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Christmas lunch could be awkward this year, depending on whether the turkey has been cooked with gas or electricity, and whether any Baby Boomers at the table deign to share its bounty.
Pass the gravy, Grandma? And would you mind relinquishing your iron grip on the nation’s tax benefits and capital as you do?
The Labor government is furiously signalling that intergenerational equity will be the focus of its May 12 budget.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers appears set to introduce changes to investment tax perks that largely benefit wealthy Baby Boomers, and which many economists believe have contributed to runaway house prices, locking young people out of the market.
We are famously in the midst of a housing affordability crisis. Inflation is roaring. Higher education is longer and expensive. The embedded economic disruption of our age has an outsize impact on young people’s lives.
Even the much-vilified Boomers acknowledge that the intergenerational compact of democracies – that we will make life a little bit better and more comfortable for our children – is broken.
But Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson says that Chalmers is setting grandparent against grandchild; and that Chalmers wants to “start an intergenerational war between the young and the old”.
Besides, Wilson says, the changes are unlikely to make much difference to house prices and may push up rents (many economists agree with him).
Into this intergenerational contretemps leapt, athletically, yet another Wilson.
The son of Labor MP Josh Wilson, Oscar Wilson, stormed the stage at the Woodside Energy annual meeting last week.
Wilson junior was part of a group of 30 activists protesting against the very same gas project that his father’s government approved.
Wilson senior is assistant minister for climate change and energy.
The incident was such a perfectly timed and wonderfully apt representation of young v old, and father v son, that it seemed as though it had been conjured by a mischievous god.
Later last week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke to a forum of mining lobbyists and used his speech to kibosh the proposition of a tax on offshore gas exports.
Albanese ruled out taxing already-contracted gas, though he left open the opportunity to tinker with offshore gas taxation in future.
The fact that the PM was forced to speak on the tax proposition at all was a testament to the highly influential campaign for it.
That populist campaign was led by progressive think-tank the Australia Institute and championed by high-profile independent senator David Pocock.
The proposal for a 25 per cent tax on gas exports has garnered widespread support, but it has especially taken off among the under 30s, largely due to the intelligent use of social media.
A video went viral of Pocock, in Senate estimates, getting a Treasury official to admit that the government collects more in tax on beer than it collects in revenue for the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (at least in the most recent reporting period). If you haven’t seen the video yet, that probably means you’re over 30.
The social media politics influencer known as Punters Politics, former schoolteacher Konrad Benjamin, also took the gas tax up as an issue.
In a rare cross-pollination between establishment politics and the young turks of TikTok, Benjamin appeared before a Greens-run Senate inquiry into the gas tax idea.
In doing so, he brought the attention of young people who are unlikely to watch the ABC News, or (sob!) read The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age.
But Shadow Treasurer Wilson is not the only person to push back against what he calls intergenerational warfare.
Some economists believe that it’s junk pseudo-science.
In 2023, the respected, independent Pew Research Centre in the United States announced that it would change the way it conducted “generational research” because so much of it was really just “clickbait or marketing mythology”.
Henceforth, Pew would conduct generational analysis only “when we have historical data that allows us to compare generations at similar stages of life”, it said.
Following that lead, I should steer clear of lazy generalisations about the entitlement of Boomers, the moral smugness of the Harry Potter-obsessed Millennials, and the short attention spans of Zoomers (for some reason my own generation, Gen X, has managed to evade vicious intergenerational critique, perhaps because we are not a clear-cut case. We enjoyed the last gasp of Boomer good fortune, but also came of age during the “war on terror”).
In Australia, we do have historical data that allows us to compare generations at similar stages of life, certainly when it comes to housing.
According to the Grattan Institute (from a 2025 paper), the price of the typical Australian home has grown from about four times the median income in the early 2000s to more than eight times now, and nearly 10 times in Sydney.
In the early 1990s, it took an average household about six years to save a 20 per cent home deposit. Now it takes 12.
Home ownership is falling fastest for young people, and within that cohort, it is falling fastest for the poorest 40 per cent.
For the Boomers, property investment was a vehicle for financial betterment.
Working people, even those from poor backgrounds, were able to build wealth through riding the property boom because of the relatively low price of entry.
But new generations won’t have those same opportunities.
This week, my colleague Shane Wright reported data from the Australian Taxation Office that showed investment properties have become the domain of the old and wealthy, who have increased their ownership of rental properties by 1500 per cent over the past two decades.
Aspirational young people are now largely priced out of the investment property market.
All these facts help Chalmers make his case.
But changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, no matter how just they may be, will not make a significant difference to housing affordability.
Former opposition leader Bill Shorten took similar changes to an election in 2019 and got killed (politically speaking) by a Coalition campaign accusing him of class warfare.
This government thinks it has a better chance of withstanding criticisms of intergenerational warfare.
But there is evidence that class differences will win out over any intergenerational inequity anyway.
Research by the e61 Institute showed that as they age, Millennials will eventually prosper as their parents have.
But only the ones who stand to inherit their parents’ wealth.
“That inheritance boom will increase inequality within a generation in a way that’s far more consequential than any gap between generations,” said e61 principal economist Jack Buckley.
Tackling that inequality requires a wholesale review of how we tax incomes – for most people, their principal asset is their own labour – versus how we tax wealth.
Maybe that’s a job for the next generation.
Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.
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