Stagnation, alienation
It mostly is the economy, stupid
It should come as no surprise that Australia’s social fabric is fraying. Australians are very tolerant people, loath to take anything too seriously (including their own culture). But everyone has their limit, and it is much harder to appear relaxed when you don’t feel relaxed.
The decline in living standards we have experienced over the past five years or so is well-documented, and the causes easily identified. But because GDP per capita has gone down instead of up, inflation has eaten away at wages, and buying a home has been placed beyond reach for most young people, Australians have become very unAustralian in their demeanour.
As I said on the Human Ecology podcast recently, Australians have been forgiving of social disruption in the past because we have been relatively wealthy:
Whereas in the past we’ve always been able to rely on our material prosperity and very high standards of living… we’ve tolerated issues of social cohesion and cultural change in the past when we’ve been very wealthy. But I think it’s an open question of how long Australians will tolerate that kind of change while there’s also economic stagnation, economic decline, going on.
Among the young this economic decline, and the feeling that they are not being given the ‘fair go’ which they were raised to believe in, is making social deracination harder to tolerate.
An article published in early 2026 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics explored the effect that GDP growth has on trust in governments around the world. The authors concluded that “strong lifetime growth experience builds trust in government” while “low growth fosters low trust in government”. The levels of GDP growth one experiences over their lifetime, therefore, is “an important determinant of trust in government, which can in turn drive social cohesion”.
I’ve compiled some relevant data about GDP growth in Australia, shown in the chart below. Along the x-axis is birth year, and the line shows what the average lifetime GDP per capita growth has been for Australians born in that year. An Australian born in 1960 has experienced annual average GDP growth of 1.8 percent over their lifetime. For those born in the year 2000, it is just over 1.1 percent. It’s harder to get data going back earlier, but those born between the end of the Second World War and about 1965 experienced very high growth rates during their formative years.
Even though Australia’s economic growth has been anaemic in recent years (dragging everyone’s average experience down), older Australians still remember the good times of the past. They also had better access to the Australian way of life, because housing was more affordable, there were genuine material rewards to higher levels of education, they could readily obtain a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, and they lived through periods of greater cultural cohesion.
Young Australians have not shared in this experience, and it shows.
They have seen much lower economic growth rates than their parents and grandparents. They graduated into a job market characterised by growing low-paid, part-time work in the so-called “services economy”. And they are more likely to be perpetual renters. Consider that in 1988, even among the lowest income earners aged 25-44 (born between 1944 and 1963) almost half were homeowners. In 2016, it was barely one-third.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that a majority of Australians aged 18 to 24 say that they are dissatisfied with democracy. Nor should we be surprised that almost 70 percent of Australians born after 1996 do not feel a sense of belonging to their homeland. These are alarming findings for anyone who cares about Australia’s social cohesion and about the future of the country.
How much more alienated young Australians will become remains to be seen. Unless turned around, our poor economic performance - really a kind of managed decline under the bipartisan consensus of mass migration, net zero, and a fake taxpayer-funded services economy - will only further undermine the faith young Australians have in our economic and political systems.