The photo, which ran on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1985, features a beaming Ronald in black tie, coupled in dance with Nancy, who stands, kicking up a heel, gazing girlishly at her husband's twink-ling, senescent visage. Wilson came across the photo on the internet in 2010, got in touch with the photographer and bought it for himself as a 30th birthday present. "There are only 35 of these prints in the world, and mine is number 10," he says. "Cost a fair bit, but to me it's priceless." Right on? … libertarian Tim Wilson. Credit:Mark Chew He and Ryan had planned to put Ronald and Nancy somewhere else, but the bedroom was the only place big enough to fit them. And so here they have stayed, a silent, supervisory presence, chaperone to Wilson's intimacies and aspirations. "Reagan was an agent of change," he says. "He embodied the idea that it's better to be president for one term and do things than hold back for fear of a backlash." Holding back has never been the Wilson way. As policy director at the Institute of Public Affairs, a free-market think tank, the 34-year-old has over the past five years become a prolific commentator on public policy, a veritable geyser of right-wing steam on everything from copyright law to climate change, the sheer volume of his opinions matched only by the confidence with which he expresses them. He's decried restrictions on cigarette advertising and plain packaging and relentlessly bagged the carbon tax. He has a visceral horror of government handouts, whether for individuals or corporations, and sees in the free market the answer to almost everything. "Qantas might fall over," he says. "Great! Someone will come along and buy what's left and make it into profitable airline!" His Facebook page resembles a libertarian's opium dream, with portraits of Margaret Thatcher and links to groups including "Privatise the ABC!", "The Bolt Report Supporters Group", and the US-based "Log Cabin Republicans".

To those on the political right he is, in the words of former Victorian Liberal Party president David Kemp, "one of the most effective and best-informed voices we have for the liberal position". Others regard his mix of youth and conservatism as one might a blobfish; with a mix of bafflement and disgust. Speaking out … standing up against the Victorian government's proposed 2am pub lockout, 2008. Credit:courtesy of Tim Wilson The cloud of controversy that has long hovered over Wilson intensified last year with his appointment as "freedom commissioner", a senior role in the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC). Quite apart from his long-held antipathy to the AHRC, which he has said should be abolished, the appointment, by Attorney-General George Brandis, was unusual insofar as it was never advertised. (All six of Wilson's fellow commissioners gained their positions after expressions of interest were called for in the Commonwealth Government Gazettes. Wilson says "George" simply rang him and "asked if I was interested".) Then there was the matter of consistency: here was the staunch free marketeer, a disciple of unfettered competition who has long railed against government largesse, being gifted a taxpayer-funded position with a salary of $325,000 a year. Wilson says queries over the transparency of his appointment must be put to Senator Brandis. But he waves away any suggestion of hypocrisy. "It's silly to suggest there's inconsistency with being in favour of smaller government and taking up a government role." As for his infamous 2011 tweet in which he urged authorities to "send in the water cannons" to clear away Occupy Melbourne protesters, that was "a joke". "I figured out I was gay at 12 but didn't come to terms with it until I was 18" … with partner Ryan. Credit:Mark Chew

Wilson says his agenda at the AHRC will be to promote liberal human rights, "like freedom of speech, of association and of movement, of religious worship, of property rights, and the rights of individuals to determine how to live their lives". One of his first priorities will be the Queensland bikie laws, which he regards as an affront to freedom of association. (The laws make it illegal for three or more members of a criminal organisation to associate in public.) He has also argued for the scrapping of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which he says violates free speech. (Section 18C makes it a crime for a person to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person on the basis of race.) Plenty of people agree that the terms "offend" and "insult" should be removed - why should someone be able to take legal action for hurt feelings? - but Wilson would dump the provision altogether, potentially exposing minority groups to hate speech. This is partly because, as he has said many times, he does not believe in hate speech. But it's also because of his devotion to individual liberty, even when that means, as human rights lawyer Professor Sarah Joseph recently pointed out, the liberty to discriminate. This was made clear last year when Wilson appeared before a parliamentary committee on anti-discrimination law. At one point, Wilson was thrown a hypothetical question about an Aboriginal man who is refused service at an outback pub. Should the publican be prosecuted under anti-discrimination laws? No, said Wilson, the publican should be free to "show [his] bigotry and hatred" - and the public should be free to boycott his pub. Once again, the market would come to the rescue. In person, Wilson is shorter than he appears on television, and tubbier, his frame generously upholstered from eating out almost every night at functions and corporate dinners. "We do cook when we can," he says. To try to keep in shape he runs the Tan, the track that circles the Botanic Gardens. "Ninety-five percent of people run the Tan clockwise, which is the easy way," he tells me. "I do it anticlockwise, which is much harder, because it's uphill nearly all the way." This, he points out, "is a good metaphor for my life. I don't take the easy path; I don't go with the flow." That much is true. Wilson is a polemicist and button-pusher, a man who loves nothing more than poking a received wisdom with an inconvenient truth. (On a 2008 episode of ABC TV's Q&A, he publicly upbraided Penny Wong, Australia's first openly gay cabinet minister, for not speaking out on gay marriage.) Because of this, his opponents tend to either attack or underestimate him. "He's very good on policy," says friend and ALP member Peter McMullin. "I don't always agree with him, but I think he'd even give the PM a few rounds. But with Tim people tend to shoot the messenger without looking at the message, which is a shame, because good ideas come from across the spectrum."

