Published by The Age, Sunday 18 August

Baby Boomers are awful, right? The big houses, the franking credits and the gratuitous advice about young people’s breakfast choices. At least so says Twitter, the most Millennial of social media platforms. So are these cross-generational salvos just another manifestation of young adult angst, or are young people justified in feeling aggrieved?

Generation-on-generation progress in living standards has been the happy dividend of Australia’s strong economic performance since the Second World War. On average, children could expect to be substantially healthier, wealthier and better housed than their parents at the same age. This generational progress can no longer be taken for granted.

The wealth of households under 35 has barely moved in 15 years. And poorer young Australians have less today than poorer young Australians did 15 years ago. In contrast, wealth for older households has grown rapidly. A household headed by someone 65-74 now has on average $1.3 million in assets, up from $900,000 for a household of this age group in 2004, helped by the housing boom and growth in superannuation assets.

Housing markets are crucial to the divided fortunes of the younger and older generations. Booming property prices since the turn of the century have made many property owners in Sydney and Melbourne unexpected millionaires. At the height of the boom, the average capital gain for a regular house in Sydney was higher than average annual earnings. In other words, for a lot of workers their houses earned more than they did.

High house prices make it substantially harder for young people to save for a deposit. Home ownership rates on average have dropped significantly for households under 35 over two generations, with the biggest falls among the young and poor. In 1981, 60 per cent of people in the lowest wealth quintile aged 25-34 owned a home. Today the figure is just 20 per cent.