The generation gap has implications for all levels of government

On a more personal level, the conflict plays out in workplaces and social settings where the "young" (sometimes people in their 40s), eye the positions and salaries of the boomer glut. Combined with fiscal constraint, this type of intergenerational tension is pernicious. For Generation X, their continual infantalisation leads to resentment, and ruthlessness. For the Boomers, it generates continual unease about their position and the motivations of younger people around them.

In my workplace, this is evident by the average age of staff but also in the way that decreasing funding to higher education plays itself out in the day-to-day operations of universities. Take the Australian Research Council (ARC), for example. The ARC disburses funds from the Commonwealth to researchers in Australia's universities on the basis of competitive applications. Money is tight, application numbers are high and therefore success rates are low and falling. In the last round of grants, Political Science not only fared very poorly but the disproportionate tendency for disbursements was to towards those with "track records", namely: professors and associate professors. Thus, as the money goes down and average age goes up, structural tendencies inevitably bias towards those who've been through the mill, proven themselves, and are deemed worthy of another dip in the pot. While we can all see the logic of this, industrial harmony is not an output of such a system.

This isn't a simply a problem for Australia's universities. The Victorian Public Service is currently eyeing its "retirement bulge" with growing alarm. The current proposals (to encourage workers to stay on past 55) will only delay the eventual labour shortage, while doing little to ease workplace tensions and the frustrated career expectations of those young 40 and 50-year-olds. The VPS is not alone in this, and private sector organisations are similarly affected.

Where we're going to feel the pinch is in local government. Pressed hard by increasingly politically active local residents to increase services, while squeezed for money, our cities and shires are set to be the level of government that will fare badly by this demographic trend. Because local government is dependent on municipal rates for their budgets, there is a tendency for this sector to see ratepayers (home owners, the boomers) as their major constituency and the group that councils need to service well. This has the tendency to subtly disenfranchise those Xers who don't, and maybe never will, directly pay rates. As this group grows in number, the great strength of local government over many years – its intimate size and claims to greater democratic legitimacy because of the relative closeness of councils to their populations – is under a real and growing threat.

The Municipal Association of Victoria's Chairman, Brad Matheson, is one who is clearly aware of this problem. In calling for the Commonwealth to directly fund local government and break their reliance on rate incomes, Matheson, knowingly or not, has touched on the key reform that will restructure our municipalities in such a way as to overcome some of the caustic intergenerational tensions. Better for the conflict to be writ large at the federal level, with the lines of demarcation clear, than a Lord of the Flies scenario in the 800 local-government bodies around the nation.

Populations age and change slowly but these trends are irresistible. We need to plan now for the way the boomer-Xer transition will play out, or commit ourselves to decades of social conflict. Time appears to be running out, the Council's just announced a major redevelopment of the park.