He certainly knows how to fill a CV: directorships here, fellowships there, and more leadership awards than Barack Obama. He is currently completing a Graduate Diploma of Energy and the Environment at Murdoch University, to add to his qualifications in international trade, intellectual property, carbon accounting and global health diplomacy. So varied are his aspirations they have tended to collide with one another, like overexcited children. He has occupied various internal Victorian Liberal party posts, and ran in 2008 for deputy mayor of Melbourne in a joint ticket with McMullin as mayor (he lost). Until the human-rights job popped up, he seemed destined for a career in commercial radio, even crowing to friends about how generous his pay would be. "He did some radio in Melbourne, and was very popular," says Shaun Levin, from Profile Talent Management, which represents Wilson. "Surveys showed a spike in numbers when he went on, and a drop when he went off." Friends describe him as ambitious, with a dizzying sense of his own destiny. "He wants to be a Liberal Party senator, that's his goal," a close friend says. His default setting seems to be tireless self-promotion and B-52-scale name-dropping. "He's always mentioning which federal Liberal Party MP he's just talked to, which is a way of showing how well connected he is," says the friend. "He said to me once, 'I am much better known than most federal party backbenchers.' And that's true." Like many driven people, Wilson seems powered as much by self-belief as the chip on his shoulder. Asked whether he would travel to Sydney to take up the job with the AHRC, he delivers a curt no: "And quite frankly, we are all a little tired of being told we have to do everything out of Sydney." It all comes down to "clubs", he says. Opposition to his appointment, for example, "comes largely because I'm an outsider and they don't like people outside their club". "Tim has achieved so much," says his friend. "But one thing he always goes on about is people who went to Oxford [University]. He says they are such wankers, always talking about Oxford. He says you don't need to go to Oxford to get ahead."

Wilson, the friend adds, "is very status conscious. He talks about money a lot; he'll ask you what you earn. But while he can have the money and the jobs, he can never have the [Oxford] status. And that makes him angry." Wilson grew up in Melbourne, the second of three children. His parents ran pubs, in Richmond and Little Collins Street; the kids lived upstairs. "We were raised to be independent," he says. "It was very much about hard work. You get on with things and don't cause a fuss and be a burden on society." Wilson's parents divorced when he was seven, after which Tim and his siblings moved with their mother to Mount Martha, on the Morning-ton Peninsula. Tim attended The Peninsula School, a private school at Mount Eliza, but didn't enjoy it. "I was a very awkward kid," he says, a result largely of his unresolved sexuality. "I figured out I was gay at 12 but didn't come to terms with it until I was 18. For me, school was about survival: I felt very isolated." He was, however, prominent in the visual arts - he helped design the stage sets - but missed out on being named a prefect in year 12, something that clearly remains a sore point. After school he studied fine arts at Monash University before transferring to international relations. He became heavily involved with student politics, eventually becoming president of the Student Union in 2001, thanks in part to his talent for favour-trading - plying opponents with "a whole bunch of delegateships" in return for their support. He also had "this really clever little trick", using a digital camera, "which very few people had back then", to take photos of himself at university club functions, several of which he would attend in a single night. He would then send the photos to the club magazines the next morning. "They didn't have any photos, certainly not that immediately. So they'd run them, and of course I was in half of them, and it made me look as if I was the centre of everything." So carried away was he with campaigning that he was re-elected president before realising he had finished his degree and actually had no business being at university. "I thought, 'What am I doing here?' " (He eventually enrolled in a master's degree in diplomacy and trade.)

