As the first generation never to have endured a shrinking economy, Australia’s millennials might be considered pampered.
They see themselves as paupers, victims of a housing bubble that condemns them to rent. And the rising cost of a university education is but one extra cost they have to pay for the healthcare of the most pampered generation of all – the armies of baby boomers who’ve watched their investments and property wealth balloon over the past quarter of a century of growth.
The depth of the millennials’ anger exploded in October when the country’s best-known demographer, Bernard Salt, wrote a column castigating them for spending money in hipster cafes rather than squirrelling away cash for a house.
“I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more. Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on a house,” Mr Salt fumed.
Of course, there was the swift retort that even if millennials were to save $22 (£12.80) a week it would still take them 175 years to save the deposit for a median-priced house in the overheated Sydney property market.
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Let us eat avocado instead, they said.
Despite Mr Salt’s misgivings about having too much of good thing, Australia’s treasurer, Scott Morrison – himself on the cusp of turning 50 and who was around for Australia’s last recession in the late 1980s – now thinks that no Australian should ever endure another.
That’s the problem with a quarter of a century of prosperity; people can get used to it – the pampered and the paupers.