Myra Hamilton, a Millennial, co-wrote a hard-hitting op-ed for this newspaper with her father Clive Hamilton<\/a>, who recently retired from Charles Sturt University as professor of Public Ethics. \u201cWe now have a cohort of younger commentators furiously mining the data and cherry-picking the numbers to find new reasons to excoriate Baby Boomers,\u201d the pair wrote.<\/p>\nPatricia Sparrow, CEO of COTA (Council on the Ageing), complains there are two deeply damaging media narratives on Boomers. \u201cThey\u2019re either living on Easy Street or they\u2019re frail and blocking up hospital beds. Both entirely ignore the huge social contribution Boomers are making.\u201d<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t assume the Boomer-bashing doesn\u2019t have a real-life impact. Myra Hamilton recalls that after delivering a talk in which she dismantled the myth that Boomers are universally comfortable and uncaring, an older woman approached her with tears welling in her eyes. \u201d\u2006\u2018Thank you so much,\u201d she said. \u201cIt hurts deeply to be branded selfish. I poured my life into raising my children, worked part-time, put everything on hold to care for my ageing parents, and I\u2019m still pushing through work every day to cover my expenses. I love my children \u2013 yet society keeps accusing my generation of stealing their future.\u2019\u2006\u201d<\/p>\n
While more older Australians are remaining in the workforce, participation rates are still below that of countries such as Sweden, Japan and New Zealand, according to the OECD. And it\u2019s been estimated by KPMG that boosting labour-force participation among experienced older workers could increase GDP by $29 billion.<\/p>\n
Growing up in the decades after World War II, Boomers lived at a time of far greater austerity than today: a more threadbare welfare net, sparse workplace protections, widespread discrimination based on gender and colour, and zero universal healthcare. Gough Whitlam\u2019s original Medibank didn\u2019t arrive until July 1975, only to be scaled back months later when Malcolm Fraser came to power \u2013 leaving the country to wait until 1984 for Bob Hawke to finally establish the Medicare system we now take for granted.<\/p>\n
Whitlam abolished tuition fees at universities in 1974, but it was middle-class kids, not working-class youth, who took advantage of it, insists Clive Hamilton. \u201cThe idea that Baby Boomers universally benefited from free higher education is a myth; university participation rates at that time were under 15 per cent,\u201d he tells Good Weekend.<\/p>\n
But life was so much cheaper back then, and everything\u2019s outrageous today, right? Think again. For a reality check, let\u2019s rewind to 1975, a year when the first Baby Boomers were in their late 20s, when flared jeans were de rigueur, lava lamps set the mood for disco hits like Lady Bump, and when a household purchase at a retail stalwart like Waltons or Grace Bros meant a Seriously Big Buy.<\/p>\n
![\"Council](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/7640f472f0a29ae04d857392779904bd050aa0e6.jpeg\")
Council on The Ageing CEO Patricia Sparrow: \u201cBoomers aren\u2019t a single, homogeneous group.\u201dAlex Ellinghausen<\/p>\n
The family car? A popular vehicle like a Holden Kingswood sedan automatic would set you back about $4070, or a premium Cortina XL E, $4000, nearly two-thirds the median annual salary of the time ($6448). Contrast that with today\u2019s family-sized SUVs: an MG ZS Vibe starts at just $22,990 \u2013 a mere third of today\u2019s median annual salary of $74,000-78,000 \u2013 with Chinese hybrids like the Chery Tiggo 4 Urban and the BYD Atto 2 DM-1 starting at under $25,000.<\/p>\n
Home entertainment? When colour television was launched in Australia on March 1, 1975 (\u201cC-Day\u201d), a Baird set (remember when the Brits manufactured TVs?) cost about $1300 \u2013 a staggering $11,667 in today\u2019s dollars. Even the cheapest portable AWA-Thorn carried a price tag of $400, or $3700 now. TVs were so punishingly expensive that for many families, like mine, owning a TV wasn\u2019t an option \u2013 we rented one for several years. Fast-forward to 2026: you can pick up a 55-inch LED Kogan smart TV for $449: a weekend impulse buy.<\/p>\n
Whitegoods? In 1975, buying a $400 fridge or a $250 fully automated washing machine meant many months of disciplined saving or a dreaded lay-by: the equivalent of forking out $3500 to $4000 today. Even a humble Victa lawnmower carried the modern equivalent of a $1200 price tag. Now, a 4-stroke model is a steal for $424 at Bunnings. (It\u2019s easy to forget how much globalisation and supply chains shifting to Asia have brought down prices.)<\/p>\n
