Damned if you work, damned if you retire: The Baby Boomers stuck in a Catch-22

Groceries? Staples like milk, butter, eggs and bread cost way less now than in 1975 when adjusted for wages; chicken is much cheaper, red meat pricier, and while ice-cream and biscuits are cheaper, they’ve suffered shrinkflation (here’s looking at mini you, Chocolate Montes and Cornettos). Some items, such as washing powder, are marginally more expensive, but the prices of all plastic consumer goods (Glad Bags, Tupperware) have plummeted. Economists today may sweat over an inflation rate of 4 per cent, but in 1975, it was galloping at a wallet-shredding 15 per cent. Grocery prices were moving faster than a disco beat.

Dining out? Until the 1980s, your options were milk bars, hotel dining rooms, department-store cafeterias, tearooms and a handful of cafes in Sydney’s Potts Point or Melbourne’s St Kilda. Try asking a 1975 waiter for an oat milk piccolo whatevs, or quizzing them about the “provenance” of the sirloin or whether the peas are “hyper local” or not, and they’d most likely assume you were on a bad acid trip.

Clothing? Just about every item of casual and formal wear was far more expensive in 1975, when many garments were still manufactured locally, made to last and, in many working-class families, were passed down to younger siblings. When I recall to Anne Drane that my mother, a seamstress in a shirt factory, insisted on making most of my teenage shirts, much to my annoyance, she warms to the theme (“yes, we relied on our auntie to make all our clothes”). Today we’ve traded durable, locally made craftsmanship for “fast fashion” – a relentless tsunami of ultra-cheap, synthetic junk that winds up in landfill at the end of each season.

International travel? In 1975, a standard return economy airfare from Sydney to London on a major carrier like Qantas cost about $2300 – about a third of the median annual wage. Today, a return economy airfare on Qantas for the same trip costs much the same – starting at about $2200, less than three per cent of the median annual wage. Once largely the preserve of the well-heeled, international travel has become as mundane as booking an interstate bus trip.

Margaret Betteridge, 73, who has worked as a curator at the City of Sydney for more than 30 years, recalls her first flight overseas to London in September 1975 to do a course in museum studies. “My salary was around $3000 per annum and the airfare to London cost a bit more than that,” she recalls. “Because it was so expensive, people who flew to Europe either saved up a long time, if they were young, or if they were old, tended to be very comfortable financially.”

Today’s acquisitive lifestyle, hypercharged by the internet’s endless digital bazaar, makes 1975 look positively spartan by comparison. We’re drowning in smartphones, iPads, Fitbits, Sonos, noise-cancelling headphones, flatpack furniture, disposable threads and – ugh! – plastic plants as decor. Consumerism didn’t truly hit its stride in Australia until the ’80s and ’90s, when tariff walls were brought down, ushering in the so-called “affluenza” era of cheap imports – and a mountain of landfill.

While financial strain is very real today, and risks getting much worse because of deteriorating international conditions, decades of lifestyle creep have turned what were once luxuries into non-negotiables. We might be skint, but do we really have to ditch our cafe breakfasts or streaming subscriptions?

Today’s great expectations were noted by many of the Boomers interviewed for this story. “This need for instant gratification – ‘We’re entitled to this now’ – didn’t exist a few decades ago,” muses Drane, who recounts a childhood in south-western Sydney’s Revesby in the 1950s marked by poverty and missed meals while her mother toiled at part-time jobs and her father struggled with post-war trauma and alcoholism.

There’s no denying, though, that Boomers were blessed with a big stroke of historical luck with housing. In 1975, a Sydney home cost about $28,000 – manageable at four times the average annual income. Today, that same dream requires $1.53 million, a suffocating 16 to 18 times the median annual salary. And yes, history has been generous to Boomers in terms of building equity in bricks-and-mortar over the decades. But this doesn’t mean they gamed the system: all they did was stay in their homes while market forces over time drove values through their roof.

Today’s housing market is brutally unfair for young people, but it’s pure piffle to imagine that getting a home loan or paying a mortgage were pieces of cake in decades past. Home loan interest rates didn’t just climb in the 1970s and ’80s – they throttled the household budget, rising from 10 per cent in 1975 to a punishing 17.5 per cent by 1990.

For my own working-class parents, both of whom worked in factories from the 1950s to the 1980s, home ownership was but a distant mirage for the entire time I was growing up. When I finally managed to help them buy a home, my monthly mortgage repayments became a high-wire act across a chasm of soaring interest rates that drove me to getting a second job until they began to fall after a year or so.

