Baby Boomers Beware

Disputed Destination: New Zealand's world-beating, state-provided universal superannuation scheme offers unprincipled politicians and rapacious financial institutions a tempting target. The Baby Boom Generation (1946-1965) is fast becoming the preferred scapegoat of these "reformers".

THERE’S NOTHING NEW about Welfare Reform, it’s as old as the ideas advanced in its justification. Managing the poor and vulnerable is just one of those perennial problems with which governments of every stripe have to contend.

Mostly, politicians restrict themselves to tinkering, but every so often a government comes along which engages in the sort of ruthless, root-and-branch reform that leaves deep scars upon the body politic. Fortunately, the bitter historical memories handed down by its victims serve as a prophylactic against similar “reforms” for generations. But, eventually, popular memory fades, and when it does the threat of root-and-branch reform returns. And tragedy follows it.

New Zealand may soon be facing just such a threat and, curiously, it’s as likely to come from the Left as the Right. If that sounds improbable, then perhaps we should all remind ourselves that it was the supposedly left-leaning Labour Party which unleashed the “New Right” economic reforms of the late-1980s. And that it was no less a “liberal” than Bill Clinton who campaigned on a promise to “end welfare as we have come to know it” and who, in 1996, affixed his Presidential signature to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.

President Bill Clinton signs the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, putting an end to "welfare as we have come to know it", August 22 1996.

But why would Labour do such a thing? How could attacking the poor and vulnerable possibly assist its reclamation of the Treasury benches?

Part of the answer lies in the “communitarian” beliefs evinced by followers of Labour’s “Third Way”. It’s a philosophy which asserts that too much emphasis has been placed on “rights” and not enough on “responsibilities” in the formulation of public policy. Society, they say, has a duty to see that one group of citizens’ rights are not upheld at their neighbours’ expense.

The implications of communitarianism for solo mums, the unemployed, the sick and the disabled are readily imagined. Indeed, they’d do well to remember that David Parker, Labour’s finance spokesperson, is a strong believer in communitarian principles.

The other reason Labour might opt for root-and-branch welfare reform involves the same reasoning that went into the National Party’s own root-and-branch solutions to the “problem” of “welfare dependency”: poor people don’t vote. Eight hundred thousand New Zealanders failed to cast a vote in the last election. Most of them were young, many of them were poor, and practically all of them didn’t give a stuff about politics.

Motivating such voters requires immense effort, and National has opted instead to appease its more conservative supporters by transforming the young and the poor (Maori and Pasifika especially) into handy targets.

Labour’s challenge is to find some way of mobilising the young without at the same time making itself a political hostage to the needs of the poor. One of the easier ways to do this might be to provide younger voters with a hate figure: a stereotype capable of igniting both their indignation and their fear. Fortunately for Labour, such a stereotype already exists: the Selfish Baby Boomer.

By encouraging Generations X and Y to blame the Baby Boomers for everything from the price of real estate to the rising cost of tertiary education, and enlisting their support for a “root-and-branch” reform of New Zealand’s “irresponsibly generous and fiscally unsustainable” system of universal superannuation, Labour could off-set its declining levels of support among older voters. By attributing New Zealand’s indebtedness to the “intergenerational theft” of Baby Boomers, this stripped-down, communitarian Labour Party could, at least in younger voters’ minds, transform “austerity” from a political swear-word into a righteous electoral virtue. In combination with the Greens’ bracing mantra of ecological restraint, they could be on to a winner.

In 1834 the newly enfranchised English middle-class shrugged-off its responsibilities to the poor and vulnerable by passing a new Poor Law. Its hated symbol, the workhouse, was immortalised by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist. The new Poor Law’s sponsor was not some Tory reactionary, but the liberal Whig, Lord Melbourne.

The Workhouse: The New Poor Law of 1834 brought these dreaded institutions into existence. They were explicitly required to offer conditions harsh enough to dissuade all but the most desperate (overwhelmingly, as the above photograph reveals, the elderly) from seeking sustenance within their walls. The legislation was the work not of Tory reactionaries, but of liberal Whigs.

Baby Boomers, be on your guard.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 June 2012.

Intergenerational Theft? - What The F**k! Guest Post by Jill Ovens

High Flyers? Students belonging to Generations X and Y accuse the Baby Boom generation of committing "intergenerational theft", but, as Jill Ovens points out in this guest posting, these students might benefit from a course in New Zealand's recent social history. For many of their parents, particularly those born into the working class, life in the 1970s and 80s was not as easy as they're being encouraged to believe.

