The Wal-Mart Syndrome and Climate Change

This stuff about what 'all' or 'most' baby-boomers think and do is the same stuff the growth lobby put out in the mainstream media pretending it is a reflection of majority opinion. I was on the Jon Faine Show conversation hour with Steve Bracks (http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2010/04/19/2876868.htm?site=melbourne&...) in 2010 and Jon and Steve both said to me something like, "But surely you can see that if population growth went down and house prices went down that would be a real problem." And I replied that they were out of touch: most people don't have two houses. Many people don't own houses and the majority of people would be really pleased if house prices and rents went down. The phones were ringing hot with people who agreed with me, but the desirability of increasing house prices has been normalised in media-land and media jocks just can't allow the real majority to capsize that carefully promoted myth. My point is that the mainstream media is 'manufacturing consent'. It is telling us how it wants us to think we all feel. It manages thus to contrive an apparent climate of reduced criticism of greed. I think that the reality is that 'we' are not all investing in housing, many of us are disgusted by the land-speculation. A minority are able to speculate. As Kate implied, there is a whole sex maligned under guise of the spoilt baby-boomers who didn't earn equal salaries. If they had children that meant even less earning power and years in paid work. For those who did not have children, then they could not be said to have deprived their children of their inheritance. Look at all the women in the anti-growth movement! They deserve our recognition. Most of the real political activists are women - working outside the failed party system. Working for nothing. Doing what our paid politicians should be doing. Most of those women are baby boomers. By the way, it is the Anglo system of inheritance (derived via the Normans in Britain) that gave us this system where it is so easy to disinherit children. In sensible countries with Roman law, your children have a right to inherit your property equally. Although you might sell it off before you die, it's not well thought of. (In some countries like Switzerland, it used to be required of a parent that they get the consent of their children, or that they give them first option to buy.) Furthermore, the Roman-law state is bound to see that every citizen has housing that they can afford, as well as right to work or be supported by the state. Also, in Australia, the temptation to cash in on properties is probably one of the few ways of having a chance of avoiding destitution in old age these days. That again is the system and the growth lobby who market property as a commodity, rather than a place, a value, and a right of one's children and clan. And what got us into this housing unaffordability? 1. population growth engineering 2. foreign ownership liberalisation 3. internet marketing internationally from late 1990s We were never asked (as Mary Drost pointed out) whether we wanted a big population. As Bernard Salt (who writes like you about babyboomers and has a specialty in personifying age cohorts) says, "80 per cent of Australia doesn't want a big Australia." We knew this would happen if Big Australia were forced on us. How do we deal with it? Surely not by pitting the generations against each other? We need to change those manufactured norms - by combatting the mainstream media propaganda - by writing for candobetter etc. Castigating the people who advocate commodification of the family home and sacrifice of children to debt for their education and housing in a hopeless job market from which for an increasing number the only way out is dealing drugs, stealing, prostitution, joining the armed forces or suicide. It's late. Hope this makes some sense.