David Sinclair's final piece of advice to students at his alma mater could well have been directed at Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey, whose maiden Budget had threatened in one fell swoop all the foundations of a vibrant democracy: welfare, healthcare, public education — and the implicit promise by publically-elected leaders that they would undertake their duty in good faith.
'The last thing I want you to know is that there's nothing more important in life than to be honest,' Sinclair told students gathered before him in a nondescript school hall in Sydney's suburbia. 'Never lie, always tell the truth and people will grow to trust you and follow your lead.'
It was a striking comment that percolated up amidst an atmosphere of public fury.
Dazed and betrayed, the electorate was slowly digesting the list of election promises that Abbott had already broken just eight months into his term: the cutting of funding to education, health, the disability pension, foreign aid, the ABC and SBS; the changing of the retirement age and the GST; the towing back of asylum seeker boats to Indonesia; the failure to reduce debt and return the budget to surplus; and — most paradoxically of all — the botched assurance that governmental accountability and transparency would be restored.
For keen observers of Sinclair's address, there was also the poignant irony that such words of integrity were emerging from the mouth of a man educated in the very public system the Abbott Government and its new budget measures seemed intent on undermining.
Standing at the lectern in a school hall built in 1964 and barely altered or updated since, he told his audience that to be there speaking to them had been one of the highlights of his life so far.
The magnitude of this tribute was not lost on the students: after all, Sinclair is a professor of genetics at Harvard University and one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world for 2014. He has spent his adult life researching ways in which humans might live longer, healthier lives, and had returned to Sydney to receive the 2014 Australian Society for Medical Research medal.
Amidst a whirl of media interviews and meetings, Sinclair was asked if there was anything else he would like to do while in his hometown. He didn't hesitate: I'd like to visit my old high school, he said.
Perhaps Sinclair understood implicitly that the students — schooled in a deeply under-resourced, under-respected system, and shepherded by an education minister who acknowledges his government has a 'particular responsibility for non-government schooling that we don't have for [state] government schooling' — needed all the inspiration and encouragement they could get.
After all, he had grown up just down the road, attended the state primary school next door, walked into the high school science lab each day and leached such invaluable knowledge and wisdom and guidance from his teachers that one day his scientific findings would reverberate around the world.
Perhaps, in asking to visit his old school, Sinclair had wanted to reassure its students that the class warfare manufactured by the current government was just a smokescreen aimed at winning conservative votes; that, in truth, public (state) schools are not the repositories of children too impoverished or unintelligent for the alternative, that they are, in fact, the living manifestation of democracy, egalitarianism, multiculturalism and ecumenism, because they educate a rich diversity of all-comers; that the gross output of public schools benefits society at a far greater and more equitable rate than does that of its private counterpart.
Perhaps Sinclair realised, as he stood up on that stage with hundreds of pairs of attentive eyes fixed on him, and later, when he answered students' questions which were, he said, 'better than [those] I get from some of my scientists', that it might be far harder for these children to prosper, that their potential might not be as successfully cultivated as his had been almost 30 years earlier.
Since then — indeed, since 1970, when non-government school funding was introduced as a concession to the struggling Catholic sector — successive governments have redirected increasing sums of precious education funding so that the once financially-autonomous independent system has now become wholly dependent.
Australia's once robust, inclusive public system has been infused with a culture of deprivation, neglect and fear, so that too often parents are condemned to make the same choice as their peers: to flee the apparently sinking ship, and in so doing to make the ship's fate a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The final, sad chapter of this country's educational story will be written when the newest raft of budgetary changes — the deregulation of university fees — completes the transfer of high quality education from the demos into the hands of the rich.
But if Sinclair's intention was political, his message was oblique. It contained the sort of advice that, if followed, could turn any student — no matter their postcode or the colour of their school blazer — into just the sort of independent thinker that electioneering, panic-mongering, sheep-herding politicians fear the most.
'There are certain personality traits that can really help you in life, and one of them that I found very useful was not paying attention to the dogma,' he said. 'Don't listen to what everyone tells you you have to do. Follow your own path. Be rebellious. Take risks in life.'
Catherine Marshall is a journalist and travel writer. She is the president of the P&C at Professor David Sinclair's alma mater, St Ives High School.