2 months ago
17
This year, the most common age for an Australian was 34 years old. As one of those 34-year-olds, I will try to furnish Wilson and Allan with some ideas.
Both Labor and the Coalition are right to talk about housing affordability as much as possible. It is the single-biggest policy failure affecting younger generations.
Allan has a head start here, having spent her two years as premier working on policies ranging from building more townhouses and towers around railway activity centres to reforming planning to speed up the timelines for new homes.
Wilson, who on becoming leader made housing one of her four key policy areas, will have to convince Millennial voters in 2026 that she can do better, but the path is treacherous.
Government insiders believe protests against density in Melbourne’s east and bayside are electoral gold that can be used to tell young voters that the Coalition is the chief impediment to tackling the housing crisis. Allan’s team has shown it is all too happy to spur on this fight.
Wilson has proposed axing stamp duty for first home buyers on all properties up to $1 million. Reforms on property taxes like stamp duty are in the Liberals’ DNA and a good area for them to try to differentiate from Labor. If she follows this path, Wilson will be pressured daily to explain how she’ll maintain a budget that reduces one of the state’s biggest sources of income.
In September, demographer Simon Kuestenmacher predicted Millennials would continue to be pushed to the city’s fringes for another 12 years. After this point, he said, enough Baby Boomers will have died or downsized for the middle suburbs to truly densify.
Jess Wilson and Jacinta Allan.Credit: Stephen Kiprillis
Party leaders would be wise in 2026 to pledge as much money as possible for hospitals, schools and transport infrastructure at the edge of Melbourne, particularly in the north and west.
While traffic snarls continue to be a major issue, don’t expect many with a long commute along a single-lane highway to oppose policies that encourage working from home.
Over the same 12-year period that Kuestenmacher mentioned, he predicts Millennials will have plenty of babies.
Potential political fights for 2026 and beyond will be over pressures on maternity services, hospital budgets and capacity for childcare and schools.
There is one element of this predicted baby boom that is far more difficult but, if solved, could deliver some of the biggest electoral benefits. Put simply, the trade-off between your career or having kids.
A major challenge for Millennials is how to handle the increasingly contradictory demands between a well-paying job, a satisfying career and starting a family.
Most people in this age bracket won’t make it to 9am without thinking about children. Not just if or when to have them, but how this would be achievable.
In an environment where two incomes are needed to afford a home, discussions between couples about children have an extra tension. Who would be willing to take a job they hate but pays more or has more reasonable hours? Should you apply for a dream job if it’s a short-term contract or doesn’t have parental leave?
Yes, at its core this is a cost-of-living issue, but there is a broader challenge here about what the Australian Dream actually looks like and what we value as a society.
We have for years spruiked a world where men and women can both have careers, equal pay and a family.
The reality is that, during the years when you are arguably your most productive, you cannot achieve one of these goals without one person in the relationship making a major trade-off.
This is a problem for workplaces around the world. There are many excellent young journalists who have left my industry because they sought a more secure lifestyle to provide for their family.
Political offices are often dogged by brain drain as 30 and 40-year-olds disappear for a decade into the private sector. The consequence is, despite there being plenty of Millenials in the workforce, many institutions struggle to retain them and miss out on the contributions they can make.
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Millennials were not the first to have this problem and won’t be the last, but the size of the generation combined with the nation’s ageing population has made the issue more pronounced.
With the weight of numbers, what better time to find a solution?
Improving housing and childcare affordability will help. Governments have also made strides in areas such as parental leave and childcare, but the choice between a career and a family remains a constant anxiety for many Millennials.
If Labor and the Coalition strategists really want to finish 2026 having won government and a generation of Homers and Marges, here is a problem begging for action.
Kieran Rooney is a Victorian state political reporter at The Age.
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