THE BOOMER EPITAPH

 

With the ever-increasing roster of punters either entering the waiting room or exiting from it, 2019 seems as good a year as any to reflect on the contribution of the baby boomer generations to world history, bliss and futures’ markets. For the purpose of full disclosure, I’m one of the cohort- having been born in 1954- and now living the life of Riley as a non-working unit on the government tick. And many of the citizens around me exhibit the same profile. You can see us on trains (in the middle of the day). We’re frequently falling asleep at matinee performances in movie theatres and, of course, the scoffing of the last of the jumbo lamingtons at the local Michel’s Patisserie is part of our DNA. As a rule, we tend to have a low centre of gravity (probably because of the lamingtons), an almost delusional take on our place in Christendom and we entertain the notion that the boomer legacy will be recognised and adored.

Part of the mythology and wallpaper of the boomers surrounds their emergence following World War II. The civil rights’ movements, the Summer of Love, Vatican II, the so called ‘sexual revolution’ and the firming of social welfare programs within liberal democracies in a post-war world all occurred alongside the ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ mantras of a new generation. The assumption that boomers were instrumental in at least some of these events/ movements/ eras is spurious. Mere association is probably a safer setting. But why spoil a good story?

The post-war scene is important to tag. Richard Cooke asserts that….

You can chart a kind of path through state spending, a path that begins with their (i.e. boomers) birth between 1946 and 1964 and is ending now. The remaking of developed economies after the Second World War meant that this generation’s rise coincided with the high-water mark of the welfare state. (Richard Cooke; The boomer supremacy; 2016)

In 1950s Australia, the industrial relations dashboard was in ‘overdrive’ mode. The eight-hour working day, workers’ compensation, structured pay scales, sick leave pay, annual leave, penalty rates and long service leave were all entrenched in workplace landscapes. In many ways, Australia led the pack with such provisions. Moreover, a focus for this brave new world lay in securing the future for upcoming generations. Boomers were not so much touchstones for the vision as mere witnesses to it……… and beneficiaries.

In keeping with a social and economic blueprint for the decades ahead, Robert ‘Pig Iron’ Menzies (hardly a pinko by any measure) proclaimed in 1944….

The moment we establish, or perpetuate, the principle that the citizen, in order to get something he needs or wants and to which he has looked forward, must prove his poverty, we convert him into a suppliant to the state for benevolence……… That position is inconsistent with the proper dignity of the citizen in a democratic country.

It would be at least three decades before baby boomers would be investing in wind chimes for their back verandahs yet many of the features and emphases from those times have been attributed to them. Revisionism is often a self-serving process.

The whole concept of ‘revolution’, which often sits alongside the first post-war generation virtually as a stablemate, should be tested. The principles of labour movements internationally over the 1950s and 1960s were embedded in collectivism and equity. And these processes of development were well into third gear by the time boomer punters took their place in the engine room. But then things began to change.

The Labour movement that had created the post-war welfare state through a collective force of will, along with universal health and education, and whose power kept capitalism honest, was infected and finally overwhelmed by the new culture. Socialism no longer meant building great national institutions that enfranchised the mass of citizens, or acting as a crucial countervailing power to capital; it meant fighting for individually rewarding wage settlements and becoming part of the romantic movement for the ‘revolution’. The shop steward movement of the 1960s and its wildcat strikes were inextricably linked to hippies, smoking dope, the anti-Vietnam war movement and the rapidly growing women's movement. (Will Hutton; The baby boomers and the price of personal freedom; 2010)

Hutton’s argument is fundamental because it highlights the shift from organised strategies to that of localised skirmishes and the latter being badged as part of the revolution. In a way they were revolutionary but such stoushes certainly weren’t founded on a consensus or deference to what had occurred prior to boomer control. Even more importantly, this ‘new culture’ was paving the way for the real masthead of the flower children’s vessel……..neoliberalism.

Unfortunately, neoliberalism is an amorphous term often referenced or blamed for a mutated cornucopia of economic and social woes. But even allowing for problems of form and strict definition, the processes surrounding and driving it represent a departure from the regimented capitalism that featured in industrialised countries from the 1950s through to the 1980s. At the ground floor, neoliberalism undermines mechanisms of social solidarity and popular engagement in decision-making.