Groceries? Staples such as milk, butter, eggs and bread cost way less now than in 1975 when adjusted for wages; chicken is much cheaper, red meat pricier, and while ice-cream and biscuits are cheaper, they\u2019ve suffered shrinkflation (here\u2019s looking at mini-you, Chocolate Montes and Cornettos). Some items, such as washing powder, are marginally more expensive, but the prices of all plastic consumer goods (Glad Bags, Tupperware) have plummeted. Economists today may sweat over an inflation rate of 4 per cent, but in 1975, it was galloping at a wallet-shredding 15 per cent. Grocery prices were moving faster than a disco beat.<\/p>\n
Dining out? Until the 1980s, your options were milk bars, hotel dining rooms, department-store cafeterias, tearooms and a handful of cafes in Sydney\u2019s Potts Point or Melbourne\u2019s St Kilda. Try asking a 1975 waiter for an oat milk piccolo whatevs, or quizzing them about the \u201cprovenance\u201d of the sirloin or whether the peas are \u201chyper local\u201d or not, and they\u2019d most likely assume you were on a bad acid trip.<\/p>\n
Clothing? Just about every item of casual and formal wear was far more expensive in 1975, when many garments were still manufactured locally, made to last and, in many working-class families, were passed down to younger siblings. When I recall to Anne Drane that my mother, a seamstress in a shirt factory, insisted on making most of my teenage shirts, much to my annoyance, she warms to the theme (\u201cyes, we relied on our auntie to make all our clothes\u201d). Today we\u2019ve traded durable, locally made craftsmanship for \u201cfast fashion\u201d \u2013 a relentless tsunami of ultra-cheap, synthetic junk that winds up in landfill at the end of each season.<\/p>\n
International travel? In 1975, a standard return economy airfare from Sydney to London on a major carrier like Qantas cost about $2300 \u2013 about a third of the median annual wage. Today, a return economy airfare on Qantas for the same trip costs much the same \u2013 starting at about $2200, less than 3 per cent of the median annual wage. Once largely the preserve of the well-heeled, international travel has become as mundane as booking an interstate bus trip.<\/p>\n
Margaret Betteridge, 73, who has worked as a curator at the City of Sydney for more than 30 years, recalls her first flight overseas to London in September 1975 to do a course in museum studies. \u201cMy salary was around $3000 per annum and the airfare to London cost a bit more than that,\u201d she recalls. \u201cBecause it was so expensive, people who flew to Europe either saved up a long time, if they were young, or if they were old, tended to be very comfortable financially.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s acquisitive lifestyle, hypercharged by the internet\u2019s endless digital bazaar, makes 1975 look positively spartan by comparison. We\u2019re drowning in smartphones, iPads, Fitbits, Sonos, noise-cancelling headphones, flatpack furniture, disposable threads and \u2013 ugh! \u2013 plastic plants as decor. Consumerism didn\u2019t truly hit its stride in Australia until the \u201980s and \u201990s, when tariff walls were brought down, ushering in the so-called \u201caffluenza\u201d era of cheap imports \u2013 and a mountain of landfill.<\/p>\n
![\"Curator](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/6574988ad2ae3f3ecdfb3233830878ad4d17a399.jpeg\")
Curator Margaret Betteridge, 73, recalls that in 1975, her first flight to London cost more than her annual salary.Brent Lewin<\/p>\n
While financial strain is very real today, and risks getting much worse because of deteriorating international conditions, decades of lifestyle creep have turned what were once luxuries into non-negotiables. We might be skint, but do we really have to ditch our cafe breakfasts or streaming subscriptions?<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s great expectations were noted by many of the Boomers interviewed for this story. \u201cThis need for instant gratification \u2013 \u2018We\u2019re entitled to this now\u2019 \u2013 didn\u2019t exist a few decades ago,\u201d muses Drane, who recounts a childhood in south-western Sydney\u2019s Revesby in the 1950s marked by poverty and missed meals while her mother toiled at part-time jobs and her father struggled with post-war trauma and alcoholism.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no denying, though, that Boomers were blessed with a big stroke of historical luck with housing. In 1975, a Sydney home cost about $28,000 \u2013 manageable at four times the average annual income. Today, that same dream requires $1.53 million, a suffocating 16 to 18 times the median annual salary. And yes, history has been generous to Boomers in terms of building equity in bricks-and-mortar over the decades. But this doesn\u2019t mean they gamed the system: all they did was stay in their homes while market forces over time drove values through their roof.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s housing market is brutally unfair for young people, but it\u2019s pure piffle to imagine that getting a home loan or paying a mortgage were pieces of cake in decades past. Home loan interest rates didn\u2019t just climb in the 1970s and \u201980s \u2013 they throttled the household budget, rising from 10 per cent in 1975 to a punishing 17.5 per cent by 1990.<\/p>\n
