Fair dinkum – at what point is the youth of Australia going to rise up in a bloody revolution and put the rest of us against the wall? Surely, the moment must be close at hand.
Don't get me wrong. As I settle into deep middle-age, I'm as disapproving of the yoof as anyone. I fear their Snapchat loops and their failure to listen to Radio National – which I still haven't started calling RN yet because it's only been five years. I didn't get the whole animal onesie thing.
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My own youth is far enough in the rear-view mirror that I can feasibly begin to convince myself that it was a halcyon time of effort, principle and good works, rather than the dissolute exercise in lavish time-wasting that is probably closer to the truth.
(Like all incipient fogeys, I am quietly satisfied that any success I've enjoyed is due to my own talent and application, rather than the good fortune of being born in a time of prosperity when, for instance, young people working in journalism actually got paid.)
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Among the well-padded ranks of Gen-X-and-older, it's not unusual to hear disparaging remarks about Generation Y's lack of application, or sense of entitlement, and so on.
But – wow. Just look at the crap we're asking them to put up with.
There's the matter of housing, where ageing beneficiaries of the property boom – hard-pressed to find adequately profitable alternatives for investing their stray millions – outbid youngsters at red-hot property auctions so they can rent their third or fourth home to the underbidders at crippling expense.
Plus then reserve the right to whine about how their own kids won't move out.
What's the secret to securing your first home in this treacherous environment?
Getting a well-paying job, as the Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar reminded us on Tuesday. And was – of course – promptly beaten to within an inch of his life for that observation, given how sensitive people who cannot afford to buy a cardboard box within a day's hike of their job tend to be when reminded of select obviousnesses by a guy on $300K with more than one house of his own.
(One has to feel a certain degree of sympathy with Sukkar, who grew up in an age where stating the bleeding obvious wasn't a capital offence.)
Getting a well-paying job is one of the main things you have to do before you can think about buying a place.
And as of Thursday, it's probably best that job not be in retail or hospitality, given that that significantly youthful cohort of workers is undergoing, as a class, the rare and unpleasant experience of a significant, industry-wide pay cut – something with which their parents never in their whole lives had to cope.
What else sucks about being young at the moment?
Oh, yeah, I remember: The fact that faced with major existential questions of climate and energy security, the political class remains deeply committed to the complicated, absorbing and noisy task of doing bugger-all about it.
Sooner or later, for young Australians, these problems will become theirs to solve. If they can find a moment, that is to say, between tending to their parents in the five-star adventure retirement resorts we've demanded they subsidise.
They will carry the crushing national debt we couldn't shake because we couldn't stomach the idea that any of us should be worse off, or give up the fripperies on which we've come to rely, or the publicly funded gimmicks that actively helped us to buy an extra investment property, which meant that they became permanent tenants.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh on us oldies. We did make a few moves towards austerity.
We charged young people extra for their degrees – that was prudent.
Plus we made some other tough choices. Like cutting unemployment benefits to young people. (That was necessary, guys, because youth unemployment is so high these days that the bill for the dole is getting really expensive.)
How – if you were a young person today – would you see your seniors as anything but a grabby crowd of legislative brawlers who got their degrees for free and their homes for a song, and are conspiring together to have you foot the bill for their retirement as they drink the last of the Grange in the polluted ruins of the planet that is now exclusively yours to fix?
Young people in the US voted overwhelmingly against Donald Trump; young people in Britain voted against Brexit. But they were outvoted by their elders.
We hear a lot about class war. Religious war. Gender war. But how long can peace last between a generation that is making hay, and the children who will pick up the tab?
Annabel Crabb is an ABC writer and broadcaster.
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