How Australia was Ruined under the Stewardship of the Baby Boomers

I was a child in the 70’s. I reached adulthood in the late 1980’s. It was during this time that stewardship of Australia and its institutions passed from the Greatest Generation (the generation who grew up in the Great Depression then fought the Second World War) to what I suspect history will recall as the Sell Out Generation (AKA the Baby Boomers). Certainly I am not saying the 70’s were perfect. There was perhaps more racism (or perhaps it was just less hidden) there were thugs, there was poverty. But in the 60’s and 70’s people cared about poverty. Massive resources were directed at eliminating it. Social housing being one major area of spending. People then were prepared to reshape whole areas to accommodate the poor – we still use that housing today – the public housing towers (such as the ones recently locked down). Large swaths of Frankston were built as social housing. But there were good aspects in the 70’s. We had great public institutions. We had the SEC, Telstra, local manufacturing, top class universities. Monash University was created in that post war period. Immigration was truly targeted around public works and the need for specialised skills and labour – the Snowy River Dam project was built. I grew up in Malvern – people of all demographics lived in the inner suburbs then (Hawthorn, Prahran, Armadale, etc) – rich and poor, side by side. I remember going to friend’s houses, friends whose parents had hardly any furniture and needed to dig around for spare change to buy food. But even though people were less wealthy, over all the economy was good. Talk to people of that time and they will tell how if you went for jobs you would easily get 5 good offers. There were opportunities. My father left school at 16 and ended up running one of the largest companies in the southern hemisphere. A company that that grew up over the post-war period. No need then to spend 4 years at university and come out in debt to the tune of ten’s of thousands of dollars. Houses were cheap. Public transport was good, infrastructure was at human scale – no crazy mazes of over passes like we see in the city now. There were local shops - strip shops rather than huge mega-box stores. Lots of small businesses. Spotlight was another small shop on Glenferrie Road. So what happened? Gradually the baby boomers came of age. Their buying habits and desires re-shaped Australia – and things got worse as they came to have more power, both financially and within our institutions. Firstly, their family life changed. Generation X are the children of the baby boomers, also known as the neglected generation. Gen Xer’s were left alone to find their way through life, to determine their values. Their parents walked away from the institutions that had been at the heart of Australia for the previous hundred years. When the Boomers were children and teenagers, churches sat at the heart of Australian society. Pretty much all sports clubs revolved around the church. Communities were real, people interacted, looked after each other. People cared about each other, and for each other. At the least the Boomer’s parents did. The Boomers walked away from this, preferring to do their own thing. The church based organisations and sports clubs slowly died out, to be replaced by more secular, less social engrained organisations, more heartless, more money and status oriented. For example, the AFL (then VFL) clubs in the 70’s were filled with locals, played in the local areas. Players stayed with the club for their whole career and did not get paid much. They played because they loved the sport, and they loved their club. By the early 80’s players were being poached between teams. It was not long before large amounts of money were involved in paying and poaching players. The game was changed forever. Some clubs went broke. Other clubs moved interstate, something that was unthinkable in the70’s. In the 80’s the boomer’s kids became teenagers. The social structures their parents grew up with were now disintegrating. The boomer’s kids were left to create their own institutions and care for themselves. There were no home video games or cable T.V available back then, so boys and girls organised around gangs. The Sandy Boys, the Broady Boys etc. roamed trains and streets, fighting with each other, terrorising other kids and engaging in crime. Their parents however were too busy looking after their own interests. These interests reshaped Australia. Gradually public assets were sold. The argument was they were too inefficient, they should be privatised. Profit rather than social good became the motive and justification for everything. The institutions that for the past 100 years had built the Australia we lived in were gradually dismantled and sold off. The SEC was one. It used to train young Australians in all sorts of technical apprenticeships. No longer. The children of the baby boomers would need to undertake their own education at colleges and universities. Not long afterwards, their grandchildren would also have to pay for it themselves. Also, in the name of efficiency and growth (which is needed for big profits) we would bring in trained people. Immigration now was not driven by grand social visions, but by visions of competition, reducing prices reducing or outsourcing training costs. i.e by profits. The vast bulk of these profits flowed into the pockets of baby boomers who bought up the shares in the privatised public organisations. These organisations - now businesses - sent their profits not to the state governments to be used for social programs, but to the personal accounts of the baby boomers, to spend on their own private hobbies and