Particularly in the context of the recent Federal Budget, and the upcoming State Budget, we’ve been talking a lot about government spending and the long-term impacts it has on young people and their futures.
The most important piece of context to this budget puzzle is something referred to as the generational bargain which you might have seen us refer to. This is an agreement across generations that acknowledges that some age groups and stages of life require more supports than others, and that other cohorts are obligated to support them.
In the context of young people, older generations have a responsibility to ensure that the next generation are better off than the last.
Investing in things like social and disability services, mental health and education gives each generation of young people access to what they need in order to become active citizens and members of the workforce as they get older. Older age groups are in a similar position – following generations contribute to the care they may need as they age, as they did for them when they were young people.
But this bargain has been broken. This generation of young people will be the first generation since Federation to be worse off than their parents.
So what is the cost of breaking the bargain?
Bad outcomes for young people. Not having access to appropriate services and supports means young people miss out, and the most marginalised groups of young people are hit hardest. Children, young people and their families need, have a right to, support to ensure each individual’s needs are met.
We often talk about home ownership being out of reach for young people in their lifetimes, but the reality is that breaking this bargain puts generating any kind of wealth out of reach for most young people.
This broken bargain is a context we cannot separate from any conversations around young people because it has real, continuous impacts on the lives of young people.
Further in the future young people now will continue to carry the burden of struggling to generate wealth and supporting an ageing population, setting them up for continued disadvantage.
We often hear about young people who have tragically ‘fallen through the gaps’, but this takes the responsibility off of decision makers, as if they couldn’t have avoided this outcome by properly funding child and family services, welfare, public education, disability services and mental and physical healthcare. Bad outcomes don’t just happen, they are political choices.
Governments have money – but it is how they choose to spend it.
