by Gareth Hughes
It hasn’t been a good year for under-twenty year olds. Hopefully if you’re young, you’re out having fun and don’t really give a toss what those old fogies in Government are up to. But if you’ve followed some of the changes this year, you could be mistaken into thinking that someone’s declared a war on youth.
Not an actual war with bombs and tanks. Not even a formal declaration of hostilities issued by the Baby Boomers to Gen Y and Z. It’s a sneaky, slow burning attack on our rights and future expectations. This year we’ve seen significant Boomer advances through the frontlines of how we study, where we work, and how we drink.
We’ve been in a ‘phoney war’ for years and Gen X and Y have had the odd tactical victory. The Greens managed to get the discriminatory youth pay rates scrapped and the last Government got rid of interest on student loans. However, not all fronts are holding up and the entrenchment of Boomer’s wealth and power should get us younger generations feeling as though we’re under attack.
Sir Roger Douglas, one of the Boomer’s most decorated generals, had a huge victory last week. His Voluntary Student Membership Bill passed the vital Select Committee hurdle. It’s not a done deal yet, but this situation demonstrates that if 98% of 4000+ submissions against a bill won’t convince the National Party, very little will.
The VSM Bill is an ideological solution in search of a problem. The aim is to weaken the battlements of younger generation’s traditional base: students’ associations, and undermine their membership and financial viability; and, in doing so, reduce student democracy, student participation, and students’ voice on University and Polytechnic boards.
I’ve written here before about how the very nature of our open egalitarian tertiary education system is under attack from Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce, whose budget cuts have meant universities are literally shutting the door to new enrolments. Last week it was revealed that approximately 9000 students will not be able to access student loans next year because of a rule change that removes access for the student if they failed half their papers over a two year period. It is manifestly unfair that it has been applied retrospectively to those studying in 2009. This means if you ran into trouble—got sick, had personal issues, etc.—in 2009, you may not be able to study in 2011. We’re not talking about grants or allowances, just access to borrow money to study. This harsh and unfair change is Mr Joyce’s strategy to reduce demand for tertiary education, because he can’t find enough money to fund it properly.
Boomers—including most of our current politicians—enjoyed free education ‘back in the day’ because of the societal and economic benefits it brought to NZ. When it comes to today’s students they are portrayed as ‘loan-jumping lay-about’s', sucking on the Government’s ‘generous tax teat’ who need to ‘get real.’
My colleague Nandor Tanczos once criticised MPs for “being drunk in charge of the country” but if you read the paper or watch TV you’d think all under-twenties in NZ had a drinking problem. While Parliament debates raising the purchasing age back to twenty (unfair, ineffective and not targeted), it’s right now lowering to zero the blood alcohol level for drivers under twenty. I support safer roads but this is blatant youth scapegoating when they won’t act on lowering the adult level to the OECD average which would save an estimated 33 lives a year.
The intergenerational ‘war on youth’ is most pronounced in housing. For my parents’ generation home ownership was as normal as putting Marmite on your toast. In 1960, the average cost of a house was $6639. Now it is $408,000. Even after adjusting for inflation, young couples have to work three times more hours to pay off their house and that is not taking into consideration all other expenses (including that student loan).
We used to have one of the highest home ownership rates in the OECD. Various government incentives and tax structures encouraged Boomers to buy a house and then use the equity in their home to buy more houses to rent them out. This has meant a hugely inflated housing market, effectively putting home ownership out of this generations reach, and an economy with $200B locked up in unproductive housing.
If you’re like the majority of Gen Y’ers you’re renting, paying heaps every week for a substandard cold unhealthy home and heaps on heating and hospital bills. The Boomers are laughing all the way to the bank.
The economy run by the Boomers has failed. From taking over from the post-war generation, they’ve presided over New Zealand’s precipitous drop down the OECD rankings all the while increasing the gap between rich and poor, which in turn has exacerbated social problems. They built an economy dependent on housing, low-wage/high-hours job and debt.
If you are lucky enough to have a job, conditions and wages are being weakened by bad laws like the 90 Day ‘fire at will’ bill. Our exports haven’t diversified and are still vulnerable - based on growing grass and our landscape (dairy and tourism) - rather than a high-tech, high-value clean and green branded path to prosperity.