houses. During this transformation Telstra was sold off, local water companies that once responded to local needs became huge organisations that now bully local populations. Like South East Water, which used its power to build a massive multi-story building right on the Frankston foreshore – against the clear will of residents, and against long standing promises of council to create a beautiful boulevard there. Council employees and South East water employees were seen hugging each other after the decision was approved. In addition to the construction of a massive building (you can see this eye-sore from across much of the bay) a popular local public car park was requisitioned solely for the use of South East Water employees. This is just one example of how these organisations now serve their own corporate interests rather than public ones – there are thousands of other cases like this. So let’s do a summary of what happened to Australia under the stewardship of the Baby Boomers. Big, unaccountable institutions arose. It was the creation of beasts like Melbourne Water – which exists mostly to service and work with developers in converting local wetlands, catchments and waterways into housing estates and roads. Melbourne Water now uses its massive resources to stomp on and/or confound the small, poorly funded community groups trying to preserve something of the neighbourhoods and natural environment they grew up in. A few resolute and foolhardy baby boomers fought this good fight – many still are fighting over 40 years later, although it is clear now that not only the battle, but the entire war has been lost. Most baby boomers were just happy with the flows of money and watching their wealth grow. Australia allowed most of its manufacturing to go overseas, undercut by cheap labour with no protection offered by any government (labor or liberal). During this period we imported much labour – we, as one of the wealthiest nations on earth, progressively poached doctors and specialists from poorer nations. That way we could spend more on fun times and fun things for (mostly) baby boomers. Our waste has gone through the roof – things like the reusable glass bottles - which soft-drinks used to come in - have been dispensed with by packaging companies who make more out disposable plastic containers, and who then present themselves as beacons of sustainability for collecting this waste and shipping it off to third world countries. It is now a sad Australia where spin and lies and contortions of the truth, and common-sense, are used to justify the most base self-interest. It is a more inequitable society – the young are loaded with debt and relatively little is spent on them, while everything possible is done to benefit the older generations e.g: house prices are pushed up enormously by sales to foreigners; banks don’t care how much they lend for houses, because during good times the bank profits will flow to their shareholders (mostly baby boomers) and when it all comes crashing down, these too-big-to-fail institutions will be bailed out by the tax-payer i.e mostly every generation after the baby boomers. The baby boomers typically live in the areas they grew up in – the delightful leafy suburbs, which are now only occupied by the wealthy. The poor are pushed out to the farther suburbs – not the distant but nice ones where the poor used to live – like Rye or Sorrento – which were once cheap. No those suburbs are where the wealthy have their second and third homes, and they are no longer dirt cheap (when I was a young adult a house in Rye cost around $60,000). No, the poorer people are housed in the great urban wastelands - Cranbourne or Melton – great seas of houses, with no local shops, high density living and crowded roads. These areas – particularly Cranbourne - were once prime farmland. But nothing is sacred or valuable to the Boomer generation when it conflicts with their self-interest. These have been sold off – and under Boomer philosophy the previous owners allowed to keep the massive windfall profits. No resource taxes or similar under the Boomer stewardship – that might transfer wealth to another generation. So here we are – where jobs are scarce (and are going to be much scarcer in the near future) and younger generations are loaded with debt such as Australia has never seen. House prices are 5 times what they were 20 years ago, council rates are 6 times what they were 20 years ago. We have some cushy jobs for people in the few large organisations – the big box retailers, the huge corporatised organisations that were once public institutions – everyone else is in a dog-eat-dog gig economy, and nothing, nothing, matters more than profits. So we find ourselves in 2020 in a world shaped by baby boomers in their own image. And what sort of world is that? It is one where – can you believe it – aged care centres are run not for the good of society or those in them, but for the profit and benefit of Maserati driving administrators. Well done Boomers. Mission completed. Money is now more important than ever before. And we have established that younger generations can be thrown under the bus for the benefit of older generations. Stewardship now is all about self-interest. I wonder what members of the Greatest Generation would think if they could look down and see what their children made of their legacy, what they made of the freedoms and institutions that were won over 150 years of hard work and great sacrifice. (PS: please note that the above is a generalisation - not all baby boomers are like this, and certainly not all are rich - apologies to those who are unjustly smeared by the above. It is intended as a general characterisation rather than a statement about all individuals.)