This open letter is a public protest against the conditions which students and staff at Victoria University have had to endure. I hope it speaks for many who have had their educational experience and their livelihoods as educators devalued due to one of the most potentially negative structural reforms in recent memory.

Every weekend we’d go out in cabs to some rich kid’s party where girls were assaulted by boys. There were so many times, I can’t remember them all. The richer the boys and men, the more obvious their impunity. For all the ridiculous rules designed to instil some kind of British schoolhouse discipline and academic achievement, nobody took seriously the rape culture at the heart of private school life.

Around 2 o’clock I join a peaceful protest walk. It is the eighty-seventh day of peaceful protest. Men are holding banners and cards with different slogans on them, like ‘Four years are enough’, ‘PNG is not safe for us’, and ‘Safety is everyone’s human right.’ The main purpose of the protest is to let people know that we don't want to be resettled in Papua New Guinea. We are also asking for an end to this indefinite detention.

All my doctors counsel me against being open about having a serious mental illness. Finding ways to massage the truth to people – and explain away periods of absence from the workforce – has become second nature to me. But, as a gay man who has been open and proud about his sexuality, I can’t help but feel a bit conflicted. Is the counselling to stay secret actually denying people their proper supports in society and jeopardising mental health?

Let’s concede, for a second, that Grace Dunham was indeed the victim of Lena Dunham’s predatory sexual behaviour. That Lena masturbating next to her in bed was an overt display of power, that bribing her with kisses was a form of grooming and that finding pebbles inside her was driven by misconduct.

I get the sense that Brutalism is in need of getting dressed; clothed in white, perhaps, or some other colour in the Taubmans paint box, in order to push back the grey we already see all over our cities. It is the palette – the veneer – that needs to be rendered differently.

Here’s why I panic: maybe there aren't any lines. Maybe all misogyny is violent, all sexism holds at its core a kind of brutality – be it emotional, physical or psychological.  I cannot talk about what happened in Santa Barbara and quarantine it from my own life, and this makes me ashamed for reasons I struggle to admit: is this disrespectful to those who died so needlesslessly and so horribly?