Australians Under 40 Must End Neoliberalism for Good
Australians under 40 face an uncertain future and lower living standards than their parents or grandparents enjoyed. To bring us back from the brink, Australia needs to end the neoliberal consensus.
A worker at Zelda bakery in Melbourne, Australia. (Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty Images)
For many young Australians, the mythologized early adulthood rites of passage — renting ramshackle share houses or working minimum-wage casual jobs — now stretch over the foreseeable horizon. And the wages for those jobs have risen far more slowly than the rent charged for those houses. In short, people under forty have endured a historic decline in living standards — and this is the reality that political economist Alison Pennington seeks to understand in her new book, Gen F’d?: How Young Australians Can Reclaim Their Uncertain Futures.
In addition to providing a wealth of information about this decline of living standards and the ideology that inspired it, Pennington lays out some proposals for turning things around. Most of these sit at the progressive end of the social democratic spectrum, although she avoids clearly demarcating her political position.
It’s Not All in Your Head
The first chapter of Gen F’d explores the rise of insecure, casual employment and the decline in secure, permanent jobs. Pennington traces how reforms introduced in the 1980s aimed at making the Australian workforce flexible and competitive meant stagnant wage growth and the loss of many work entitlements. She also argues that many of “the worst trends for youth jobs and incomes set in” during and after the financial crisis of 2007–8, in opposition to analysts who hold that Australia emerged unscathed.
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