Unlike the Boomers who always had a sense prosperity was assured, we know it’s going to get harder. Just like our developed counterparts, New Zealand’s population is steadily ageing; this will undoubtedly make age inequality much worse.
Currently 12 per cent of New Zealand’s population is over 65 but it is forecasted to rise to 25 per cent by 2051. As our population gets older the young will have to pay more taxes to keep the pension and healthcare systems going. An increase in the population and an ageing of that population will undoubtedly push house prices up further.
More and more young people will be forced to rent and you can guess who the landlords are—that generation who are using it to prop up their retirement funds.
Lastly, the Boomers have made poor environmental decisions. We’re still dependent on oil to power our economy, even though it’s expensive and contributes to climate change. We are so lucky to live in Aotearoa, but rather than the paradise portrayed in the overseas tourism marketing ads, we can’t swim in our rivers for fear of getting sick, and our last few special natural areas are being turned into dams, coal mines and dairy farms.
We’re not all binge-drinkers, taggers or stoner students and we have heaps to offer the country so don’t deserve negative media stereotypes or punitive measure in work or study. It’s about time youth were seen as an investment not a cost to be battled. Under attack let’s be like Te Whiti o Rongomai who led the Parihaka non-violence movement against English aggression: lets wise-up, use creative tactics and take action.
Published in Society & Culture by Gareth Hughes on Tue, October 5th, 2010
Tags: employment, Tertiary, Youth
More posts by Gareth Hughes | more about Gareth Hughes
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Oh, this is an absolutely fantastic post. I totally agree with the experiences put across in this post.
Has there been any developments on the youth caucus you proposed in your maiden speech Gareth? Youth seem to face a distinct set of challenges and have a shared set of ideas that stretch across party lines, so I thought it was an excellent idea.
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Gareth. Making this a generational thing is counterproductive.
As a boomer who has consistently voted and spoken against the things you mention I am not part of the problem. Many of us opposed Muldoon, Rogernomics and Ruthenasia. we are still opposing those who want to strip mine NZ and its population for their own short term benefit.
You are rubbishing the many of us “boomers” who have tried to oppose the gutting of our country.
The one thing I disagree with you is on student loans. The free university education in the past was paid for by taxes on those of the many of us who did not go to University. It is fair to require a student, most of whom are from upper middle class families, to pay a proportion of their education costs. Especially if they are just going to flit overseas anyway.
Notably the proportion of your generation who vote for NACT is higher than in mine, so who is really to blame??
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Your housing caparison is not accurate either. The ones who got cheap housing were the generation who grew up during the war. When we bought our first house in the early 80′s it took 60% of two quite high incomes to service the mortgage on a modest 3 bedroom in Auckland. You also had to have a 30% deposit.
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It wasn’t the boomers that failed us, it was the interwar generation (those born between 1918 and 1939). Muldoon was from the interwar generation. The problem was that those in the interwar generation were children during the Great Depression and that scarred them for life, so they were keen on spending heaps and heaps of money on welfare programmes and schemes such as Think Big.
Shipley was the first boomer to be Prime Minister, and it wasn’t until the Fifth Labour Government that we saw much of cabinet made up of boomers.
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This intergenerational BLAME game is counter productive, in fact it is downright negative.
This VICTIM mentality is what is destroying youth, not another generation, not the parents of youth, not the state, not society, not any economic system nor culture.
The responsiblity for youth start and ends with the person looking back from the mirror.
I guess there is one thing my generation had was an ability to look past the majority of the problems we had (such as ex serviceman getting farm ballots, new state houses, best jobs, etc) ahead of us new immigrants.
Remember Gareth, there is no such thing as the “Good Old Days”.
Each generation has a struggle.
What we are seeing now is a whole lot of young New Zealanders with huge chips on both shoulders. The woe is me, I’m a VICTIM, I cant cope, generation.
Jeez, that makes me sad at the lost opportunities available to young people that they are not seeing.
John-ston has some answers but again that generation that went to war made a lot of structural wrong decisions, as has every generation prior to theirs and each generation after them.
The ability for the current generation to take innitiative is woefully lacking, such wimps, they are only going to receive by how much they put. And judging by how little they do, it wont be much.