THERE IS A LOT of idealised commentary on what it was like to be a university student in the 1970s compared with the lot of today’s students. This is leading young affluent university students to accuse “baby boomers” of stealing from the next generation.

It is a concept of affluent students because the kids of working-class parents don’t generally get to university. Those few who do make it know how much their parents struggled, working two or three jobs, night and day, to get them through school.

Working-class kids didn’t get to university in the 1970s either, unless they had a scholarship. University Entrance paid 9/10 of your fees, but that still meant a bill of $90.00 (the equivalent of two-and-a-half week's pay, or more than $1,000 in today’s terms). There were student allowances in the form of bursaries, but if your parents lived in a university town, you couldn’t get a boarding allowance.

There were no fast food restaurants to provide jobs throughout the year, so you had to earn enough to live on during the varsity holidays. That was okay for the guys as there were well paying jobs in the freezing works and car factories. For women students, it was very different.

Equal pay didn’t come in till 1972. That meant that if we did the same job, men and women were to be paid the same. But we weren’t given the opportunities to do the same jobs. They didn’t let women into McKechnie Brothers, the aluminium extrusion foundry where my boyfriend worked in the holidays (except in the canteen).

I packed peanuts at Eta Foods, screwed lids on Vick’s jars, sorted indescribably filthy linen in Christchurch Hospital laundry, and I earned $15.00 a week cleaning people’s houses for Nurse Maud, a district nursing association. But I could never earn enough to go flatting, so I spent my whole varsity life living with my parents.

When we graduated, the opportunities were very limited. I didn’t want to be a teacher, and the Bank of New Zealand said I’d make a good teller because I was good at maths. I turned them down.

We got paid a lot less than our male friends, and despite women’s liberation, there was a cultural expectation that we would soon produce babies (at least three of them).

We bought houses in huge Neil Housing subdivisions way out in Massey, Manuwera and Glenfield where there were no trees, no amenities (certainly no gym!), and no public transport.

I washed the nappies in a wringer washing machine and hung them on the clothes line. We ran an old VW between the two of us so I was stuck at home. The couch was Mum and dad’s hand-me-down and the bed was bought at a second-hand store.

There was no paid parental leave and limited childcare, so we women graduates had a big gap in our careers that made it difficult to come back into the job market. We had no superannuation as Muldoon scrapped the Kirk scheme.

If we got divorced, as many of us did, any equity we had in our house was divided up. And when our kids came out of high school in the 1990s, there were no jobs, so they stayed home for years, along with their girlfriends and eventually their kids.

Because our kids can’t afford to buy houses, we bought houses for them to live in using the equity from our house, and now all our money is tied up in mortgages. At the same time, we’re supporting our parents in their old age.

That’s how life is and always has been, for most of us. Our parents worked to give us a decent start in life, and we worked hard so our kids could have a fair go. We’re looking after our parents in their old age. We hope we’ll be looked after in our old age.

What about this is “intergenerational theft”?

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Generation Games

Divide and Conquer: Who benefits from setting Generations X & Y and the Baby-Boomers at each other's throats?

WHEN DID IT BEGIN – this war between the Baby-Boomers and Generations X & Y? When did it become something more than the normal bickering between those who wish they still were, and those who (infuriatingly) still are – young? And how did I become so sensitised to these anti-Baby-Boomer attitudes that I’m now posting on the subject?

The proximate cause – as the forensic scientists would say – was a story by Tim Watkin on the Pundit blogsite. According to Tim, the Baby-Boomers were "locusts" –poised like a pestilence to devour what little remains of New Zealand’s patrimony:

"The baby-boomers start retiring now", wailed Tim, "which means the first locusts are already landing on our crops, and behind them comes the swarm ready to devour our welfare budget. Yet our politicians are sitting there like the monkeys with their hands over their eyes, ears and mouth."

For the first time in a long time I experienced that awful feeling of being condemned not for anything I had done, but because of my membership in a particular group. Like every other New Zealander born between the years 1946 and 1966, I did not choose my birth date – and yet, there I was, squarely in Tim’s gunsights.

