Business Spectator’s Robb Burgess has posted a thought-provoking article today arguing that the seeds have been sown for the mass emigration of young Australians seeking better opportunities offshore:
… unemployment in the 18 to 24 age group has been rising steadily since the Lehman Brothers global shock of late 2008, from a low around 9 per cent to 14 per cent today…
If many youngsters had not given up job hunting, the 14 per cent unemployment rate would be even higher…
[The financial system] present[s] a current 18-to-24 year-old with a future of near-insurmountable struggle… house prices have soared to lofty heights that make older generations asset-rich, and leave young generations stranded…Oh, and Treasurer Hockey has lifted the retirement age to 67, with more increases ahead.
So why not sail away and “leave a country that’s finishing for one that’s beginning”?..
Good question. What Burgess has effectively described is Australia’s politico-housing complex in full flight: of selling-out its youth in order to feather the nests of the ruling baby boomer class.
There is no greater example of this process that Australia’s highly distorting taxation system that mis-allocates national savings into mortgages, along with the myriad of other tax concessions – which represent 8% of GDP, the highest of their kind in the OECD – that drive the politico-housing complex economic model.
Throw in public guarantees for the nation’s banks, which have prevented markets from-restoring balance to the system, the state government restrictions on housing supply, the record high immigration levels (including unfettered use of 457 visas), and un-policed foreign buying activity of existing real estate, and you have the wholesale degrading of our national political economy and future standards of living for the expressed purpose of boosting baby-boomer dominated property-owner wealth.
And let’s not even begin on the failure to address climate change and the massive wealth transfers from future households to polluters embedded in Direct Action.
Instead of attempting to address these failings of the economic model for young Australians, what we received in the May Budget was draconian cuts to unemployment benefits and a radical overhaul of education funding that will dramatically increase the cost of higher education for future students.
The political economy has been systematically rigged against Australia’s youth, which as Burgess points out is utterly unsustainable. And the end result is likely to be a mass exodus from Australia as younger, working Australians grow fed up with paying ever-increasing taxes to fund an ageing population, whilst receiving less in return.