Boomer influence has recently been pegged by Bruce Gibney in his 2017 book, ‘A generation of sociopaths: How the baby boomers betrayed America’ when he states that their private behaviours congealed into a debased neoliberalism. The emphasis on ‘private behaviours’ cannot be overstated. Much of the neoliberalism ethos encompasses survival of the fittest claptrap but it’s a socio-economic Darwinism on steroids. The Age of Aquarius has featured the cutting of taxes and the borrowing of money at ‘pro’ levels. Gibney uses banks to illustrate this forty year trend where there has been a substantial push for ‘privatised’ gain and ‘socialised’ risk. Moreover, the Australian experience reflects the Yank descriptors of a modern bank’s anatomy. Nice work if you can get it. Royal Commissions merely serve as punctuation marks…..minus full stops of course.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher describes the burgeoning boomer generation as a pig moving through a python with subsequent generations left to clean up the snake’s shit. Mark Mazower paints a slightly less colourful portrait-

Heirs of the golden age still run the show, and septuagenarian rock stars hog the limelight. Meanwhile the young face dismal employment prospects, insecurity if they do land a job, and soaring bills for their housing and education. Their plight is an extraordinary generational triumph for their parents. (Mark Mazower; Financial Times; 2014)

The role of government in a neoliberal world has also been transformed. Political processes and decision-making have been hijacked by the ‘needs’ for efficiency, productivity and growth. The general ‘good’ can only be articulated after these three hashtags have been checked off. Public assets and public services really come into their own when there’s canoodling with the private sector. Success and achievement in enterprise, infrastructure and service delivery now display corporate watermarks where once they were collectively owned and controlled. Nation-building has become a non-governmental construct with transnationals allowed entry when there’s a buck to be made. One only has to go for a Sunday drive around Sydney and hear the auto’s motorway monitor doing a reasonable rendition of King Crimson’s ‘The Talking Drum’ to realise that both work and leisure come at a premium price. Thank fuckin’ god for the Senior Opal.

The demerit points that government attracts in Boomer Town flows through to the spectrum of politics itself. The blurring of the lines between left and right, between progressive and reactive, between Whig and Tory and even between labour and capital is now a reality. Elections centred on any real differences in philosophy or ‘party political’ intent have disappeared. Democracy sausages are consumed after there’s an almost ecumenical filtering of policies to the point where the middle ground is where it’s at. Populists like Trump, Farage and Tony Abbott are the spawn of this type of thinking and they’re quick to occupy the void. And up till now, that middle ground has been occupied by guess who.

The decline of trade unions has accompanied this rock throwing at government. Deregulation ‘imperatives’ have not only presented unions with unique challenges regarding working conditions and pay scales but have threatened their own existence. Union memberships are now at an all-time low and continuing with a downwards trajectory. Gig economies, the smashing of penalty rates and stagnant wage levels over a period of fifteen years attest to this ‘development’.

But union impotence has not been the sole metric in explaining a labour versus capital match of the day in the boomer years.

The union continued….. to be constrained in campaigning over salaries as the Hawke government, first elected in 1983, entered into an Accord strategy with a most compliant and corporatist ACTU leadership. The Accords led to private arrangements between a Melbourne-based ACTU bureaucracy and the Hawke government, predetermining what unions could seek to deliver for their members. For teachers it meant an endemic disadvantage, driving down their standard of living and immobilising their union, preventing it from campaigning on a range of issues. (Denis Fitzgerald; Teachers and their times; 2011)

The Accords, in reality, occupied a central position in the vanguard for capped salaries and denuded working conditions that have plagued Australian public service unions for the last two decades. With friends like the 80s-style ALP and ACTU, who needs enemies?

However, the real genome of the boomer generation has been the marginalisation it has driven and the social, economic and political crevasses it has either created or widened. For instance….

Our investigation of the outcomes of schooling has revealed that success in school and in the competition for rewarding careers is largely determined by such factors as social class, ethnic background and geographic location. The structural inequalities in our society are nowhere more evident than in our school systems. Far from being a way out for poor people, schools act as a sorting, streaming mechanism helping to maintain the existing distribution of status and power.

A timely reminder of the current malaise in education? Hardly. This diagnosis of Oz schooling was penned 45 years ago as part of Ronald Fitzgerald’s Poverty and Education in Australia inquiry. And nothing has changed. If anything, the correlation between postcode and educational outcomes has firmed since this 1976 report.

First Nations’ Australians now enjoy significantly lower health, educational and economic profiles than their white counterparts. Racism, in the form of the crazy guy yelling out something about wogs down at the bottom of the street, may have disappeared but….

….we need to describe the invisible monolith. Now, racism can be found in the way a debate is framed. Now, racism can be found in coded language. Attacking racist frame, form, functions and codes with no words to describe them can make you feel like you are the only one who sees the problem. We need to see racism as structural in order to see its insidiousness. We need to see how it seeps, like a noxious gas, into everything. (Reni Eddo-Lodge; Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race; 2018)

The irony of all this stuff is that we boomers have systematically dismantled the very mechanisms that led to our development in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s as if the drawbridge has been lifted up behind us and we’ve now retreated to a world of state-funded support, exotic travel, role model posturing and generating good-vibe memes on social media accompanied by selfies laid on with a trowel.

The boomer epitaph may well be that we craved to be the centre of attention and that’s probably still true as we keep the benches warm in the departure lounge. But our heirs and the following generations will have to foot the bill.