For my own working-class parents, both of whom worked in factories from the 1950s to the 1980s, home ownership was but a distant mirage for the entire time I was growing up. When I finally managed to help them buy a home, my monthly mortgage repayments became a high-wire act across a chasm of soaring interest rates that drove me to getting a second job until they began to fall after a year or so.<\/p>\n
Lucky for them, they had a son: back in the 1950s, \u201860s, and \u201970s, a single woman applying for a housing loan might as well have asked a bank manager for the keys to the vault. Banks routinely demanded a male \u201cfinancial chaperone\u201d \u2013 a father, brother, or partner \u2013 to sign off as guarantor, assuming the little lady would eventually resign to pop out babies anyway. Just ask Drane. When she sought to buy her first home as a 25-year-old single woman in the early 1970s, she had to jump through hoops, even though she was beginning her career in the Commonwealth Bank at the time. \u201cTo be considered, I got a second job and worked seven days a week for a year to meet their strict criteria,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t much easier 10 years later for teacher Margaret Harrington, who applied for a loan in 1983. Even with tens of thousands of dollars in the bank from her divorce settlement, her request for a modest top-up to buy an apartment fell on deaf ears. The then 30-something had to go to five different banks before finally finding a lender willing to treat her as an independent borrower. \u201cIt was a terrible experience, made worse by bank managers making sexist remarks,\u201d she recalls.<\/p>\n
Back then, sexism was baked into the entire workplace. Drane recalls with absolute clarity being passed over for promotion after promotion for less-qualified males during her banking career in the 1970s. It wasn\u2019t until the banks were deregulated in the 1980s and social attitudes began to change that those roadblocks started crashing down. By 1993, Drane didn\u2019t just walk into a bank, hat in hand for a housing loan \u2013 she was manager of a suburban branch of the St George bank.<\/p>\n
![\"As](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/5ecd408f1bae51936a5b0f4e0691fb2b805d53b0.jpeg\")
As a single woman the early 1970s, Anne Drane had to get a second job and work seven days a week for a year to meet a bank\u2019s home-loan criteria.Brent Lewin<\/p>\n
Younger Boomers and Gen Xers undoubtedly profited nicely off the Howard government\u2019s 1999 tax perks, including capital gains cuts and boosts to negative gearing, which many economists believe unintentionally drained capital away from start-ups and innovation, a regrettable shift expertly exposed in Amy Remeikis\u2019s recent book Where it All Went Wrong.<\/p>\n
\u201cHoward turned housing from a place to live to a source of wealth,\u201d she writes. But if you imagine Boomers monopolise the rentals and are to blame for your latest rent hike, sneak a peek at your landlord\u2019s ID. ATO figures show that more than 73 per cent of landlords are Gen Xers or Millennials, with Boomers holding under 27 per cent (a number that COTA insists is now much lower, and set to crater, as older people offload investment properties and pass away).<\/p>\n
If Gen Zers imagine they\u2019re the first generation to face a raw deal, they may draw some comfort from the fact high home-ownership rates in Australia have been the historical exception, not the rule: from Federation until World War II, barely half the nation owned the roof over their heads. And home-ownership levels have remained pretty steady over the past 50 years (68 per cent in 1975 compared with 66 per cent today), although that may be under threat in the years to come.<\/p>\n
