The Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss has penned a ripping piece in The Monthly examining how the political and economic cards have been stacked against young Australians. Below are some key extracts:
The Liberal Party of Robert Menzies wanted all Australians to own their own home. The Liberal Party of Malcolm Turnbull wants us all to be landlords…
It is not just the high price of housing that prevents many from “settling down”. Over the past few decades Australian society, and the labour market in particular, has been fundamentally reshaped in ways that prevent workers and employers making long-term investments in each other…
After decades of labour market reform to make Australian workplaces far more “flexible” and decades of tax reform to make investment in rental housing “more attractive” it is now much harder for young Australians to form the kind of traditional families that conservatives often like to romanticise. It is no accident that it is now virtually impossible for young families to repay a mortgage on a single average income while one parent stays home to raise the kids. This is the inevitable consequence of those tax and labour reforms…
Australians in their 20s didn’t grow up in the laid-back land of the sickie, the smoko or the long weekend. They grew up with their parents coping with split shifts, unpredictable hours and weekend work…
With this in mind, it’s easy to see why young people have low expectations of both the public sector and those in public life… It is easy to blame young people for not caring about the state of our democracy. But it is also easy for young people to blame their democracy for never caring about them…
So perhaps it should come as no surprise that, come budget time, a parliament (that has only one member under 30, and knows young people are less likely to vote than older Australians) decides year after year to deliver something extra for the “grey vote” while lecturing the young about the need to search harder for jobs that don’t exist, and save harder for houses they’ll never be able to afford…
While we are regularly told that retirees who live in their own home need at least $50,000 per year to live “with dignity”, apparently young people, who may be raising kids and saving for a house on an income well below that, need to start repaying a [HECS] debt that older citizens never had to repay in the first place.
Of course, HECS-HELP repayments aren’t the only costs loaded upon the young. They are also pressured to buy private health insurance they don’t need to make it cheaper for older people who need it a lot. (Imagine if we made older people pay more for their car insurance to help keep prices low for younger people.) And young people must put 9.25% of their income into superannuation in order to ensure they can “fund their own retirement”. But they must also pay enough income tax to fund the retirement of those who didn’t have to save for their retirements…
What has been created is a two-tier political system…
Twenty years of deregulation (or “light touch” regulation), privatisation, contracting out, tax cuts, spending cuts and welfare reform have created a radically different Australian economy and society to the one that remains burned into the memories of older voters and politicians…