I cannot say my mood was improved upon reading, a little further down, that: "[The Baby-Boomers] have given themselves generous and repeated tax cuts, meaning fewer services and assets for the generation coming behind. I used the locust metaphor because the baby-boomers (not all, of course, and in a broad, generational sense) have simply gorged themselves without thinking about what they leave behind."

Tim’s rather mealy-mouthed qualification notwithstanding, this accusation really flicked my angry switch. So this was how the younger generations saw us? As selfish insects who "gorged themselves" without the slightest thought for future generations?

I recalled the Baby-Boomers who had raised the banner of ecological sustainability; the Baby-Boomers who had fought tooth-and-nail against the onslaught of Rogernomics; men and women with no other thoughts in their minds except to preserve the planet and keep safe the ideals of fairness and social justice for future generations.

I thought about the vast cultural and political transformations wrought by young middle-class students of the 1960s and 70s: in civil rights, women’s rights, Maori rights, gay rights. I remembered the struggles waged against nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, sporting contacts with South Africa, and for a woman’s right to choose. Two decades of unceasing agitation against the cultural and political institutions of the rigid post-war consensus: militant anti-communism; fast-frozen gender- and race-relations; a stultifying cultural conservatism – all made palatable by an ever-rising standard of living and expanding material wealth.

And, finally, I thought of the tens of thousands of young New Zealand workers who’d unleashed the most protracted period of strike action in New Zealand history. Because, yes, it was the working-class Baby-Boomers who made the 1970s and 80s rock-n-roll with militant union power: working on the chain at the freezing works, driving trucks, building dams, manning the production-lines in the big import-substitution factories of Auckland, Porirua and the Hutt Valley.

Not that I imagine young Tim ever gave much thought to where all those fifteen-year-olds ruthlessly drafted-out of secondary education by the School Certificate examination eventually ended up.

Just as it never occurred to Tim that the tax-cuts he so casually attributes to the greed of the Baby-Boomers couldn’t possibly have been their doing. It was, after all, Rob Muldoon who began cutting income taxes back in the early 1980s. Roger Douglas and Bill Birch (neither of whom are Baby-Boomers) kept on cutting – but not for the sake of young New Zealanders in their 20s and 30s.

The reduction in the top rate of income tax was for the benefit of those in the top income brackets, and in the normal course of events such people tend to be older rather than younger. The men and women (they were mostly men) entering their prime earning years in the 1980s and 90s weren’t Baby-Boomers, they were of Roger Douglas’s and Bill Birch’s generation – New Zealanders born in the 1930s and 40s – not the 1950s and 60s.

A moment’s more thought would have reminded Tim that the real "Baby-Boomer Government" led by Labour’s Helen Clark (b. 1950) – didn’t cut taxes, it raised them.

And it’s about here, of course, that we come to the ultimate cause of this nasty little war between the Baby-Boomers and Generations X & Y - historical amnesia.

Having the generations who were its primary victims at each others’ throats is exactly what the neoliberal architects of Rogernomics require. Those responsible for the changes which transformed New Zealand society from one of the most equal (in terms of income share) to one of the most unequal in the OECD have no interest whatsoever in New Zealanders accurately recalling "whodunnit".

And, of course, Generations X & Y either weren’t old enough to appreciate what was going on between 1984-93 – or had yet to be born. All they know about what happened in the 1980s and 90s is what other people tell them. And that’s the trick, you see. To make them believe that the reason they have to pay student fees; the reason they can’t afford a house; the reason they have to keep putting off getting married and starting a family: it’s all down to those greedy bloody Baby-Boomers!

And we Boomers: affronted and hurt by the false accusations of Generations X and Y; and not a little confused ourselves about how everything turned so comprehensively to shit over the past quarter-century; we get all angry and defensive.

"Who do these little bastards think they are?" we say. "We haven’t noticed them marching down the street for peace, justice and equality – like we did. We haven’t seen them taking part in strike action. Shut up in their rooms: with their PCs and iPods and cell-phones; downloading, texting, face-booking and tweeting their lives away; who the fuck are they to point their fingers at us!"

Divide et Impera. Divide and Conquer. It almost never fails.

While the victims of the neoliberal counter-revolution scratch and tear at each other for a share of the social-services cake which, with every passing budget, emerges from the oven just a little bit smaller than the year before, the men and women who bake it refill their glasses and offer up a votive prayer to Pluto – the God of Death and Money – that those whose lives they've so comprehensively constrained never grasp the simple and unchanging truth. That greed is ageless.

