In Australia, working- and middle-class students who cannot obtain financial familial support must both study and work a shitty part- or full-time job. Government youth allowance payments are deliberately difficult to obtain and excessively bureaucratic. Certainly, they are not provided on the presumption that to study is to perform valuable labour.

It extrapolates, of course, the socially conservative values of the right of today: the withdrawal of contraceptive rights, denial of civil rights to queer citizens, the re-assertion of a women’s place, and so on. But it also demonstrates the dangers of the new social conservatives, as well as ‘a certain kind of thinking in the left’: a desire to re-establish tradition bonds of community, which they view as destabilised by the autonomous neoliberal world.

‘That’s the issue with bisexuals’ says my girlfriend, jokingly. ‘Double the choice, double the chance of cheating. You should be scared.’ She’s joking, of course. She’s bisexual, I guess; I don’t usually feel a need to express it so simplistically. She’s mocking the dialogue that goes on even in liberal circles. But she’s not offended as such. Like me, she recognises the trade off. Given the dialogue around bisexuality – that bisexuals are less real, more flippant – the homophobia directed at you can feel somewhat less real, less harmful.