Lucky for them, they had a son: back in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ’70s, a single woman applying for a housing loan might as well have asked a bank manager for the keys to the vault. Banks routinely demanded a male “financial chaperone” – a father, brother, or partner – to sign off as guarantor, assuming the little lady would eventually resign to pop out babies anyway. Just ask Drane. When she sought to buy her first home as a 25-year-old single woman in the early 1970s, she had to jump through hoops, even though she was beginning her career in the Commonwealth Bank at the time. “To be considered, I got a second job and worked seven days a week for a year to meet their strict criteria,” she says.

It wasn’t much easier 10 years later for teacher Margaret Harrington, who applied for a loan in 1983. Even with tens of thousands of dollars in the bank from her divorce settlement, her request for a modest top-up to buy an apartment fell on deaf ears. The then 30-something had to go to five different banks before finally finding a lender willing to treat her as an independent borrower. “It was a terrible experience, made worse by bank managers making sexist remarks,” she recalls.

Back then, sexism was baked into the entire workplace. Drane recalls with absolute clarity being passed over for promotion after promotion for less-qualified males during her banking career in the 1970s. It wasn’t until the banks were deregulated in the 1980s and social attitudes began to change that those roadblocks started crashing down. By 1993, Drane didn’t just walk into a bank, hat in hand for a housing loan – she was manager of a suburban branch of the St George bank.

Younger Boomers and Gen Xers undoubtedly profited nicely off the Howard government’s 1999 tax perks, including capital gains cuts and boosts to negative gearing, which many economists believe unintentionally drained capital away from start-ups and innovation, a regrettable shift expertly exposed in Amy Remeikis’s recent book Where it All Went Wrong. “Howard turned housing from a place to live to a source of wealth,” she writes. But if you imagine Boomers monopolise the rentals and are to blame for your latest rent hike, sneak a peek at your landlord’s ID. ATO figures show that more than 73 per cent of landlords are Gen Xers or Millennials, with Boomers holding under 27 per cent (a number that COTA insists is now much lower, and set to crater, as older people offload investment properties and pass away).

If Gen Zers imagine they’re the first generation to face a raw deal, they may draw some comfort from the fact high home-ownership rates in Australia have been the historical exception, not the rule: from Federation until World War II, barely half the nation owned the roof over their heads. And home-ownership levels have remained pretty steady over the past 50 years (68 per cent in 1975 compared with 66 per cent today), although that may be under threat in the years to come.

And don’t fall for the line – often pushed by pro-development YIMBY cheerleaders – that senior Australians are selfish for wanting to stay in the family home, where they built their lives. Look around our suburbs, and you’ll see that all too often, Granny’s big, leafy backyard is bulldozed, not for a duplex or low-rise apartments, but for a brick-veneer mansion with a small paved courtyard. Forget the modest family cottage of 1975 – a sensible 130 to 150 square metres. Today’s typical Aussie house has bloated into a monstrous brick-veneer box of between 214 to 235 square metres, bursting with cinema rooms, multiple bathrooms, and empty bedrooms galore – all built to house tiny families that are half the size of those in the 1970s.

In our rapidly ageing nation, keeping senior Australians in the workforce, particularly in critical sectors like aged care, education and health, is no longer an option but an economic necessity. “Australia is shooting itself in the foot by treating willing and capable older workers like a financial liability rather than an economic lifeline,” argues Chris Grice, CEO of National Seniors Australia.

Championing the peak body’s “Let Pensioners Work” campaign, Grice believes the system actively discourages people over retirement age from staying in the workforce. For every dollar earned above $226 a fortnight for singles, the pension is slashed by 50 cents; for couples earning above $396 a fortnight, it reduces by 25 cents in the dollar. (Centrelink’s Work Bonus helps you keep more of your pension if you meet eligibility requirements, however.) Slapping seniors with fortnightly income reporting can also be a disincentive because of all the red tape, notes Grice.

Even finding a job when aged over 55 can be a marathon. ABS data shows it takes older jobseekers an average of 20 months to land a new role after losing one – more than double the nine months for younger applicants (15 to 54). COTA’s State of the Older Nation 2025 report reveals that 38 per cent of people over 50 have experienced some form of age discrimination and one in two recruiters show little or no openness to hiring workers 65 and over. “Ageism can be a significant deterrent for seniors trying to re-enter the workforce,” says COTA’s Sparrow.

