Even in tough times, I’m optimistic for the future

In today’s world, in which many Australians are suffering the effects of a cost-of-living crisis, what is the hope on the horizon?

The key to getting through the tough times is the belief that things will get better. Picture: istock

What are the common denominators of periods of great prosperity in modern Australia, and can we expect more such times in the future? The answer to the second question is yes, I do think there are better times ahead. As well as some things to be cautious about too, of course.

There was a brief boom after Covid, sparked by a surfeit of public spending aimed at “getting us through the worst”. But then, isn’t this pattern typical of life in general? Good times often follow the bad. The key to getting through the tough times, I think, is the belief that things will get better. Perhaps it’s this thinking that enabled Australians in the first half of the 20th century to endure and recover from the Great War, the Great Depression and World War II within a 30-year window.

The horrors of the Great War and the ensuing Spanish flu were followed by an era of recovery known as the Roaring Twenties – which was then, in turn, followed by the Great Depression. In a world of modest government support the Great Depression must have been a terrifying time. Indeed, in the quiet of night in the slums of Melbourne and Sydney in the 1930s, I’m sure mothers and fathers prayed for better times to come.

But of course even worse was to come with the advent of World War II. At this time Australia was a nation of seven million people, and yet we hastily assembled a military force of more than 600,000 which eventually was absorbed back into the workforce.

At the time of the 1947 Census, 56 per cent of Australian housing stock was owned either outright or with a mortgage. At the 1966 Census this proportion was 73 per cent, which remains the high-water mark in Australian home ownership. This era was delivered in a fervour of construction that was unfettered by today’s rules and regulation. It forged our suburbia out of the orchards and the dairy farms that sat on the edges of our great cities. Here was a movement that created the Australian middle class and an expectation of how things should be: each generation should be more prosperous than the last; home ownership was considered almost a birthright of Australians. It was a time when these ideals – realistic or otherwise – were set in concrete, and it all flowed from the adversity of war, from the sacrifices of the fallen, from the collective determination to recover and rebuild.

And so in today’s world, in which many Australians are suffering the effects of a cost-of-living crisis, what is the hope on the horizon? Is there a belief in better times ahead? We are a different people to our 1930s forbears, and the world is a very different place too.

Yes, times are tough for many right now. But there are reasons for believing that things will improve. The Millennial generation will pass through their peak-spending forties over the coming decade, driving up consumer spending as they raise families. And the Millennials are set to inherit parental wealth from the 2030s onwards, which will morph into a great wealth transfer in the 2040s.

As tough as things are at the moment, there is logic to the thinking that things will get better in Australia. We’ve done this in the past. We will do it again, and again, in the future.