It’s tough to picture the future if you’re a New Zealander under 30.
Your first home has never been more out of reach, if you want to live in one of the main centres – not that we have much of a choice, because high rates of unemployment and thousands of dollars of student debt mean we go where the jobs are.
Even then, we’re faced with increasing costs of living and slow wage growth.
In short, our prospects are bleak, and especially so in comparison to the rosy route enjoyed by members of our parents’ generation. And economist Bernard Hickey can’t figure out why we’re not more angry about it.
We face a political contest between the people who have to pay the bill, and the people who receive the benefits, and that is building into a clash of the generations
He calls us the “baby bust” generation: burdened by debt, held apart from home ownership, the losers of sweeping changes imposed by Roger Douglas’ Labour government in the mid-1980s.
The baby boomers, meanwhile, continue to benefit from the free education and cheap property they had access to as young people.
Hickey predicts this gap between the older and younger generations will get bigger in the coming decades, before eventually coming to a head when the last of the boomers retire, and their children are left to foot the bill for their healthcare and superannuation.
“Ten, 20 years from now, the younger generation will realise they face a future of not … being as wealthy as their parents’,” he says.
“We face a political contest between the people who have to pay the bill, and the people who receive the benefits, and that is building into a clash of the generations.” Continue reading.
Source: The Wireless
Image: Stuff
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