sleep so I vacated the living room just after 10pm in favour of studying in the kitchen. Yes, they adjoin and there’s currently no door, but there is also NOWHERE ELSE IN THE HOUSE that I can study. I don’t have my own desk and she’s already kicked me out of the boy’s parent’s study because she claims that even with the door shut it is too noisy listening to the sound of my pages turning.

So I went to the kitchen. I admit that there was a light on, I kind of need that to see. However I also needed to study. I was given work today that needs to be finished between tomorrow and Thursday. I have classes all this week, hence it’s one of the few times that I will actually have to do it. But can I? No.

Ms Drama Queen strikes again, and comes in asking me to turn the light off. I can’t. I need to see my work.

“So when will you be done then?” Comes the question. Yes, an innocent question. Except when it’s said with such scorn and attitude that it made me wonder if I’d had a swastika tattooed on my head and didn’t know about it.

My reply was “as long as it takes to get it done.” Which it wasn’t since I ended up cutting it short due to the next part:

She cried. Or faked it. She went onto her sofa bed and faked sobs for about 15 minutes. This was cut short when the boy got home and she realised that this might make her look bad in front of the cousin that she’s trying to convince I’m evil. So she started sighing loudly and making a big show of shading her head from the small amount of light I had to study by. Light that would actually have been shadowed off her face should she move (quite literally) three inches to the left.

Now I know she wants to sleep. But it’s not that late by this point and she literally has nothing to get up for. We all make sure to tiptoe around in the morning and make sure that she’s not woken, so she gets to sleep in to whatever point she wants to. So is it unreasonable of me to try and study in the one place in the house that she HASN’T banned me from, or should I just…well, I don’t know what I’d do otherwise. I have no other time or place to do my work, so I don’t know WHAT I’d do.

While students as a whole at my uni are in the same frame of mind as me – there to learn rather than to slack off, there are a few notable exceptions. And with these people I’ve noticed some common patterns.

-If a class start time is publicized at 12:30, it is reasonably assumed that everyone will be present and ready to learn by 12:35. However it seems that this is just a guideline. It seems that a 12:30 start on a 2 hour class means that you are welcome to show up anytime from 12:45 to 2pm. Interrupting the class, the lecturer and missing important information yourself is not a concern it seems.

-Despite being warned by every single lecturer we have, people will not turn off their phones. I do not think that I have had a single class in the course of my week where someones phone has not gone off. I have to admire the stance that my psychology lecturer has taken. Unless someone warns him at the beginning of class that there is an emergency and they need to leave their phone on, any phone that rings during class will be answered. By him.

-There are special rooms in the library for those who want to undertake group study. All you need to do is rock up, write your name and details down, grab a key and the room is yours for however long you book it. But apparently that is too hard for some people, and instead they think that talking loudly about their particular class in the library is acceptable, not really caring about those who are trying to undertake quiet personal study.

In all honesty, I just don’t understand this sort of behaviour. They are there to learn – why do they think that inconveniencing other students and the teachers will help them do that?