Minority Opinion

"They've got the guns, but we've got the numbers", or so sang 60s icon Jim Morrison of The Doors. But, for the first time since the progressive majority of the Baby Boom Generation became old enough to influence social and political trends, "the numbers" now lie with conservative social movements like the anti-anti-smackers, Family First .

FINALLY, the die-hards have got the numbers. For years now, on the issues that divide New Zealanders into progressives and conservatives, the progressives have been in the ascendant.

Whether it be issues as old as the death penalty and a woman’s right to choose, or as relatively recent as New Zealand’s nuclear-free status, genetic engineering, or the Iraq War, a solid majority of New Zealanders have held up their hands for compassion, justice, peace and rationality.

This progressive ascendancy has lasted a long time. From the late-1980s until about 2005 – nearly twenty years.

Historically, it coincided with the rise of the NewLabour, Green, and Alliance parties, and the election of the Helen Clark-led Labour Government – all of them elevated by the public’s deep mistrust of the New Right revolution of 1984-96.

Progressive dominance was also reinforced by the advent of proportional representation. Instead of a hide-bound club, comprised overwhelmingly of white, middle-aged men, MMP forced the House of Representatives to live up to its name. Nandor Tanczos’s dreadlocks, hemp suit and skateboard were only the most colourful proof that the times were a-changing.

Underlying all of this, however, was the relentless demographic pressure of the Baby-Boom Generation (1946-66).

The first of the Boomers were in their late-30s when Rob Muldoon’s conservative government finally fell in July 1984. Over the next 20 years, they and their younger brothers and sisters would steadily occupy all of the strategic decision-making points of New Zealand society – and progressively transform it.

From the moment they entered primary school in the 1950s, the Boomers had been absorbing New Zealand’s nominally progressive "official" ideology. And, as they entered high-school and university in the 1960s and 70s, these youngsters were naturally impatient to test its authenticity.

There was genuine reason for doubt.

Apart from a handful of progressive enclaves in the universities, civil service, arts and trade unions, the New Zealand of the 1960s and 70s was a profoundly conservative society. There were overwhelming popular majorities in favour of restoring the death penalty, keeping abortion and homosexuality illegal, maintaining sporting contacts with South Africa, and preserving the ANZUS alliance with Australia and the United States.

When it came to challenging the "official" values of their parent’s generation, the Baby-Boomers (as in so many other aspects of their lives) were spoiled for choice.

New Zealand had signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – but was willing to play Rugby with representatives of Apartheid. We had endorsed the UN Charter – but backed the United States’ rape of Vietnam. We solemnly affirmed that in our democratic society all citizens were equal – but we paid women less for doing the same work as men, and refused to protect te reo Maori, their lands and other treasures.

The Boomers’ great mission became matching their nation’s deeds with its words. And, to a truly remarkable degree, they were successful.

Or, perhaps it’s more truthful to say that the Baby Boomers who genuinely believed in the progressive ideals they’d been encouraged to actualise were remarkably successful. Because not all of the generation born between 1946 and 1966 ended up falling under the progressive spell.

For conservative Baby Boomers, these past 20 years have been a torment. While New Zealand’s officially progressive ideals remained little more than window-dressing, behind which the majority’s die-hard conservatism continued to hold sway, all was well. But when the official credo found official backing, and theory became practice, things turned decidedly sour.

Railing against the "political correctness" of the Boomer generation’s progressive majority, its conservative minority could only wait for the same demographic forces which had unseated their parents’ regime to come to their rescue.

And come they did, in the form of Generations X and Y. Innocent of the old conservatism’s crimes, but only-too-aware of their Boomer parents’ glaring hypocrisies (who was it who took everything the Welfare State had to offer, and then decided it was all too expensive for their children to enjoy?) the New Zealanders born after 1967 proved easy prey for the "political correctness" calumnies of the conservative Boomers.

And so the period of progressive ascendancy has ended, and the conservative Baby Boomers – backed by their privileged generation’s alienated offspring – are eagerly anticipating an historic victory for the anti-anti-smacking referendum.

Which leaves the progressives exactly where they’ve always done their best work: carrying the flickering flames of our vulnerable virtues into the cankered heart of the conservative darkness.

A version of this essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 26 June 2009.