Chris Grice says that institutional ageism remains rampant in recruitment and promotion, particularly in financial services, media and some areas of hospitality and sales. AI may be a double-edged sword, he says, enabling instant screening-out of older applicants, yet also simplifying software processes and helping seniors bridge technical skill gaps.

In a basic sense, Boomers are caught in a damned-if-you-work, damned-if-you-don’t Catch-22. Stick around in the office, and you’re a job-hoarder robbing eager young things of a career ladder; retire, and you’re a freeloading burden bleeding taxpayers dry. For many manual labourers and tradies, there isn’t even a choice: decades of hard physical toil make working past their 60s virtually impossible.

Painting Australia’s 3 million Baby Boomers as a uniform group of comfortable, home-owning Anglo-Saxons ignores a far more diverse and complex reality. It erases the waves of European migrants – 2 million in total between 1945 and 1965 – who spent decades breaking their backs in low-paid factory jobs, and the Indigenous Australians who have battled racism and job discrimination for their entire lives. “Boomers aren’t a single, homogeneous group,” says Sparrow. “The rich diversity of our broader community exists across every age bracket.”

Beneath all the anti-Boomer noise lies a fundamental truth that now seems long forgotten: these old-school trailblazers forged the very social freedoms we take for granted today. This was, after all, the generation of the counter-culture, one which transformed the rights for women, gay people and, to a degree, Indigenous Australians, as well as launching the environmental movement, says Clive Hamilton, whose 2016 book, What Do We Want? The Story of Protest in Australia, traces the grassroots history of these movements – and the high price some then-young people paid for their principles (arrests, fines, legal consequences). “Let’s be clear: only between 10 and 20 per cent of Baby Boomers were active participants, but the majority of young people supported their broader aims,” he says.

To this day, surveys consistently show Boomers outperforming Millennials and Gen Z when it comes to sustainable habits like recycling and curbing waste. The bitter irony? Many of the hard-won environmental protections and equal rights agendas that Boomers fought for are now under assault from populist demagogues – US President Donald Trump, the UK’s Reform leader Nigel Farage, One Nation’s Pauline Hanson – whose reactionary rhetoric is supercharged by social media algorithms.

A landmark University of Melbourne study recently exposed a dark rise in misogynistic attitudes in Australian classrooms: nearly a third of teenage boys believe gender equality has gone too far, with one in four agreeing violence is a fair response to feminism. It’s a sad spectre: impressionable young blokes taking life lessons from manosphere hucksters like brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, now languishing on remand in a Miami, Florida prison, fighting extradition to the UK for charges of rape and human trafficking. (At his Miami bust, Andrew Tate looked less like a badass and more like a dancer at a Barry Manilow tribute, sporting an unbuttoned purple silk shirt, skin-tight Capri pants and pointed loafers, for which social media roasted him into oblivion.)

“If the Tate brothers had arrived in the 1960s and 1970s, they’d have been laughed off the stage,” chuckles Clive Hamilton. “The crowd would have been shouting, ‘Get off, you fools.’ The Tates are a reactionary backlash to the rights that Boomer women – and men – fought so hard to build.”

The young blokes pining for the good ol’ days of strict gender roles and “trad” wives remain amusingly blind to the crushing financial pressures placed on men of that era as sole breadwinners – and the battle-hardened grit of the women, forged by survival instincts in a man’s world (a theme vividly captured in Dorothy Hewett’s 1959 novel Bobbin Up). Had they been transplanted back to the factory floor of the 1950s and ’60s, these young keyboard warriors typing outrage from their family bedrooms would have been chewed up and spat out before smoko.

Besides, younger people can’t take much of the high ground with Boomers, when they’re about to become beneficiaries of their largesse. The country’s much-heralded, mega financial handover from Boomers to Gen Xers and Millennials is rapidly accelerating, notes KPMG’s Terry Rawnsley, as Boomers sell off larger homes, bankroll their offspring’s property ambitions and prepare to pass over a mammoth $3.5 trillion in the coming years.

Some weeks after our interview, Shane Scully messages me. He’d just been admitted to hospital for an angiogram, where doctors discovered an artery that was 95 per cent blocked. Surgeons inserted a large stent in the nick of time – dodging what cardiologists ominously call the “widowmaker”.

After the near-fatal scare, Scully was back at work within just over a week. He’s been prescribed meds and advised to walk more and adhere to a stricter diet, but the new regimen has inconveniently coincided with one of the most frantic times in his business.

For many working Boomers, the real daily grind isn’t the job itself but rather, looking after your health. “It’s a bitch getting old, I tell you,” reflects Scully.

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