Illustration: Jim Pavlidis. Here's another. According to new research by the Grattan Institute titled "Age of entitlement: age-based tax breaks", senior Australians today enjoy Howard government era tax breaks which mean a retired couple earning $70,000 of taxable income pays $2845 less in tax a year than a young couple on the same income. Salt is astounded to have observed hipsters paying $22 for smashed avo. Well, the size of these tax breaks is enough to ensure Australian couples aged 65 and over could buy 129 serves of smashed avos a year – a serve each every Sunday, and then some. Similarly, a single pensioner drawing taxable income of just under $27,000 each year from term deposits pays no tax. But a 25-year-old part-time student earning the same amount will pay $1690 – again delivering the pensioner a windfall serve of smashed avo each week.

Avo-gate has exposed a chasm between the generations. Credit:Eddie Jim Three policies from the Howard era deliver the boost to seniors: the senior and pensioners tax offset, a higher income threshold for paying the Medicare levy and a higher rebate on private health insurance. Because the poorest pensioners – drawing the full age pension and nothing else – pay no tax to begin with, most of these benefits go to middle to high-income retirees, including wealthy self-funded retirees who also enjoy tax-free withdrawals from their super. Together, the Grattan Institute calculates these concessions drain the budget by $1 billion a year. In addition to being unaffordable, these are just manifestly "unfair" to young people, says chief executive John Daley.

According to previous work by the institute, the average senior household receives $30,000 more in government benefits each year than they chip in as taxes, up from about $20,000 at the turn of the century. All other age groups contribute more than they drain, or drain by only a few thousand dollars. Thanks to the mining boom, net government transfers to older households increased by about $22 billion a year between 2004 and 2010 – about half the size of federal budget deficits in recent years. Governments have long taxed young people to fund the old, but "large tax breaks for seniors are a relatively new invention that were not provided to the previous generation of seniors", the report finds. As a result, just 13 per cent of seniors paid tax in the 2010 financial year, versus 27 per cent in the mid 1990s. So, yes Bernard, we see you and your army of "middle-aged moralisers" judging us as we devour our smashed avo and silently blaming us for our property-owning frustrations.

We've also been watching. We've watched as you've dragged the heft of your demographic bulge through the tax and welfare system, with politicians only too glad to buy your votes. We've watched as you were granted rights to sock hundred of thousands of dollars into your super nest eggs while we were busy paying off university debts you never had to pay. We've endured having one dollar in every 10 deducted from our pay packets and locked away in super to make sure that, in our sunset years, we are not as big a drain on the budget as your generation has been. We've watched as the structural lowering of interest rates has delivered a one-off windfall to existing property owners.

And yes, we've watched as the end of the mining boom has thrust the budget into deficits which young Australians will be paying off for generations to come. So while older households are drawing down $10,000 more a year from the public purse, the Grattan Institute also estimates younger households will pay about $10,000 more over their lifetimes for every year of deficit accumulated between 2010 and 2016. Why don't we just add that to the $42,000 a year we pay for daycare for our kids, or the sky-high rents and supersized mortgages we pay to live in a properties of similar size and amenity enjoyed by factory workers during the industrial revolution. And you'll forgive us if, instead of lounging about in our backyards – which we don't have – we sun ourselves instead on milk cartons outside local cafes, drowning our sorrows in fatty foods. We don't ask for your sympathy. Only, perhaps, that you pay your fair share of taxes.

Loading Until then, all we ask is to be allowed to enjoy our breakfasts free from the condescending and hypocritical gazes of our "taxed-not" seniors. Oh yes, and remember us fondly in your wills, won't you?