OK Millennial, quit whingeing

fecundity that we now know as the Baby Boom. In the 1970s there was a brief scare about a new ice age and in the 1980s Aids was destined to break free from its redoubt in the gay and Haitian communities to cut a wide swath of death.

Boomers had to endure Peak Oil, the Ozone Hole, Y2K and Billy Ray Cyrus. Each crisis passed only to be replaced by a new panic, which is why they don’t take whining teenagers crying into their iPhones and waving jazz hands seriously.

Now, it is true that your grandparents didn’t pay for their degrees but unless they were from a relatively privileged background they probably didn’t actually go to university. Most Boomers went from school to employment while their grandchildren spend years in our everexpanding tertiary sector. Today nearly 10 per cent of the population is enrolled in some form of tertiary schooling, most of it useless. The cost is absurdly subsided and interestfree student loans mean even the nominal cost is never fully re-paid.

And here is the real kicker: Boomers bought houses. It was the done thing and property was cheap. Today property values have racheted up to levels that trigger the toughest of millennials. People who spent a decade getting their psychology degree can’t understand why they can’t afford a house of their own.

Boomers could afford houses because they and their parents built them. We built more houses in the 1970s than we do today. In the insulated, protected, cotton-wool safespace hyper-regulated world that today’s young pretendadults like to live, building and land-use regulations make knocking out cheap houses uneconomic.

This won’t change because a generation raised without the ability to act unsupervised are afraid to swing a hammer without three years training and under the guidance of a health and safety officer.

And as for the argument that our emissions are heating up the planet, I have one thing to say; pull my finger.