Economic depression, delusion and the media

Another reason, not much reported by Australia's media, is that young people are living under the heel of a hegemony, imposed by uninterested politicians and comfortable members of the post-war generation.

They have watched as the Boomers were showered with senior payments, indexed against average male earnings, tax exemptions on the family home and superannuation tax breaks.

Less than half of 25-34-year-olds own their own home, compared with 61 per cent back in 1981, according to the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute.

Work for the Dole, the casualisation of the workforce and mounting HECS and VET Student loans, are all burdens young people face today, which older generations didn't. There's no more telling example of intergenerational intransigence than the failure to produce a cohesive energy and carbon emissions policy.

Now, like poor Don Quixote's barn horse, Rocinante, the kids will spend the next 30 years, carrying the tax burden. They'll part-pay for the Boomers expensive MRI's, hip replacements and therapy for depression, and government debt will hang around their necks like a yoke.

One of the strange quirks of history is that while we know plenty about what led to the Great Depression, the arrival of the virus has almost entirely wiped from our recent memory, the fact that Australia's economy was already flagging and that household debt was a massive 200 per cent of income.

Politicians and powerbrokers know that it's better to run self-congratulatory pieces on 'flattening the curve', rather than focusing on the bitter economic seeds the virus has sown for the future.