And don\u2019t fall for the line \u2013 often pushed by pro-development YIMBY cheerleaders \u2013 that senior Australians are selfish for wanting to stay in the family home, where they built their lives. Look around our suburbs, and you\u2019ll see that all too often, Granny\u2019s big, leafy backyard is bulldozed, not for a duplex or low-rise apartments, but for a brick-veneer mansion with a small paved courtyard. Forget the modest family cottage of 1975 \u2013 a sensible 130 to 150 square metres. Today\u2019s typical Aussie house has bloated into a monstrous brick-veneer box of between 214 to 235 square metres, bursting with cinema rooms, multiple bathrooms, and empty bedrooms galore \u2013 all built to house tiny families that are half the size of those in the 1970s.<\/p>\n
In our rapidly ageing nation, keeping senior Australians in the workforce, particularly in critical sectors like aged care, education and health, is no longer an option but an economic necessity. \u201cAustralia is shooting itself in the foot by treating willing and capable older workers like a financial liability rather than an economic lifeline,\u201d argues Chris Grice, CEO of National Seniors Australia.<\/p>\n
Championing the peak body\u2019s \u201cLet Pensioners Work\u201d campaign, Grice believes the system actively discourages people over retirement age from staying in the workforce. For every dollar earned above $226 a fortnight for singles, the pension is slashed by 50 cents; for couples earning above $396 a fortnight, it reduces by 25\u00a2 in the dollar. (Centrelink\u2019s Work Bonus helps you keep more of your pension if you meet eligibility requirements, however.) Slapping seniors with fortnightly income reporting can also be a disincentive because of all the red tape, notes Grice.<\/p>\n
Even finding a job when aged over 55 can be a marathon. ABS data shows it takes older jobseekers an average of 20 months to land a new role after losing one \u2013 more than double the nine months for younger applicants (15 to 54). COTA\u2019s State of the Older Nation 2025 report reveals that 38 per cent of people over 50 have experienced some form of age discrimination and one in two recruiters show little or no openness to hiring workers 65 and over. \u201cAgeism can be a significant deterrent for seniors trying to re-enter the workforce,\u201d says COTA\u2019s Sparrow.<\/p>\n
Chris Grice says that institutional ageism remains rampant in recruitment and promotion, particularly in financial services, media and some areas of hospitality and sales. AI may be a double-edged sword, he says, enabling instant screening-out of older applicants, yet also simplifying software processes and helping seniors bridge technical skill gaps.<\/p>\n
In a basic sense, Boomers are caught in a damned-if-you-work, damned-if-you-don\u2019t catch-22. Stick around in the office and you\u2019re a job-hoarder robbing eager young things of a career ladder; retire and you\u2019re a freeloading burden bleeding taxpayers dry. For many manual labourers and tradies, there isn\u2019t even a choice: decades of hard physical toil make working past their 60s virtually impossible.<\/p>\n
Painting Australia\u2019s 3 million Baby Boomers as a uniform group of comfortable, home-owning Anglo-Saxons ignores a far more diverse and complex reality. It erases the waves of European migrants \u2013 2 million in total between 1945 and 1965 \u2013 who spent decades breaking their backs in low-paid factory jobs, and the Indigenous Australians who have battled racism and job discrimination for their entire lives. \u201cBoomers aren\u2019t a single, homogeneous group,\u201d says Sparrow. \u201cThe rich diversity of our broader community exists across every age bracket.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beneath all the anti-Boomer noise lies a fundamental truth that now seems long forgotten: these old-school trailblazers forged the very social freedoms we take for granted today. This was, after all, the generation of the counter-culture, one which transformed the rights for women, gay people and, to a degree, Indigenous Australians, as well as launching the environmental movement, says Clive Hamilton, whose 2016 book, What Do We Want? The Story of Protest in Australia, traces the grassroots history of these movements \u2013 and the high price some then-young people paid for their principles (arrests, fines, legal consequences). \u201cLet\u2019s be clear: only between 10 and 20 per cent of Baby Boomers were active participants, but the majority of young people supported their broader aims,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
![\"Clive](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/4db3afbd1edf3a07bdb8a3be38a883a9d00bb6b7.jpeg\")
Clive Hamilton: \u201cThe idea that Baby Boomers universally benefited from free higher education is a myth.\u201dAlex Ellinghausen<\/p>\n
To this day, surveys consistently show Boomers outperforming Millennials and Gen Z when it comes to sustainable habits like recycling and curbing waste. The bitter irony? Many of the hard-won environmental protections and equal rights agendas that Boomers fought for are now under assault from populist demagogues \u2013 US President Donald Trump, the UK\u2019s Reform leader Nigel Farage, One Nation\u2019s Pauline Hanson \u2013 whose reactionary rhetoric is supercharged by social media algorithms.<\/p>\n
