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A new switched-on and cynical generation

By Peter West - posted Monday, 12 December 2005


A small proportion of us baby boomers were able to leave school for “uni”. This usually meant the old sandstone universities in the capital cities. After many changes, we are moving back towards an elite which goes to university (and then is saddled with a HECS debt). If our 20-year-olds sit at university lectures, they will sit close to many Asians. We found out in November that in NSW selective schools, fully one-third of the children are Asian. Other Asian or foreign students will be there at university too. Anglo-Aussie students might well feel anxious or resentful about the smart Asians they must compete with and who seem to work harder than the Aussies.

Muslim kids have their own issues. My Muslim students feel they want to explain themselves and justify their ordinariness. One of my students commented, “I’m married to a guy called Bruce and he’s from Wagga Wagga. We sit and argue about football and cricket. How integrated can you get?”

When I swam at a Sydney beach last week, I noticed a noisy group of Muslim boys whom I learned were from the Bankstown area. They disappeared about 1pm to say their prayers. Most observers would see these youngsters  as lacking authority. Yet in some ways they are highly disciplined. Talk to them at length and you will see they have ideals: they want girlfriends and wives they can respect. They desperately want to be respected themselves. The search for respect takes them to lengths their fathers rarely considered.

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Gyms are full of young men who learn that society wants them to look good, have a strong chest and arms. Like their fathers, they feel the need to be masculine in acceptable ways. Men’s biology has apparently not altered very much. But what it means to be a man has been changed by all the societal developments that have hit us in the past 40 years: feminism, the arrival of waves of immigrants, technology. And society has changed the script for being a man somewhat as time has moved on.

The world of work is changing as you are reading this. Aussie children saw Hurricane Katrina expose a US in which millions are working poor and living in appalling housing: trailer parks and urban slums. Meanwhile, Aussie children's own clothes and many of the things they use are being manufactured in China.

People now under 20 will have to work in that changed global environment, in which “globalisation” will mean that Australians will have to accept the lower standards that operate elsewhere. Australian children won’t know the protected employment their parents knew in which working conditions were virtually guaranteed to most: holiday pay, ample sick leave, freedom from unfair dismissal. Many of them will have their Schoolies Week and come crashing down to earth when they are confronted by employers who will tell them when they will work, for how many hours, for what pay the employers decide is fair.

Like others, this generation has its contradictions. They are very aware of body image, but trends show that one-third of them will be obese by 2013. They are well-informed about diet and exercise but many are lazy, spending hours a week with the computer and the TV. And although they embrace new technology, they often seem complacent about political issues and have not transformed our political landscape. It would be great if they used their talents to create a dynamic Australia that really accepted our challenges and moved us forward in the next 30 years.

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Peter West acknowledges the ideas he received from Adam Longmuir and Ryan Barclay at UWS and Ali at JJJ. All responsibility remains his alone.



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About the Author

Dr Peter West is a well-known social commentator and an expert on men's and boys' issues. He is the author of Fathers, Sons and Lovers: Men Talk about Their Lives from the 1930s to Today (Finch,1996). He works part-time in the Faculty of Education, Australian Catholic University, Sydney.

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