I wasn't particularly interested until Uni.

Before that i was a standard conservative country kid with little/no exposure of the real world.

My Uni years were when The Howard government went on a deliberate campaign to destroy campus culture.

Voluntary student unionism killed all of the cool stuff on campus (like the fiction library, co-ops & free meeting areas for clubs), continual cuts forced the unis to become reliant on overseas income... by the time I left the "Union building" was the "campus centre" caring only about the budget and not the community.

That started me on my journey to the left.

The journey was boosted when I saw first-hand just how randomly brutal police were at the s11 protests, only to be given a thank-you barbie by the premier.

After that I drifted towards "maybee i've been to extreme" and started drifting towards the centre. But a secondment at a bank watching how the people on 300k salaries behaved/lived/lied shocked me back someplace to the left of Whitlam.