Wilson embodies a strange kind of dissonance: internal contradiction is almost an art form with him. A champion of individual rights, he was, until he resigned from the Liberal Party to go to the AHRC, a member of a political party that denies him the right to marry his boyfriend. Likewise, he is a free marketeer who has spent surprisingly little time in the free market. Apart from a boyhood paper route, some table-waiting and occasional stints for communications consultancies, most of his employment has been with a think tank (seven years with the IPA) or a political party (three years as a part-time Liberal Party staffer while he was at university). Asked about his political awakening, Wilson mentions the day when, as a 12-year-old in 1992, he walked down the high street of his home town, where business after business had been cruelled by Paul Keating's recession. "I realised then how important economic opportunity was. It was like, these things matter." In the event, though, his convictions weren't forged so much in the crucible of the free market as on the couch, watching television. "One night in 2002 I watched this documentary called The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy," he explains. The program charted the rise of free markets and globalisation over the 20th century and referenced several prominent thinkers, including the high priests of liberal economics, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. "I read their books and went 'Wow!' " says Wilson. (In 2004, Wilson made a pilgrimage to then 92-year-old Friedman's apartment in San Francisco: a photo of their meeting hung on the wall of his IPA office, and is also on his Facebook page.) In 2007, Wilson began at the IPA, where he soon weighed in on the issue of cheap medicines in the developing world. Wilson attacked efforts by Brazil and Thailand to promote access to affordable drugs, particularly their decision to compulsorily license patents covering HIV/AIDs and heart-disease medicines. Such action was perfectly legal under international patent law; it was also highly effective, producing a four-fold decrease in the price of second-line retro-viral medications, according to Médicins Sans Frontières. Yet Wilson opposed the measures, claiming, incorrectly, that the Thais had "nationalised" the patents, and calling it "socialism". It was crucial, he argued, that intellectual property rights - in this case, of large pharmaceutical companies - remain inviolable, in order to deter counterfeiting and maintain the incentive for innovation. He pursued a similar line in regard to the environment, arguing against the compulsory licensing of low-carbon technologies, the kind desperately needed by poorer countries to combat climate change. But it was on cigarette plain packaging that he dug in the deepest. When, in 2010, the federal government flagged its intention to introduce plain packaging, the IPA (whose financial backers include British American Tobacco) went into overdrive, deriding it as nanny state paternalism. Wilson, in particular, warned of the legal Armageddon that would descend on any government that attempted to implement the measure, insisting that Australian taxpayers would have to pay the tobacco industry $3 billion a year in compensation. But when the case went to the High Court in 2012, the tobacco companies lost 6-1.

"Wilson's understanding of that issue was almost infantile," says Simon Chapman, professor of public health at Sydney University. "And yet here he was, venturing a hugely confident opinion that the government would lose." Chapman says Wilson's performance on this issue "would have embarrassed an ordinary person into early retirement". According to Chapman, Wilson is "just a cocksure errand boy for big business". Taken to its natural conclusion, Chapman says, Wilson's libertarian outlook tends towards "social Darwinism, where the more privileged and educated people survive, and to hell with all the rest". When I mention Chapman's name, Wilson visibly stiffens. "I have to respect someone to care what they think." But would Wilson concede he was wrong on plain packaging? "No." "Have you ever been wrong on anything?" I ask.

"I'm sure there have been things," he says. "But I can't think of them right now." Wilson is one quarter Armenian. "That's what accounts for my passionate side," he says. He is also very protective, especially of Ryan. "Ryan has become part of the narrative of my life, and my life has become very public." Accordingly, Wilson makes me promise not to disclose the address of their apartment, nor the name of the small town on the Mornington Peninsula where they own a holiday home, nor the name of the primary school where Ryan teaches. "I plan to be very active at the Human Rights Commission, and I don't want it to disrupt Ryan," he says solemnly. "I am used to the whole thing: he is not." Then, our interview almost at an end, Wilson gets reflective. "The concept of time," he says. "I think about that a lot. I feel I lost most of my teenage years, that I was unproductive, because of the chaos in my head over being gay and all that. Most people would look at me and think I was doing pretty well for myself, which is true. But the irony is that I feel I have a lot to make up." Seeing me to the door, he says: "I'm wondering if this was a good idea." "What?" I ask.

"The interview," he says. "It's a terrible idea!" I reply, joking. "Yes, well, I just want it to be fair," he says. "But fair is a relative concept, I guess."