That life has become extremely hard for young people in Australia is clear. Born during or after the 1980s, when governments began radically restructuring the economy to prioritise private gains over public good, millennials and Gen Z have only known their country as harsh and self-interested.
This cohort entered a job market teeming with insecure work and disposable labour, a welfare system geared to create low wages, and a housing system designed to generate income for investors and landlords, rather than house people.
The poorest young people have fallen the furthest. Home ownership for the bottom 20% of 25-34-year-old income earners has fallen over 40 percentage points since the 1980s to under 23% – one of the largest falls in the OECD. Many children of renters stare down a lifetime of poverty.
But comfortable living standards for young people and future generations does not come at the expense of that of older Australians. This claim relies on the flawed notion that there is only a certain amount of resources to go around. It relies on us believing the size of the pie is fixed, but it’s not.
The federal government’s recent proposed changes to super concessions for a tiny pool of multimillionaires shows how easily ruffled the gold feathers of the wealthy can be. Intergenerational warfare is a key weapon in the rich’s attempts to naturalise and obfuscate their wealth and power.
False equivalence is their first tactic. By creating a fantasy world where everyone is an “average mum and dad”, state-funded landlordism can be equated to pension plans, allowing the rich to claim “attacks on retirees”.
But maintaining multi-billion-dollar tax breaks to a wealthy minority is, of course, not the same as providing secure retirements. Australia’s $53bn a year outlays on super concessions, nabbed mostly by the rich, now outweigh the pension bill, which supports almost 2 million people – and currently fails to keep them out of poverty.
Australia’s tax concessions are empire building, and poles apart from the egalitarian social compact to support working people in old age. If the old rich were forgoing holidays and “nice cars” to accumulate funds over $3m, how were they planning to spend their bounties in the last 20 years of life, anyway? Yacht parties?
Another tactic is the classic divide and conquer. Blame people when they become ensnared in policies designed to fail them, and pin their material stagnation on personal failure or weakness. The cost of avocado on toast, iPhones and other new consumer goods apparently plugs the income cavern of exploding house prices, now a record-high 8.5 times median earnings.
If only young people could show restraint, like fiscal conservatives do. Take the retired 68-year-old Sydneysider who accused millennials of failing to make sacrifices to buy a home like her. Later, it was revealed she was a former general manager of Merivale, a hospitality behemoth accused in 2020 of $129m in wage theft – mostly from young workers. Is this really “mum and dad”?
An economic model putting private gains before public good needs cheerleaders, and the recent super debate exposes the minority of Australians who were bought off with taxpayer dollars. They’ll keep making noise. Meanwhile, the big businesses reaping record profits under the status quo need people to believe ghoulish views like those of Merivale’s former general manager are representative all old people.
But most older people seek to forge mutual social bonds across generations. They acknowledge young people will be worse off over their lifetimes, and want action. Many want younger Australians to have more political power.
For young Australians, their demands are modest, and familiar to older generations: the opportunity for decent work, a secure home, choices about family formation, and free education. And this is a worthy goal, not a sin.
How can we reach across generations and build a better Australia? Innovating the architecture of a new modern Fair Go requires that we transcend the warfare tropes and embrace a new kind of intergenerational politics – one based on solidarity and collectivism.
As Donald Horne reminds us, politics isn’t just for politicians, the media and elites. “In politics, we all have the right to consider ourselves experts”. By working together for a new vision of government that creates plentiful good jobs, social housing, a non-punitive social security system and more, we can extend the “golden years” to a new generation.
This vision requires we derail the public-subsidised gravy trains. It means dragging big untaxed wealth to the table to contribute to the nation’s future in young people. A bigger pie, better shared.
Alison Pennington is an economist, writer, and author of new book Gen F’d: How Young Australians Can Reclaim their Uncertain Futures. She is an adjunct senior research fellow in politics, philosophy and economics with La Trobe University
