Capitalism: zero likes from Gen Z
If young people didn’t already feel aggrieved enough, having a generation of social-media-obsessed scrolling addicts tell them they can’t watch YouTube must really grate.
Yet that’s what the federal Labor Party, which by the way gave almost $20 million to tech bros at Meta and YouTube to help get itself re-elected last May, has done. And the worst part about it is not that young people are going to have to use someone else’s account to get access to unproven health and wellness advice, but that this is far from the worst affront to their dignity.
On almost every conceivable measure, young people in Australia are being disadvantaged and excluded. Life milestones that previous generations took for granted are increasingly becoming luxuries, achieved later in life if at all. Society feels stacked against them, organised to enrich an obscenely wealthy elite, and governed by entitled charisma-evacuations without two political principles to rub together.
This is most glaring in relation to housing. While no political party will even countenance stepping on the toes of property investors or developers, young people are locked out of the housing market, denied economic independence and forced to live with their parents into their late 20s either because they can’t afford rent or because it’s the only way to save for a deposit. If they can afford rent, they have to put up with substandard housing owned by landlords who think being required to remove mould is socialism.
The result, as the Grattan Institute’s 2019 “Generation Gap: ensuring a fair go for younger Australians” report notes, is that “younger Australians are now less likely to own a home than young people were in the past. In 2016, 45 per cent of 30-year-olds owned a home; in 1981, the figure was 67 per cent. By contrast, older people are just as likely to own a home now as they were then—with about 80 per cent of 65-year-olds owning a home”. The most recent Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) report likewise found that only 18 percent of people born between 1994 and 1997 owned a house before age 28, compared to 26.5 percent of those born between 1974 and 1977.
And if they do own a house, young people are likely to be in more debt than any previous generation—the average home loan today is $694,000, up from $416,000 ten years ago. Low wage growth is a big factor locking young people out of home ownership, the price of an average house in Australia last December being 16.4 times the average household income, up from 9.5 times throughout the 1990s and 4.5 times in the 1970s. In capital cities, the discrepancy is even worse.
And while young people are taking on record levels of housing debt, they also have to contend with unprecedented education debt, not having had the benefit of free or very low-cost education that their forebears enjoyed.
According to the ATO, average student loan debt for people in their 20s has increased 145 percent over the last twenty years, well above the 62 percent total inflation over the same period. Graduates now take 40 percent longer to repay these debts than they did in the early 2000s, reflecting both higher debts and lower wages graduates are saddled with.
Young people are also shouldering a disproportionate burden in relation to tax and government support. Older people have benefited from tax policies that favour investors, such as the capital gains tax concessions introduced by the Howard government, while younger people on average have been further disadvantaged by them. The result, as Robert Breunig from the Australian National University, writing for the Conversation, points out, is that “older Australians have much higher incomes than previous generations of retirees. The average 75-year-old’s post-tax and transfer income 25 years ago was little more than 75% of an average Australian income. Today it equals the average Australian income ... Older Australians also enjoy a post-tax income one third higher than Australians aged 18–30”.
Older people typically have more assets than the young, but the gap between them has grown significantly over the last 30 years. The Grattan Institute reports:
“The average household headed by someone aged 65-74 now has more than $1.3 million in net assets, up from $530,000 in real terms for a household of the same age in 1994. Wealth for an average household headed by someone aged 25-34 increased only modestly—from an average of $190,000 in net assets in 1994 to $300,000 today. Over the past decade, wealth for younger households has barely shifted.”
Age used to correlate with economic disadvantage in Australia, and it is positive that it no longer does. But aside from the fact that the benefits are not evenly distributed even among older people, this change is in part a product of tax and welfare policies that favour the already wealthy, to the detriment of young people.
Then there are the social and political values young people have to contend with. A case in point is the unapologetic indifference of those in charge towards the climate catastrophe they are knowingly signing up future generations to endure. Profits from fossil fuel production and export come before any consideration of the irreversible impact these industries will have on people’s lives. The cynical spin and creative accounting that pass for climate action only compound the contempt many young people feel for the political class.
There is likewise the sense that politicians and the powerful have no human decency, demonstrated most clearly by the almost unanimous official and institutional support for the genocide in Gaza. Add to that callousness towards the plight of refugees, Indigenous people and a general tendency to blame those with the least power for society’s problems.
