Steve Price: Young gens thinking they have it tough shows how little they know about hardship

Members of some generations went to war, whether they liked it or not. Education and a good job was a privilege. It’s time entitled young Aussies realised their good fortune and quit complaining.

Younger generations need to stop complaining about everything and start living.

Sick of being dumped on for being a Baby Boomer and called “the lucky generation”, I reckon it’s time Australians of my vintage gave a bit back the other way.

Entitled youngsters from Generation Z constantly whinge and whine about how hard it is for their age group, complaining about everything from how hard it is to buy a house to climate change and pay parity for women.

They don’t seem at all happy about anything, believing anyone older than them has had it easy in life and are actively working to make their lives miserable.

The Millennials are not much better.

Gen Z members are aged between 10 and 25 years old, born from 1997 through to 2012. They have lived so far during Australia’s golden years.

They have had John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison as Prime Ministers.

Their age means they have only gone to war if they chose to join the military. The global financial crisis aside, Australia’s economy has been strong and almost nobody has been unable to get a job if they wanted one.

Parents of Gen Z Australians — the Baby Boomers and older — have seen their property values explode, allowing their children to live at home well into their 20s.

Most members of younger generations have been able to get a job if they wanted one.

More of their entitled generation has gone to university than any group before them, supported by heavily discounted student loans funded by the taxpayer.

For the majority, travel, eating out, social connection and liberated social behaviour — think endorsed illegal drug consumption — exists today like never before.

On Monday, six of these young Australians bobbed up on Channel 10’s The Project, talking about elections and their voting intentions.

Asked on air and live to respond to their attitudes, I couldn’t help but describe them as “a very lucky generation” and made the point they had grown up in a “safe country that’s prosperous with a free university education”.

I might as well have called them dole bludging un-Australian criminals for the reaction that followed. From news.com.au and Twitter, to Instagram, I was predictably bagged as an old, out-of-touch dinosaur and an entitled, old white man.

Nothing new there and I have had worse.

But it’s time we evened up some of this debate and pointed out a few uncomfortable facts to these smashed-avocado-chomping complainers, who think we are somehow enjoying watching their struggles.

It’s impossible not to personalise this and think back to our own experiences of the late teen years leading into work.

For me that meant leaving high school before completing the final year at age 17 and starting work at an afternoon newspaper, working six days a week, including a 16-hour shift on a Saturday. It was 1972 in Adelaide.

I was lucky, though. A month after I started, the dreaded National Service scheme was scrapped by the incoming Gough Whitlam government.

Up until then, and for the previous eight years, every male who turned 20 in Australia had to register, and if a marble with their birth date on it was drawn from a barrel, they had to serve two years in the armed forces and another three years in the Army Reserve.

Laws were changed in Canberra to allow thousands of them to indeed be posted offshore to fight in Vietnam.

Can you imagine the outcry by Gen Z if we decided to bring that back?

Gen Z members have only gone to war if they chose to join the military. It wasn’t always the way. Picture: Alex Coppel

The average annual salary in the mid 1970s was $7600. In that first year of work I was earning $17 a-week and paying $3 of that in board to my parents.

I’m not trying to be some Boomer martyr here but simply trying to make the point that every generation has had its challenges.

Gen Z seems to think there is some concerted campaign by older Australians to make them lifetime renters, unable to ever be able to buy property.

If their parents are homeowners, they will, for a start, be the inheritors of generational real estate wealth.

On top of that, unlike my generation, various state and federal governments have legislated first homebuyer grants, discounted deposit laws and stamp duty concessions.

Governments are determined to make buying a home easier but typically Gen Z members continue to demand more, while wanting to live in the suburbs they grew up or studied in.

By comparison, my parents rented in a housing trust development called Elizabeth, north of Adelaide, and bought their first, modest three bedroom with one bathroom home 15km south of the city on the outer fringes of Adelaide.

The first holiday as a family we ever had was in an on-site caravan not 45 minutes south of where we lived. I didn’t cross the state border until I was a teenager, straddling the line between SA and Victoria, east of Mt Gambier.

I was 21 years old before I flew on a plane and that was for a work transfer to Melbourne.

Unlike the Gen Z complainers, I felt blessed to have a job, a cheap car and a rare night out for a few beers at a pub.

My parents did it much tougher than me. My mother lost siblings to war, grew up in the Depression and worked day and night just to put food on the table.

Mobile phone scrolling, breakfast in a cafe eating, globe trotting, influencer Gen Zs ought to realise how lucky and comfortable life is for many of them, compared with us.

Stop whingeing and start living. You’ll be much happier.

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Australia Today with Steve Price can be heard live from 7am weekdays via the LiSTNR app.