Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent)
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What is happening is appalling. This does not just relate to graduate medicine and engineering or people with long-stay education ahead of them. It will become a larger problem. Parents are learning that students must borrow. There was a time when they did not need to because their parents paid or money was available.

American students all pay for their own education. They all borrow and pay back the loans and there is nothing wrong with that. If one wants one's child to go to university but one does not have the money, it is good that one can go to a bank and borrow the money. However, when a student qualifies, he or she should not be choked with debt for the rest of his or her life. It is outrageous, especially given that one can only earn 1% interest on deposits in banks at the moment but one must pay 7% to 9% interest on borrowings. What the banks are doing to undergraduates, postgraduates and their parents is amoral. It is a different kind of borrowing when one is borrowing for one's future education. There is a specificity about that. It is not about life generally but the specificity of education. The banks have closed down so many opportunities for young people. The Chairman is absolutely correct to call it apartheid because some students do not have the facility to borrow at all while others think that even if they did have the capacity to borrow, they will never be able to pay back the loans. I am appalled. I will be in a bank this coming Friday and I will make a public issue of this. Senator Power is absolutely right about the other aspects of this issue, including taxation. I am hitting this head on, like the Titanic because what is happening is disgraceful, particularly given the fact that we bailed the banks out. We keep forgetting that basic fact. It is almost as if that has gone away now. It is as if they are all back and we are all standing on board again but we are not. We are still paying for that bailout through the universal social charge. We see that every time we look at our pay packets or our pensions.