Crikey’s Bernard Keane is well behind MB but still well ahead of the MSM and deserves praise:
…focus on how the budget affects the young is misleading, because its measures are only the most recent, and relatively small, part of a much wider array of policies skewed against them but so embedded in our political and economic culture we barely see it.
…Failure to address climate change now is a vast inter-generational shift in wealth from Australians who will live in the second half of this century – and who will face lower economic growth, higher prices, fewer jobs and higher taxes as a result of it — to our own, so that we can enjoy a standard so living so neglibly higher that it is no longer even noticed by consumers.
And both sides of politics have resisted doing anything significant about housing affordability beyond talking about it — meaning property owners (whose homes are exempt from capital gains tax) and those with sufficient income to take advantage of negative gearing are privileged over those entering the housing market.
…Thus the short-term measures targeting people under 35 in the budget occur in a broader policy landscape of deeply embedded long-term policies against their interests. And that landscape is one in which the government’s generosity to previous generations — free education in the 1970s and 1980s, middle-class welfare and generous pensions in the noughties — is shut down for them under the insistence that it’s doing them good, that they must pay their own way and support an ageing population as well.
This policy bias against the young and future generations isn’t a monopoly of one side of politics.
I try not to think about too much because it makes me so angry. What kind of society eats its own children? Australia is dying for a youth political party but, FFS, it’s got to be done right.
