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The Accord report demonstrated conclusively that the funding mechanisms for both teaching and research at Australian universities are fundamentally broken and totally inadequate. They represent a profound failure in public policy over recent decades. International students have helped meet these entrenched chronic funding gaps: for the betterment of Australian students – meeting the full cost of courses like medicine and dentistry, providing infrastructure for all to use, and allowing Australia to have a quality system of R&D, despite embarrassingly low levels of government and industry R&D expenditure compared to OECD standards.

Bowie spent the 1960s doing poor imitations of the pop stars he wanted to emulate, spinning through a dizzying array of failed incarnations. The problem, as we now know, was not a lack of talent. It’s that he wasn’t being pretentious enough. He wasn’t daring to become something or someone completely new. It was only when he risked ridicule and leaned into art pop that he created Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust. From then on, he never stopped pretending to be something he wasn’t.

Pretension might be seen as a failed attempt at seriousness (those who insist, rather stridently, on being unpretentious and “down to earth” are scared either by failure or seriousness or both). But it can also be seen as a bridge to seriousness, or a downpayment on it. Somehow you have to get from where you are, to where you want to be. You can’t worry too much about whether people think you’re getting ahead of yourself.