Among the myriad indicators of Liberal dysfunction, one statistic leaps out: voters under 34 now prefer the Greens to the Coalition.
The figures suggest Australian youth reject the traditional alternative government, opting instead for a party considerably to Labor’s left.
No one should be surprised that conservatism does not appeal to those with nothing to conserve, nor that young people reject a status quo so manifestly stacked against them.
The recent stories about student debt illustrate the rigged hand dealt to the young.
Hecs-Help debts don’t gather interest. That’s because they’re not meant to grow – but, suddenly, they are. Back in the day, the indexation of student loan to inflation didn’t signify much. In today’s economy, however, an average debt of $25,000 jumps by $1,760 after June. According to the National Union of Students, the latest rise in CPI increases the liabilities of graduates by a remarkable $4.5bn.
The hike feels both grotesquely unfair, but also, in a way, entirely predictable, another grim example of young people punished for doing everything right. The social theorist Stuart Hall famously described race as the modality through which class gets lived. Something similar might be said about age, a category into which every injustice seems to crystallise.
Consider housing. Despite a softer property market, home ownership remains impossible for much of the population. If rising interest rates pushed prices down marginally, they rendered mortgages correspondingly less viable, while contributing to a precipitous increase in rents.
To put it another way, people still can’t buy houses – and now they can’t rent them, either.
The housing crisis screws lots of people (Anglicare describes fewer than 1% of rental properties as within the budget of those on the minimum wage) but, in particular, it screws the young, who can’t muster deposits for bank loans, and feel deep in their bones they never will. Understandably, many contrast their circumstances with the norms prevailing a few decades ago, back when Matt Groening could conceive a TV show centred on a schlubbish everyman in a dead-end job and then portray Homer Simpson living in a spacious suburban house with a wife and three kids.
Homer still toils in Springfield’s nuclear power plant but his demographic cohort now runs the world. In Australia, most of our politicians attended (as did this writer) university back when students paid next to nothing for education. Not coincidentally, the average parliamentarian owns, or has a stake in, two houses, with many MPs having considerably more. Karen Andrews, for instance, reportedly owns seven properties and Tony Burke, six; one-time public housing tenant Anthony Albanese now gets $115,000 in rent from his real estate portfolio.
The generational unfairness evident manifests just about everywhere.
Take a look at the ABC’s mind-blowing visualisation (really – just look at it!) of the stage-three tax cuts, a policy to which Labor apparently remains committed. As Guardian columnist Greg Jericho writes: “Almost half of the total benefits go to the richest 3% and so massive are the costs at $300bn over 9 years, that you could raise jobseeker from its current rate of $693 a fortnight to $1,925 and you would still end up with a smaller government deficit in 2032-33 than you would with the Stage 3 tax cuts.”
But it’s also worth noting that, as well as facilitating a tremendous transfer of wealth to the rich (such as politicians, who stand to benefit by $18m in the next decade), the change disproportionately rewards older Australians, with those under 25 receiving only 2.8% of the billions directed to the ageing and the well-to-do in 2024.
Even as he slashes the governmental revenue base, Albanese wants to spend $368bn on nuclear submarines. I’ve written previously on the dangers of the arms race playing out in Asia Pacific and the astonishing insouciance with which strategists now discuss conflict between nuclear powers. But recall, too, how when the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald convened a panel of anti-China hawks to urge a “psychological shift” in preparedness for war, its experts also suggested the reintroduction of military service. Now, we’re not going to see conscription any time soon but the very suggestion illustrates the dynamic of intensifying geostrategic tension: old people might plan wars but young people will have to fight them.
And then there’s climate change, the most profound generational crime imaginable.
Environmentalists describe the period after the second world war as “the great acceleration”, when the spread of American-style consumer capitalism massively intensified the depletion of nature. That era also coincided with the baby boom.
By contrast, if you’re 20 now, you’ll turn 47 in 2050, meaning you’ll still be in the prime of life as, on current trends, parts of the planet become too hot for human habitation, extreme weather grows increasingly common, millions of people get driven from their homes and extinctions cascade through the biosphere.
That’s the legacy handed to young people by their elders, a crisis on a scale unparalleled in human history.
No wonder the kids don’t vote Liberal – and that so many of them mistrust the ALP.
Of course, as a theory of social change, generationalism only gets you so far.
Poverty, racism and bigotry affect people of all ages. No one can live on Australia’s welfare system – but, statistically, one of the biggest groups forced to do so consists of women over 45.
While most voters under 30 despise the conservatives, you can still find plenty of young men attracted to the far right. For all the memes mocking Karens, today’s progressives owe a huge intellectual debt to a New Left founded by boomers. Sure, some Vietnam-era protesters aged into a sour conservatism but plenty of them didn’t: at any environment or refugee rally, you’ll encounter octogenarians far more militant than the gen Zers around them.
As for climate change, it’s an oppression multiplier, with global heating disproportionately affecting all the traditional victims of injustice.
Nevertheless, it’s entirely right for young people to feel cheated by what they’ve inherited, to despair about those politicians who won’t live to see the consequences of their environmental timidity, and to despise the greybeards wringing their hands about gender diversity and drag queens while lauding as a comic genius an old guy in a dress.
A thousand years or so ago, Bob Dylan warned parents that their sons and daughters were beyond their command. If youth rebellion was justified then, it’s a million times more warranted today.
• Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist
