Not that agriculture should be assessed for the sake of it. “Almost by definition, if nobody else is looking for it, it means you’ll probably get it cheaper,” Neal says. Apart from the aforementioned ‘tangible assets’ category, the Future Fund opted for an equally broad ‘equities’ category, covering “exposure to corporate enterprise at various stages of development” and including Australian equities, global developed and developing markets equities, and – most interestingly – pulling in private equity, away from the ‘alternatives’ bucket in which its placed by many other institutions.

The Future Fund’s ‘debt’ category is more conventional, covering “exposure to interest bearing securities” including government and non-government bonds, and extending down the risk curve to mortgage-backed securities, high yield credit and corporate debt . The alternative assets bucket, meanwhile, may not include the expected components like infrastructure but does cover “a range of risk premia” – such as commodities futures and insurance-based strategies like those ultimate anti-correlators, catastrophe bonds – which are simply aimed at “providing diversifying exposure relative to the other categories”, according to the Fund’s Annual Report.

The broadness of the investment categories will in turn broaden the skills of those teams constituted to oversee each one, Neal believes. “Particularly in the tangible assets area, we think the skill sets for the people actually going and doing this stuff are quite complementary. We wanted to build a single team for our private markets capability so that they could leverage off each other – if you think about going and buying an airport, it’s typically got some retail shopping, it’s got a car park, it’s obviously got its landing fees, and lots of them have lots of land to develop – so is it infrastructure or is it real estate? It’s both,” Neal says.

So it is that within Gary Gabriel’s private markets team, the head of infrastructure Raphael Arndt will often as not do work on the same deal as head of property, Barry Brakey. The investment process has been deliberately designed as “flexible, fluid and interactive”, in the words of general manager Paul Costello, with the question asked of any prospective investment boiling down to “how will that, when considered alongside all the alternatives, help us achieve our target return [which as most readers will know by now is 4.5-5.5 per cent over CPI over rolling ten year periods] and help ensure the overall level of risk is acceptable?”