New aspirations and a changed global outlook require re-thinking our role

Blaming the boomers

When the 'baby boomer' generation reached its youth in the 1960s, it looked around, found war, poverty and discord, and blamed the generation of its parents. Now, something similar seems to be happening as today's youth see the baby boomers as the cause of the things that bother them. Scapegoating baby boomers is an emerging practice driven in large part by federal politicians with their repeated scaremongering over the future affordability of pensions and health care. Certainly, pension payments might present a challenge but European countries with similar prospects seem to be able to discuss the issue without scaremongering and scapegoating, and little is said about the role of productivity increases boosting federal coffers (this, after all, is a role of science and technology in a market economy).

Blaming baby boomers is, of course, nonsense. They simply continued the trend started by their parents when they created the post-war boom in affluence as industrialisation and export markets opened up and as work became plentiful. It was their parents who created the generation, who had an unprecedented number of children, but even to blame their parents is rather stupid because they were simply acting out emerging historic forces, much as the younger generation today does the same thing with its sometimes lowered expectations.

A nation changed

So Australia has changed. We know that because social and economic analysts tell us and because those of us over 35 years of age see it all around us. Sometimes the researchers tell us this to make us aware of the fact, sometimes because they see the changes as potential challenges to our way of doing things and because politicians and economic interests use social and economic change as an excuse for unpopular policies.

Now we're a medium-size power, still influential in our increasingly unstable region, trying to project the country economically and militarily onto the world stage. But we are doing so haltingly and with uncertainty, our population split between wealth and want to an extent unprecedented in our history at the same time that it is politically split over the policies of the government.

Whether a nation seeking to become a world player would be better placed to seek that role with its people less rent ideologically and economically is something we all should think about. But in this era of political opportunism and social confusion, that seems a distant prospect.