It was a sad day when Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain died in 1994, not only for him and his family, but for his generation. Much of the Australian media coverage was brutally negative. Cobain was compared to baby boomer musicians who had died age 27 like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.
And guess what? The non-baby boomer was found undeserving of all the accolades heaped on him.
But by then ‘Gen X’, as Cobain’s generation were known, had got used to being trashed in the media.
Shortly after that, angered by the coverage, I began researching my book about intergenerational warfare, Gangland Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism, which focused on how the media, through the 1990s, routinely disparaged young people and their cultures.
They were cast as ‘politically correct’ whingers, like the young ‘victim feminists’ Helen Garner portrayed in her book The First Stone, or as charlatans, like the author Helen Demidenko, who was the object of national scandal after her book The Hand that Signed the Paper was revealed as a hoax.
Meanwhile, book reviewers derided the ‘grunge’ fiction being published by authors such as Christos Tsiolkas and Justine Ettler, and newspaper feature articles derided subcultures who dressed ‘funny’ like Goths, and sneered at young people because of their fondness for piercings and tattoos.
" All they saw was sneering, smug, condescension at their supposedly feckless ways."
Even back then many young people were doing it tough. At the time I was struck by the number of people I knew who were getting to thirty but had never had a permanent job and who instead balanced two or three casual jobs. Who felt like they’d never be able to buy a house or support a family like their parents had at the same age. Nor did they see themselves or their plight reflected in the media. All they saw was sneering, smug, condescension at their supposedly feckless ways.
The cultural lockout
Now it’s Gen Y’s turn. For the past decade or so the media has been full or articles trashing them for their laziness and feckless ways, their lack of interest in a proper job, their supposed political apathy, and preference for Facebook over the 6pm news.
It’s all part of an exercise to blame victims of economic reform for its effects. If Gen Y are routinely portrayed as lazy, entitled do-nothings, obsessed with selfies and social media, still living at home at age thirty, then who needs a decent youth policy, or attention to higher education fees, or liveable welfare payments? Instead, the odd stellar achieving web entrepreneur aside, young people have been branded as ‘undeserving’.
The stats
A couple of years ago a report from the Grattan Institute laid out the economic issues. Young people haven’t benefited from the growing wealth of Australian society since the early 2000s. Wealth grew significantly for those over 55, while those aged between 25 and 34 actually went backwards.
Much of this wealth is tied up in housing, but housing ownership has been diverging by age, with home ownership rates falling steeply among those aged 25 to 34.
As Jennifer Rayner has written in her excellent book Generation Less, houses have gone from costing three times the average income in 1970, to six times the average income.
Meanwhile, while the rate of casual and part-time work has stayed reasonably constant overall, it has risen steadily among those aged under 25.
As Rayner shows, the problem isn’t just unemployment, it’s underemployment, which since 1980 has quadrupled among those aged 15-24, a much steeper rise than among older Australians.
At the same time, pay rises have proportionately been much less for low paid workers than for higher paid workers, and young workers have seen only slow wage increases compared to older workers.
The net result is that many young people are shut out of the housing market both by rising prices and because they lack the means and job stability to pull together a deposit and get a loan.
Worse, many young people enter the workforce carrying higher education fee debt that mitigates their ability to get a housing loan. And that, as Rayner points out, may also inhibit their willingness to take on debt and risk, by doing innovative things like starting new businesses.
Meanwhile, property investors pocketed $42 billion of tax deductions in 2012-13 by taking advantage of negative gearing of rental losses.
"This kind of handout amounts to intergenerational theft because the tax deductions are added to the deficit, to be paid off later."
And while we’re talking about intergenerational theft, let’s not even mention the criminal lack of real action on climate change.
The way forward
So what’s the answer? Well, let’s get one thing straight. Trashing baby boomers isn’t it. Sure, by sheer weight of numbers and the long post-war boom many of them enjoyed a demographic magic carpet ride. But most worked hard for what they have. No-one should begrudge them that. And they generally have children and grandchildren, so are hardly disconnected from the issues.
Pushing people aside to ‘make way for the next generation’, as some have advocated, isn’t the answer. Solving one problem by creating another is no solution to anything. And everyone should have the right to earn an income.
Besides, the idea that baby boomers are all cashed up property speculators is a myth. Many baby-boomers did not start paying super until into their mid 40s. Many got retrenched in the GFC and never worked again. Many, especially women, have very little super at all. And pushing people out of work simply places an increased burden on welfare systems, which will be paid for by the young.
The deeper issue
The real issue here is the politics of work, and the expendability of people, in an increasingly hard-edged economic environment. The politics of ‘precarity’ that was first tested out on young people in the 1990s is now moving up the line into the lives of the middle-aged and middle class.
What we need to address all this is on the face of it simple enough: a commitment to policies that will genuinely grow the economy and at the same time address disparities so as to create wealth for all.
"This means a recognition that education is a public as well as private good that should be properly funded"
Instead of ideological attacks on public education, we need policies that recognise the connections between education, innovation, and wealth creation. This means a recognition that education is a public as well as private good that should be properly funded through, for example, a restoration of TAFE and training programs decimated by misguided free-market thinking, and funding universities properly.
And what about a fund, as Rayner suggests, to help young people borrow to start business, since they haven’t got the ballast of a home to borrow against and because too many are carrying higher education debt when they enter the workforce? And a national mentoring scheme to connect older entrepreneurs with young?
Housing policy, too, can no longer be left to the market. Supply hasn’t kept pace with demand, and speculative rorts like negative gearing haven’t helped.
What’s needed, in other words, is thinking that connects government interventionism to economic outcomes in socially productive ways, and that takes us beyond the ideological nostrums of failed trickle-down economics. This shouldn’t be misunderstood as a call to an old-fashioned welfare state. Instead, the role of government can be understood as helping to create participation, which will itself grow economic and social opportunity.
Not just for young people, but for all.
Mark Davis is an author and academic of Media Studies at the University Of Melbourne.
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