A landmark University of Melbourne study recently exposed a dark rise in misogynistic attitudes in Australian classrooms: nearly a third of teenage boys believe gender equality has gone too far, with one in four agreeing violence is a fair response to feminism. It\u2019s a sad spectre: impressionable young blokes taking life lessons from manosphere hucksters like brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, now languishing on remand in a Miami, Florida prison, fighting extradition to the UK for charges of rape and human trafficking. (At his Miami bust, Andrew Tate looked less like a badass and more like a dancer at a Barry Manilow tribute, sporting an unbuttoned purple silk shirt, skin-tight Capri pants and pointed loafers, for which social media roasted him into oblivion.)<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the Tate brothers had arrived in the 1960s and 1970s, they\u2019d have been laughed off the stage,\u201d chuckles Clive Hamilton. \u201cThe crowd would have been shouting, \u2018Get off, you fools.\u2019 The Tates are a reactionary backlash to the rights that Boomer women \u2013 and men \u2013 fought so hard to build.\u201d<\/p>\n
The young blokes pining for the good ol\u2019 days of strict gender roles and \u201ctrad\u201d wives remain amusingly blind to the crushing financial pressures placed on men of that era as sole breadwinners \u2013 and the battle-hardened grit of the women, forged by survival instincts in a man\u2019s world (a theme vividly captured in Dorothy Hewett\u2019s 1959 novel Bobbin Up). Had they been transplanted back to the factory floor of the 1950s and \u201960s, these young keyboard warriors typing outrage from their family bedrooms would have been chewed up and spat out before smoko.<\/p>\n
Besides, younger people can\u2019t take much of the high ground with Boomers, when they\u2019re about to become beneficiaries of their largesse. The country\u2019s much-heralded, mega financial handover from Boomers to Gen Xers and Millennials is rapidly accelerating, notes KPMG\u2019s Terry Rawnsley, as Boomers sell off larger homes, bankroll their offspring\u2019s property ambitions and prepare to pass over a mammoth $3.5 trillion in the coming years.<\/p>\n
Some weeks after our interview, Shane Scully messages me. He\u2019d just been admitted to hospital for an angiogram, where doctors discovered an artery that was 95 per cent blocked. Surgeons inserted a large stent in the nick of time \u2013 dodging what cardiologists ominously call the \u201cwidowmaker\u201d.<\/p>\n
After the near-fatal scare, Scully was back at work within just over a week. He\u2019s been prescribed meds and advised to walk more and adhere to a stricter diet, but the new regimen has inconveniently coincided with one of the most frantic times in his business.<\/p>\n
For many working Boomers, the real daily grind isn\u2019t the job itself but rather, looking after your health. \u201cIt\u2019s a bitch getting old, I tell you,\u201d reflects Scully.<\/p>\n
Read more from Good Weekend magazine:<\/p>\n
Get the best of Good Weekend delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Sign up for our newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Theo Newbegin cuts a wiry silhouette striding between towers of peaches and pears in the echoing vastness of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":633181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[138,246,111,139,69,244,245],"class_list":["post-633180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-finance","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/633181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Early](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1792217775_222_22c1ce57a7ee938ff91d23ad7ce6f08c2260734a78efd8eb1c6ef69e84cf3611.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Marion](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/69b8f44fa70939d38478738271a17f952a625e59.jpeg\")
Marion Wales, 78, says she still works as a dental nurse as she has to support her 81-year-old husband, and \u201cthe pension isn\u2019t covering our bills\u201d.Steven Siewert<\/p>\n![\"Shane](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/58f4710ca844c8e5d4ad34a8525f6114a44586cb.jpeg\")
Shane Scully, 67, has two teenage daughters and says work is a financial necessity.Brent Lewin<\/p>\n![\"Sydneysider](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/b0f8aeea2b513c2898807a99cdb852f3c50df2d6.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n