Once upon a time there was a land of opportunity called Australia. In it, a young person could hope to be raised amid perpetually rising living standards the envy of the world. Great weather, good universities, native English language the global lingua franca, reasonably affordable accommodation, proximity to Asia and relatives in Europe, very safe, high wages, good infrastructure, solid institutions and an excellent safety net all contributed to this outlook.
Remarkably, there was virtually no class system to hold this youth back. S/he could look forward to working hard, learning a well-paid tertiary career, enjoying a gap year and leaving home at a dignified age to set his or her own course to build independent wealth.
Then something went wrong. Very wrong. And the economic life-cycle of the Australian youth changed very much for the worse.
The youth now inhabited a land of wholesale corruption and greed called Straya. In it, a young person looked forward to declining living standards in perpetuity sliding down the global scale. Great weather turned into climate change and planet-wide destruction. Good universities plodded into an ever-declining future as pedagogical standards fell to meet the lowest common denominator of middle class Asian students paying for tuition. Native English was spoken less. Accommodations became a running joke as house prices soared to globally unaffordable levels and rents went with them as mass immigration stuffed people into major cities. Proximity to Asia threatened to overturn Australian democracy as Chinese regional hegemony mushroomed. Urban safety declined as global grievances were imported. Wages fell as policy mismanagement and mass immigration forced them down. Infrastructure got crush-loaded and environmental amenity was trashed. Solid institutions were debased by corruption and politicisation and anyone tapping the safety net was widely condemned for being a parasite.
What had been a fabulously horizontal society transformed swiftly into a vertical class structure of the landed and the deprived. The youth of Straya worked hard but could not get enough hours. When s/he did it was in competition with an imported coolie that lowered his or her wage. The university degree was now a mass-produced worthless piece of paper offering no competitive advantage. There was no chance of leaving home during or after university as the cost of living was absurd. The gap year turned into a global pilgrimage to find a higher paying job that offered the vague hope of buying a property back home, hamstrung by a currency held high by offshore borrowing to fund Strayan elders lavish lifestyles. Children of the Strayan youth’s own were deferred endlessly to age 39 and IVF exploded.
This is the economic life-cycle of the contemporary Strayan youth. Screwed by parents. Systematically exploited by government. Rorted by a parasitic media and over-concentrated corporate sector that can imagine no other outcome than defense of the Boomer rump. Destined to wipe the arses of, and serve coffees to, those former Australian youths that took it all for themselves.
