Just imagine. You are a younger Australian, perhaps nearing the end of secondary school or nearing the completion of your university degree. Perhaps you are beavering away as a young tradie, have a half-decent gig with a large retailer, or are considering joining the freelance circuit as an IT or healthcare specialist. Odds are, you are living at home.
The reason you are living at home is that it is so incredibly expensive to try to move out and rent a place that you and your significant other can only afford to live in a shared house. You hear stories. People in the past worked in factories, which made things when they were your age. It was a world where Australians made cars and car parts, washing machines and fridges, doors and windows for new houses, shoes and clothing items, electrical goods, and printed books. Young people could get jobs doing all that stuff, too. If they were moving about the country, there was always work somewhere in agriculture.
But that isn’t on the menu in front of today’s young. They can run around like blue-arsed flies, making meals of one sort or another or delivering the same. They can be the ultra-polite and cheery smiling faces imploring a purchase in retail across the board, or tapping out the base-level administrative grind of any customer interface, or being ultra-polite on the call centre lines listening to the gripes of the masses while praying their clientele don’t soak up too much of their time or ask for something that isn’t in their instructions, SOPs, or on their daily whiteboards. Some young people take up apprenticeships where they can do the grunt work across trades, much the same as their predecessors.