Intergenerational Warfare: The Enemy to Good Long-Term Policy

Tensions between generations are not new, but you would be forgiven for feeling that they have reached fever pitch over recent years. Economists like Alison Pennington have warned that “Australia’s highly educated Gen-Z” is “set to be the first cohort worse off than its parents” citing “insecure work, housing shortages and global warming” as the cause. This assessment also leaves out the more existential threats and insecurities that this generation and those that follow have grown up with, being gifted with a front-row seat to the world’s triumphs and terrors on their personal devices from an early age. The fact is that we, as a society, are facing the results of our past actions, and inactions, and I don’t think too many people are fans of the results. In these circumstances, the easiest and most satisfying response is often to turn our focus across generations and pass the blame, shunning those who ‘should have done better’. However, this approach will only further hamstring our ambitions for a better future. Instead, it's time to take a long hard look in the mirror and do the hard yards of reimagining the system that we are co-creators of, in order to safeguard future generations from this same feeling.

I recently sat down with Professor?Bobby Duffy from the Policy Institute at Kings College London, Danielle Wood, chair of the Productivity Commission, Professor Patrick McGorry, Executive Director of Orygen, and Jahin Tanvir, CEO of the Australian School of Entrepreneurship, as we discussed the launched new data from Orygen and Kings College London to unpack this very topic. Throughout our discussion, we explored the drivers of generational attitudes and the stark reality that - while not the most ‘clickable’ headline - maybe we are not as divided as we like to believe.

The trappings of generational warfare vs. intergenerational solidarity?

Addressing the challenges across generations is unique. Unlike most other intersections or representative groups such as gender or race, we count ourselves lucky if we are granted safe passage from infancy to our twilight years. As such, while ‘nothing about us without us’ stands as an essential rallying cry for meaningful inclusion in decision-making, it should not be extended to an ‘us only’ rhetoric as this holds significantly less value than true intergenerational solidarity.?

Now, before I am called a traitor to my youth advocacy colleagues, I want to clarify that I am an unrelenting champion for youth inclusion and youth leadership. However, I hope we soon move beyond siloed ‘Youth Advisory Boards’ with little interaction with the formal processes of decision-making. Not only does this approach feel like a quarantine station for youth, but it fails to establish the cross-generational collaboration that can unlock the potential of our future, pairing the innovation of youth with the wisdom of experience.

We unpacked this exact dilemma during our discussion as Jahin Tanvir, a fellow young person, passionately asserted that “If it relates to young people, it should be youth lead”. Yes, I do agree, young people should have a larger platform to input into policies and decisions that impact them, but, as you hear if you take the chance to listen to the recording - now available on ABC Listen - I couldn’t help but interject to explore this further. In this retelling I will also lead with the fact that Jahin and I then clarified that we had a lot more common ground on this topic than I had initially thought - once again the less ‘clickable’ reality that is often the case - but it provided the opportunity to unpack a point of debate that is too often stepped past. Creating siloed decision-making spaces when it comes to generational differences and long-term policy is challenging and could be characterised as short-sighted. It runs the risk of creating ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dynamics and reinforces an insidious form of tribalism that we should be avoiding at all costs. With that in mind, while youth leadership is fantastic, I far prefer the idea of building the capabilities of all parties to empower intergenerational collaboration as this is essential to true intergenerational fairness.

Redefining Success & Solution Design

Similarly, our definitions of success also can’t lay in individual metrics or the perception of a single group, an ethos that is well captured in the recently launched Australian National Wellbeing Framework which brings together 50 indicators to define ‘success’ in the landscape of societal wellbeing. An examination of these metrics and their inter-relating impacts shows the overriding imperative for a big-picture view in order to avoid playing the ‘policy whack-a-mole’ game of designing short-term solutions to systemic issues. We must think long-term and reach across generations to achieve the prosperous, secure and healthy future that this framework aims for. It is this cross-cutting view, supported by intergenerational collaboration that has the ability to provide tangible insight across an entire century. Enabling us to overcome our bias for the immediate implications for us, and people like us, and reconcile with the long-term impacts of our decisions by, quite literally, looking it in the eye.??

The Road to Intergenerational Solidarity?

The only way out of the sticky situation we find ourselves in is to work together. We must reject the myth of generational warfare being inevitable in order to build a muscle of intergenerational solidarity.?

What now? We have to get to work. Not in the fight against each other but in redefining our ways of working, only then will we systemically alter the outcomes we produce. Working in this way is also not a flip of a switch. As with engaging any new community, first comes trust building and only later comes meaningful partnership. Unsure where to start? Be curious, be open and be ready to collaborate. This will, inherently, bring compromise. But we are well past the point of any one group or person having ‘all the answers’. The state of our world requires an ‘all hands on deck’ approach, and we must work shoulder-to-shoulder with every generation to chart a course for a future that we can all see ourselves in.