Even the changes that supposedly represent the pinnacle of human achievement and that young people are told will improve their lives turn out more often than not to be the opposite. The much-celebrated advances in technology over the last three decades, for example, have not axiomatically translated into improvements in quality of life or wellbeing, especially for those raised entirely in the digital age.
More often than not, technological innovation seems to work against people—food delivery that further reduces social contact, image-crafting on social media that bears no relation to reality, endless marketing that plays on insecurities and low self-esteem to sell shonky crap. And that’s when it’s not being used by bosses to eliminate jobs and sack people, predators to groom abuse victims, misogynists to humiliate women or right-wing cranks to spread hate. The threat posed by AI to jobs is likewise projected to have the greatest impact on the young: 39 percent of entry level jobs already being replaced by AI according to a British Standards Institution survey of seven countries.
The net result is that there is no longer a sense that life holds promise—that you can be independent and adventurous when you’re young without jeopardising your later financial security—or that your life, and the life you can offer the next generation, will be better than what has gone before. Society seems like it is working against young people, not for them.
It is no wonder, then, the level of anxiety and distress among the young is at record highs. Writing for the Conversation, Flinders University academic Intifar Chowdhury notes, “Between 2011 and 2021, distress among 15 to 24-year-olds more than doubled, from 18.4% to 42.3%. For those aged 25 to 34, prevalence reached 32.7% in 2021 ... The 2025 Australian Unity Wellbeing Index survey found young Australians are some of the least satisfied with life, with adults aged 18 to 34 reporting the highest levels of mental distress and loneliness, and some of the lowest levels of personal wellbeing compared to any group across the adult lifespan”.
In the age of unprecedented connectedness, young people are more isolated, have fewer friends and are lonelier than they have ever been, with loneliness among 15 to 24-year-olds increasing from 14.4 percent in 2008 to 24.9 percent in 2022, according to HILDA.
Being connected to others in real life, accepted for who you are, valued for whatever contribution you are able to make to the collective good, is necessary for people to thrive. But it is anathema to the ideology of capitalism, and increasingly difficult to achieve in spite of it.
Not surprisingly, all this is having political consequences.
Young people are more leftish, in voting habits and social attitudes, than any other cohort. A 2024 YouGov poll found 53 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds preferred socialism over capitalism, well above the 27 percent national average. A similar poll taken the year before by the decidedly un-socialist Institute for Public Affairs and Canada’s Fraser Institute, likewise showed 50 percent support for socialism among 18 to 34-year-olds. It also found that Australia had the highest support for communism among under-35s (20 percent), higher than any of the other countries polled (the US, Canada and the UK).
At the last federal election, Generation Y voters (under 29 years old) had the most pronounced two-party preferred vote for Labor (67-33) and the strongest Green vote at 27 percent, according to the Australian Election Study (AES) report on the election.
And while the traditional pattern is that people become more conservative as they age, the factors that pushed past generations to the right are no longer as strong, if they exist at all. As the AES notes, “Millennials, a group now in their 30s and 40s, are not shifting to the right as they age, rather they have been shifting to the left. Millennials’ support of the Coalition has fallen from 38 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in 2025”.
Accommodation of older people to the status quo is largely underpinned by a degree of financial security. But less than a third of 16 to 24-year-olds in Australia in 2017 expected to have a higher standard of living than their parents, according to an International Youth Foundation survey, well below the international average of 59 percent. And there is a basis for this sentiment. According to the Grattan Institute, if the long-term pattern of low wage growth in Australia continues, people born in the 1990s will have lower incomes than those born 10-20 years earlier.
The challenge for those holding on to hope that a better world is possible is to organise this sentiment into a force that can challenge the system and the powerful interests that are invested in the status quo. Disgruntlement with capitalism manifests frequently as resignation, partly because there is so little living memory or direct experience of the sort of collective action that can win gains. Two generations now have lived through weak workers’ movements, the advance of the right and the retreat of social movements and living standards. Despite Australia being one of the countries least affected by the global financial crisis, and with relatively high living standards, it is nevertheless unable to give a critical mass of young people confidence in the future.
This represents a challenge and opportunity for the left. History shows that when people do move, when they decide they have had enough, they look to the radical tradition of what has gone before. The more people are already committed to keeping that alive, and fighting for it today, the better are our chances of organising the next generation into a force that can win a better world.
