In 2016 columnist for The Australian, Bernard Salt got riled up in an article about young people who go out and order ‘smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more’.
According to him, he can afford dropping $20 on lunch because he’s middle aged and has raised his family but young people – they should be eating at home and putting their brunch money toward a house.
This statement made news publications across the world, with the estimates on social media that at that price you would need to sacrifice a weekly brunch for close to 200 years to afford the deposit for a middle of the range home in Sydney.
Young people have been locked out of the property market, but it is much easier to insinuate young people are lazy and wasting their money on brunches rather than looking at the reasons for that like availability, affordability and debt.
We see this kind of thinking about young people everywhere – particularly as they are consistently blamed for the unemployment crisis.
However, apparently having young people globally not only dismantling the whole basis of that argument and clowning you on social media at the time wasn’t enough to stop anyone else from publicly spurting this narrative.
In 2017 Tim Gurner, a luxury property developer and millionaire, made headlines after he told 60 Minutes that the reason why young people couldn’t break into the property market was because they’re spending all their money on ‘smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each’.
Because as we all know, saving on $4 coffees is the same as being left a trust fund by a wealthy grandparent like Tim’s.
We’ve all heard these comments, whether they blame avocado toast for us not all jumping toward an unaffordable housing market or, like the Prime Minister, the ‘cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities’ to deflect from not being on track to achieve net zero emissions, the problem is obviously those young people and their food and drink spending.
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