Despite coming from a horrifically stereotypical blue collar family, whom politics often affected in a real and immediate way, the jargon of parliament and journalism was never mine to interpret and speak. This was, assumedly, a language for those who had been born into money and familial connections, streamlined into political literacy, brought before future bosses and suitors at a young age, for those who had learned to be included into the conversation before they had even entered primary school. As a result, however, their ability to engage with the intricacies of those from outside their bubble is amateurish at best—compounded by the superiority complex that their education is based on, used to funnel them into elite institutions. Sometimes, the mask of competency slips, as it did with Emma Alberici’s tweet about minimum wage workers recently, which elicited an almost immediate reactive response: ‘have you had to dip into your savings?’.

Growing up outside of Australia’s major cities, coming into contact with these aliens left me feeling confused, as if I’d spent my whole life wasting time when I could have been learning the language instead. Even so, you can spend years trying to make it in Sydney and Canberra (ostensibly the second home for Sydney trust fund kids building a career and attempting bohemianism) and still never live up to the standards normalised in the same white collar, middle-upper class bubble if you haven’t learned to internalise their mostly arbitrary/juvenile social rules about taste and form, regardless of political affiliation.