This feels like a formative moment of consciousness – the realisation that we are all now more vulnerable, and that this is the time to form broad and deep networks of our own while also demanding the full protection of the state we have contributed to. Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini – your strength does not come from you alone, but from the strength of many.

Today’s awfully successful boomers continue to eulogise themselves in awful ways, often claiming to speak with authority for their entire cohort. Think the Clintons insisting that their peers recall the balmy nostalgia of the 1990s and its (ill-distributed) prosperity, or Turnbull framing inaction on housing as a gesture of solidarity to ‘mum and dad investors’ who have worked hard all their lives. This is a generation’s history (and its policy whims) as written by its victors, and it erases the losers.

The ‘half pay scam’ Adele Ferguson and Sarah Danckert identified wasn’t elaborate – pay people for half the hours they actually work, then cook the books – but the trap that kept the employees in there, most of whom were international students, was a vicious one. Should anyone overworked and underpaid eventually raise their hand to complain, they would be pointed to the breach of their own visa conditions (international student visa holders can usually only work a maximum of 20 hours, a limit their masters are obligated by law to be aware of) and their employer would threaten to dob them in.

When I was twelve, I starred in an ad for internet safety. Tousle-haired and small for my age, with huge blue eyes that threatened to swallow the camera, I sat in the centre of a set dressed to look like a child’s bedroom, peering intently into the screen of an old Mac.