The Kids Aren't Alright
How declining education outcomes and ideological media are a threat to the future.
There is much trepidation for the future among our youth, and most often for good reason. Young people express fear, anxiety, and very often even anger about such matters as house prices, fuel prices, electricity prices, social and economic inequality and many other woes they face. All valid stresses that many individuals and families, including me and mine, are spending a great deal of time thinking and worrying about.
The problem, however, is that the young are misplacing the blame, and wildly so. This is understandable, though, when you come to understand the media they consume and, disturbingly, the media they believe, and even more so again if you first understand how far education outcomes have fallen. We have fallen from fourth place in OECD rankings to sixteenth, and worse than that in certain subjects. Combined together, these poor education outcomes of our youth and the ideological media they consume are a recipe for frustrated policy solutions to the very problems that affect them because law-makers conscious that they are the next generation of voters are beholden to their activist antics egged on by their educators and the capitulations of their affirming mothers.
Take the housing crisis as just one example. I happened upon an Instagram post summarising a report by a housing industry body that I can't remember the name of, which claimed the main causes of the crisis are high population growth on the demand side coupled with low construction growth on the supply side. This is true, the primary cause of the housing crisis is a supply-demand imbalance, but vague and ambiguous references to population growth and supply issues are misleading and easily misunderstood by this generation. A deeper and more careful analysis is required than the media they consume can offer, or the education they received can allow them to glean for themselves.
To the impressionable mind of an Australian youth who is labouring away at an intellectually frivolous university degree or has just graduated from one, the vague term 'population growth' would likely send their mind reeling into foreboding thoughts of catastrophic overpopulation at the hands of irresponsible parents, probably conservative Christian ones, having too many children. Nothing could be further from the truth. The birth rate among Australian women is below the population replacement level, as is the case in much of the developed world. To the surprise of many misled young folk, high birthrates are not a problem in the Western world. In fact, low birthrates and the subsequent ageing population with fewer young people to care for it or provide adequate tax revenue for the government to care for it is a huge cause for concern. Albeit, this is largely ignored by a generation so comfortable, privileged, and void of meaning that every social, environmental and economic ailment is simplified, misrepresented and then catastrophised as an existential problem at the expense of legitimate solutions. But I digress.
So, where are the people causing immense demand for housing coming from if not from natural population growth? Net Overseas Migration (NOM), obviously, levels of which in Australia are among the highest in the OECD and rising. The Albanese government has just announced an exponential increase in migrant intake to compensate for the shortfall in population growth during COVID. What the government has foolishly overlooked is that a) housing construction also slowed from an already slow rate to a near halt during COVID, and b) the pressure on the demand side of the housing market is the primary cause of the crisis already on our hands. Thus, the question which should have been at the forefront of such decision-making, namely, where we are going to house all of these extra people when we already have too many people competing for too few homes, was blatantly and ineptly ignored. As a result, we can expect, by mid-2024 at the latest, that the situation will escalate from crisis to (legitimate) catastrophe.
Here is the challenge, however; overseas migration is an untouchable issue in the young Australian mind. Any criticism thereof is met with accusations, often loud and high-pitched, of racism, xenophobia or an assortment of all the trending 'isms' and phobias. Never mind the costs of maintaining such policies on feigned grounds of compassion or welfare or of narrow understandings of the population-economy coefficient if we can find compelling (compelling to fragile minds, at least) scapegoats with easy solutions that only affect the 'rich', like negative gearing and greedy landlords, to complain incessantly and distractingly about.
The post alluded to above also made a vague mention of weather impacting housing construction, thus affecting the supply side. Again, to the current student or fresh graduate with a chip on his/her/their/aer/pers/vis/pers/xyr/its shoulder about society, capitalism and the environment, this innocuous mention of weather would send the mind spinning in existential angst. In reality, we have experienced consecutive cold and wet summers, which anyone who has ever worked outdoors and/or built something with their hands would know is a frustrating, often show-stopping hindrance. But that is hardly the biggest issue on the supply side.
Wrapped up tight in red tape and faced with union-driven efficiency retardation and crippling labour and material costs, the construction industry is like a Prius towing a semi-trailer uphill. Put simply, between burdensome regulation across the local, state and federal levels, inflated costs of materials, and the highest wages in the world, the construction industry is tired and giving up. This is evidenced by some of the industry's biggest firms going belly-up in recent times.
Couple this with the astronomical and (legitimately) catastrophically unsustainable migrant intake, sustained record low interest rates and unenforced regulations and minimal oversight for foreign investment in Australian property, and we have the real issue, as certified by the brightest minds in economic academia, (excluding Richard Marles, who apparently knows better than the treasury, the productivity commission and the reserve bank combined), properly understood.
The government, however, echoed by their personal public relations agency, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, would have the impressionable young who are paradoxically stressed about the price of housing while at the same time dubious of the very concept of private property, believe that it is the uneaten rich investors incentivised by negative gearing and greed who are pricing them out of the housing market because that is the simplest and most expedient explanation the solution to which requires the least effort.
They might know better had they started working, or maybe started a business, or apprenticed in a trade, or started a family, or all of the above rather than waste three years at a university that was incentivised to bring them through the door by commonwealth funding without any risk to the institution and regardless of merit and subsequently to lower academic and intellectual standards to maximise the government-funded tuition fees that could be squeezed from them. Hardly a good investment on behalf of the student or the Commonwealth, or, for that matter, the taxpayer.
But alas, they are absent the wisdom and capacity for critical thought that comes naturally in the course of adult life in the real world or of a real education from a course at an institution that holds the education of the whole person rather than the post-truth, anti-capitalist, critical race/gender theory and catastrophist environmental narrative as the highest priority. And so they continue to vote for the people who sit in the dark applauding themselves for promising to fix the problem they themselves have created and exacerbated while blaming foreign wars, marginally worse than usual flu seasons and former governments in one big continuum of incompetence.
This is the retarding effect of modern education and ideological media on one area of policy alone. Extrapolate that across every issue faced by young Australians, and one quickly comes to realise that we are shoving the stick in our own bicycle spokes and blaming anything and anyone else. The only blame owed to anyone for the trepidations of young Australians is their parents and educators for raising them to care more for leisure, self-esteem and consumerism than for conscientious work, self-control and contributory production.