Australia’s economy has become a young people-screwing machine. So how do we unscrew ourselves?
No one woke up one fine morning with the grand ambition to mess with an entire generation just for kicks. Yet here millennials are, unequivocally, unmistakably, screwed.
This is evident when I compare my 29-year-old self to my mother who had it all: debt-free, married, two kids and a stable home sweet home. Meanwhile, I’ve stacked up four uni degrees, struggle to pay off debt, live paycheck to paycheck, and burn the midnight oil 16 hours a day, seven days a week just to prove ... well, something. Hats off to mother dear, but seriously, does this seem fair?
And you’ll hear the same tune from most of my millennial crew.
We’ve taken twice as much student loan as our parents, are three times less likely to own a home today than adults were in 1991, have poorer mental health than any previous generation, and many of us won’t ever fully retire.
The stereotype that we are smashed-avo-obsessed, lazy, flighty, oversensitive, fiscally inept and entitled is too far-fetched. Let me take a sledgehammer to that myth: despite being hit hardest by recent inflationary crisis, we millennials are also the ones more likely to take financial steps to cut corners on nonessential items and put off those big-ticket purchases.
Stereotypes suck – and often apply only to the tiniest, richest, whitest sliver of young people. All the nuances of our generational screwery is lost when glazing over someone’s race, class, sexuality, childhood experience and family background.
We have read about intergenerational theft, especially between boomers and millennials. But what’s rarely spoken about is that the poorest of us are further away from the wealthiest of us, accentuating the gaping income and wealth disparities across generations.
It’s no news that the economic and social outcomes for women, Indigenous Australians, individuals with disabilities or caregiving responsibilities, LGBTQI+ individuals and those from lower socioeconomic, rural or migrant family backgrounds are consistently poorer compared with their counterparts.
But in a generation where the average millennial is left longing for a fair go, it seems cruel that inequalities of the most disadvantaged among us not only persist but also mingle and multiply.
This intersectional screwery runs deep in all the realms where we’re getting the short end of the stick – housing, education and employment.
Take the housing market, for instance, and the government policies that favour asset accumulation over housing affordability. The Australian dream of homeownership has become a distant mirage as soaring property prices outpace income growth. A lowskilled boomer worker had a better shot at owning a home than a millennial in the same occupation. Sure, some lucky ones get a leg up from the bank of mum and dad, but not everyone has that privilege. And those inheritances mostly land in the laps of the already wealthy, widening the gap even further.
For the more disadvantaged millennials, even thinking about home ownership is an audacious dream. Affordable housing, which is a fundamental human right, is out of reach for many. Indigenous Australians, for example, are severely overrepresented among the homeless, with women comprising a majority of new cases.
And before you point to the silver lining that millennials have achieved greater female workforce participation than any other generation, I’d like to remind you how the gender pay gap still shamefully persists.
Then there’s education: once seen as the golden ticket to success, it now saddles us with unprecedented debt. Boomers could work minimum wage and pay off their debts – something that will take us at least twice as long.
In a representative cohort study, I found that millennials who were female were in relatively poor health and wealth when growing up and those from a lower socioeconomic background were more likely to be in a job that did not match their educational qualification.
Insecure work piles on the misery, sliding more of us into poverty. Parttime employment, casual contracts, the gig economy – we’re stuck in a cycle of precarious employment. Migrant youth, standing at the forefront of gig economy, experience a set of compounding vulnerabilities related to insecure work, residency status and job-related health hazards. Similarly, LGBTQ+ and caregiving youth continue to face added identitybased discrimination in these shaky workplaces.
Taken together, the economy that has become a young people-screwing machine, widening not only the intergenerational gap but also the intragenerational gap.
So, how to unscrew yourself ?
While I’m wary of pointing fingers, let me acknowledge that there is a laundry list of overdue federal policy changes that would at least begin to fortify our future and reknit a more inclusive and equitable safety net. Even amid the awfulness of our political moment, the best way to fight structural disadvantage, I say, is to change the structure itself.
And, rebellious as it may sound, living in a democracy affords us (all of us) some power.
Millennials and younger generations are on the brink of outnumbering older cohorts as the largest voting bloc. My research shows we are not becoming more conservative as we age and are more inclined to vote based on policy issues than along party lines. We’ve already made significant waves in the recent 2022 federal election.
So, before succumbing to despair (if you’re a millennial) or rolling your eyes (if you’re a boomer), consider this: we’re on the right track. Yes, some help (and perhaps some empathy) from the government would be nice, but we can always change that if it doesn’t suit.
• Dr Intifar Chowdhury is a youth researcher and a lecturer in government at Flinders University
It seems cruel that inequalities of the most disadvantaged among us not only persist but also mingle and multiply