"OK Boomer!" Let me rise on behalf of my own baby boomer generation, not in disapproval of our X, Y and Z children but in their support. The "OK Boomer!" meme, popularised in the United States on social media and amplified across the Tasman by a young New Zealand MP to ridicule an entitled cohort, has sliced through generations to expose a widening disconnect between age brackets.

NZ Greens Chloe Swarbrick deployed the phrase "OK Boomer" in Parliament to put down a conservative MP who had been heckling her on climate change.

In Australia, the "OK Boomer" meme might just as easily be applied to growing tax-advantaged wealth disparities. My own Gen Y daughter has been going on about this for years, to which my response has been to accuse her, in jest, of "generational envy". After all, didn’t we Baby Boomers have our own generation gap in the 1960s, more pronounced than the one now, as we fought our battles with our "silent generation" parents? Didn’t we shift the country on its axis – and for the better – in the Vietnam era? And, by the way, didn’t Baby Boomers such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs create the software and hardware for the communications revolution to which Millennials are addicted?

All of this is true, but as the most privileged generation – with the caveat that many, many Baby Boomers born between 1946-1964 have fallen through the cracks – we have to admit that Millennials and their successor generation (known as Gen Z) have a point.