’Tis the season for intergenerational warfare – for sniping about “entitled millennials”, for moaning about baby boomers purchasing their third property. Generation Y are spoiled and cocky, while boomers are selfish and wilfully ignorant.

(Nobody cares about poor old Generation X.)

Though generational markers should not be discounted as meaningless, most of the time when we are talking about generations, we are actually talking about class.

There is moaning about millennials who waltz into offices and expect to be the boss within six months. This is not about millennials, this is about rich kids. Someone raised by teachers in a country town does not walk into their city job to tell people what to do.

Millennials should stop moaning. They've got more degrees and low rates | Stephen Koukoulas Read more

The rise in internships is unethical and exploitative, no matter what type of family you come from, but the ones who are able to work for months at a time with no pay to secure a real job are the people with financial backing from their family, even if it’s “just” a rent-free room in a house where you don’t have to pay the bills or for food.

It is an undeniable fact, no matter which way you look at it, that it was easier to get into the property market 30 years ago. But it is rich people who own multiple properties today and it’s their offspring who will reap the benefits of that. There are large swaths of young people who are not locked out of the property market at all but will inherit the spoils their elders have managed to hoard.

The system has always been stacked in favour of the rich and it is only becoming more so. Thirty years ago it was possible to save a deposit for a property within a few years without any parental help, now that is laughable. The howl of millennials – house prices are now up to nine times average income – is legitimate but there are people who moan they will never be able to afford a house on their own which, while true, discounts the fact they have parents who will guarantee their loan, or even provide the deposit.

For boomers who did not buy into the house market – and there are many who didn’t – they now face the same soaring rents millennials face and have no family home to return to. “Buy in the outer suburbs,” smug boomers crow when the soaring property market is brought up. This decree that entire slabs of the city should be reserved for the rich is not just stupid – it ignores that prohibitive housing prices extend to the very fringes of the city – but dangerous.

You are not just pushing young people away from their workplaces, their family, their social circles when you say it is a privilege reserved for the rich to be able to live within your community, you are pushing all of the lower middle class and the poor out as well. Regardless of age.

This isn’t just about housing though. That truly is an obsession of the well off. Capitalism is failing worldwide and it is the poor who are bearing the brunt of it. The casualisation of the workforce, wage stagnation, job insecurity – all these things give millennials the constant low hum of anxiety that they have come to accept as normal. The picture is particularly grim for anyone not in the top 30% of earners in any wage bracket.

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An analysis of the latest tax figures show the top 1% of Australian earners amassed 9% of Australian income in 2013, the highest proportion since the 1950s. In the US underemployment has risen from 2.5% in 1999 to 4.3% in 2015, while in the UK it is up from 1.2% in 1999 to 7.29% in 2013. In Australia it was 2.7% in the 70s and in 2015 was 8.5%.

In the UK the alarm for inequality levels reaching Victorian times has been ringing for a few years with the gap between the rich and the poor widening. Analysis by the inequality trust show poorest fifth of society have only 8% of the total income, whereas the top fifth have 40%.

Globally, the poorest 50% of the Earth’s population owns 1% of the Earth’s wealth while the richest 1% own 46%.

Boomers have no doubt benefitted from their incredible electoral clout but as the old truism goes, the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting more screwed, no matter what age they are.

• Bridie Jabour will host the panel at Quarter Time – a topical Guardian Live event featuring Dom Knight from the ABC, Adam Creighton from the Australian and Guardian Australia’s Lenore Taylor on 14 April in Sydney.