Coronavirus: Generational boom, crash – and then reset
For the young, the coronavirus pandemic presents a question of opportunity.
It is a question millions of Australians are thinking about right now: how will the coronavirus affect my life in the future?
For the aged, this can be a question of survival. For the young, it is a question of opportunity, and perhaps also of additional burdens (like more taxes, lost income) that were not contemplated from the vantage of the pre-corona world.
The Australian population can be divided into six generations defined as 18-year brackets leveraged off and around the baby boomer generation born between 1946 and 1963 and who, in 2020, are aged between 58 and 74. The coronavirus will shape the baby boomers’ retirement.
Then come the Gen Xers, the millennials, the Gen Zeds (I refuse to say Gen Zee) — and the latest incarnation, the Alphas, born between 2018 and 2035, and who I think eventually might be renamed the Corona Generation. (I quite like the idea of a cool tag for this lot — like, say, GenCo.)
I feel sorry for the pre-boomer generation, the over-75s, who are not only threatened by the virus but whose later retirement will be mightily affected. Years of self-sacrifice and frugality were to be rewarded by cruises with the family and (usually chatty) travelling companions.
Not any more.
Perhaps retiring Australians in the 2020s will be far more inclined to find exotica closer to home by cruising the Kimberley coast, thus remaining within striking distance of the safety of the Australian health system.
A large proportion of the pre-boomer population comprises farmers still connected to the family farm. This is evident in the proportion reporting that they were business owners at the last census. Often these are the patriarchs and matriarchs of farms run by 50-something sons and daughters, and who have all been grimly hanging on through the drought.
One good thing about the coronavirus is that it struck after (and not during) the summer bushfires and the worst of the drought.
Based on previous cycles, there is likely to be a drought-free window in the early 2020s as a coronavirus-inspired surge in demand for agribusiness produce lifts the spirits of farmers and of the whole of regional Australia. Including, I might add, the spirits of the patriarch generation forever in search of “one more good season”.
And then there’s the baby boomers, whose working lives have been book-ended by calamity: the 1992 recession and the 2020 coronavirus. In between these two comets of misery, the life form known as babyboomersaurus roamed and gambolled across the Australian savanna. These were good years: no recession, constant growth, ups and downs here and there but nothing that seriously threatened the status quo, or property prices.
By the beginning of 2020, the boomers had everything mapped out. They were going to be called the my-time-now generation because they had made sacrifices, postponed travel, helped their kids, fought off last election’s dastardly plan to snaffle franking credits, and head off on a series of bucket-list cruises in the golden years ahead. Yeah, well, that’s no longer happening. Cruising will take years to recover. The self-managed super fund has taken a bit of a beating. The kids have lost their jobs and need help. And as for franking credits and a range of other entitlements, well, we’re in different territory now.
Everyone must make a sacrifice and contribute more to community coffers — and especially those who, it will be argued, had a pretty good go of it during their working life. As a consequence, younger baby boomers contemplating retirement will soldier on for some years yet in the workforce.
And then we come to my favourite generation, the Gen Xers, now aged 39 to 57, straddling in many ways the toughest decades of the life cycle, and who have never really complained about their lot in life. The Xers just get on with it. They’re doers. Gen X is the quintessential quiet generation.
Is this because Xers are inherently saintly, or is it because they know they’ll never be heard above the bleating of the older boomers and the moaning of the younger millennials? If you had a choice as to what stage in the life cycle you had to endure the uncertainty, the loss of income and the unbridled terror effected by a global pandemic, then I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t choose the Xers’ time in the life cycle right now.
Consider the Xers’ situation.
At the age of 44 (or thereabouts), Gen Xers typically put on an extension (or buy a bigger house) and up their mortgage to the max; any loss of income becomes an immediate problem.
Xers are right now at a delicate stage in their careers, almost getting to the top (generally late 40s). This shutdown resets corporate priorities and career planning.
On the home front, Xers are dealing with (sometimes several) teenage kids living at home and who they can see will require funding for years to come; there is no end in sight for late-40s Xers who must push on working, earning, supporting, well into the 2020s.
Some Xers (not you, I’m sure) even may be questioning the viability of their relationships; this lockdown may crystallise a bulge in breakdowns recorded later in the year. Then there’s the fact Xers are bearing silent witness daily to their bodily transformation into the morass known as middle age; it can be a confronting experience.
Yet not a word of complaint. I do so like the Xers.
In the decade that follows the coronavirus, baby boomers will lurch into old age and their kids, the millennials, will transition into family formation. We will need to live within our means, or very much aim to do so, year after year.
The easy growth and prosperity of large-scale migration will dissipate. We must think now, plan now, manoeuvre now, not so much to simply restore Australia after coronavirus, but to forge the kind of Australia we want and that we think is best adapted to the challenges ahead.
There are no generational winners from the coming of the coronavirus; we all have burdens to bear; we will all carry the scars (and the learnings) of the events of March-April (and perhaps May) 2020. The coming of the coronavirus need only be a calamity if the generations of Australia let it be so.
Adversity can also be a time of great clarity, an opportunity to reset priorities, of thinking about the kind of life we want for ourselves, for our families and for our nation. Let’s take the good bits of the coronavirus — the collaboration, the online humour, the selflessness of the frontline, the neighbourly love — and leave the bad bits behind.
The returned Diggers rarely spoke of the pain and the injustices of their experiences; they wanted to talk about the camaraderie, which I think is code for brotherly love. Adversity changed them; it will also change the post-corona generations of Australia.
Bernard Salt is managing director of The Demographics Group, tdgp.com.au.
Research by Hari Hara Priya Kannan.