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As for intergenerational blame, it is just being blind to ignore existing problems. When we talk of the problems a generation causes, do not think of it as a personal attack. Of course there are those out there that didn’t support the moves (and a lot of them seem to be in the Green Party). But, the fact is the majority of people went along with the moves enough to grant legitimacy to them. Legitimacy of a government is dervived from the people, and there were obviously enough people out there to have granted legitimacy to the 4th and 5th Labour Government as to increase neoliberalism and privatization.
Photonz1: The difference is that Gareth is attacking the stereotype of youth as a whole, rather than a particular generation of youth. There have always been stereotypes of youth as “binge-drinkers, stoner students, and taggers”, rather than this particular generation. Tis not generational, tis ageist.
Kerry Thomas: I think the problem is that you’re still thinking of education as a private benefit as opposed to a community benefit. When we train up doctors it is not only a benefit to the individual who is trained, it is a benefit to the community because we gain a trained doctor. I personally come from a low income family, and still live in a state house. A lot of my friends chose to simply not go to university because of the costs that it entails, and I think that they should be put in this situation is wrong. The taxes are about the transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor, by helping increase social mobility so people can break the cycle of deprivation. Free education is a part of that.
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I appreciate your point that houses weren’t as cheap in the 1980s as in the 19060s. But the median house price still doubled between 2001 and 2007. Incomes did not double. Houses have never been so unaffordable for first-time home owners as they are today in NZ.
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Lucy. You and Gareth are missing the point. Affordability is not the same as total price.
The proportion of income required each month to buy a standard house is much less now than it was in the 80′s as is the deposit required. It is a lot easier now. So much easier that people from 2000 to 2008 spent too much on houses, driving prices up. If you buy a more expensive house you do not pay more each month. Just takes longer to pay it back.
The opposite with cars. The buying price is lower now, but the cost of ownership, depreciation, is higher.
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Josh. Educational benefit is part private and part public so the costs should be born by both. What public benefit is served by training a doctor who goes to the US for more pay.
Advocates of free tertiary education want people who cannot afford it to pay twice. Once for the students education and again for their services.
Also making students pay part of the cost focuses their attention on actually working instead of wasting everyones time and tax payers dollars.
I am for reducing inequality as you would see if you had been reading my posts. But lower income tax payers paying for, mostly, free education for the children of high income earners is not entirely a community benefit. .
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“the fact is the majority of people went along with the moves enough to grant legitimacy to them.”
They did not. The 1984 Labour Government was voted out after one term. As soon as it became obvious they were off on a nutty dream of their own.
Muldoon kept getting back in with electoral gerrymanders and bribes to superannuates and farmers despite only getting about a third of the vote at one stage.
The majority of parliament went along with them. Unfortunately the views of most of us do not figure much in the calculations of politicians looking for election funding.
I still think NACT got in this time as a protest against the failure of Labour to reverse the lunacy despite 9 years to do so.
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Kerry: Regarding housing the opposite is actually true if you look at the stats. I mean the median income in NZ in 1982 was $22402. It’s around $28053 now. House prices have increased much more than that. It requires a much greater percentage of income to purchase a house now.
See http://www.unite.org.nz/?q=node/704 for more info if you want.
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hi Kerry.
I just don’t see how that can be true because every graph I have seen of this shows house prices rising massively while median income stays fairly static throughout the 2000s.
do you have a source for this?
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Kerry says “The proportion of income required each month to buy a standard house is much less now than it was in the 80’s as is the deposit required. It is a lot easier now.”
The measure used is usually the cost to service a mortgage for 80% of the value of a median house price, as a percentage of the median wage.
The historical average is that it costs 40% of one median wage to service an 80% mortgage on a mediam priced house.
In 2008 the rate went up to 83% of the median wage, and it is now at about 58%.
So house prices are still quite a bit more expensive than the historical average when compared to wages.
http://www.interest.co.nz/property/home-loan-affordability
However the government has made some changes (i.e. stopping some claims on depreciation) which will help the chances of house prices remaining largely stagnant for several years.
Last weeks tax changes are also a boost for those who are young. Effectively they just got a pay increase, but house prices didn’t change.
Anybody who owns property, or has any other nest egg investments effectively just lost 2.5%.
Those in this position (largely the older generation that Gareth is attacking) just had the comparitive value of their savings and investments drop by 2.5%, as when they cash up they will be able to buy 2.5% less for their life savings than they would have got last week.
Compared to the young generation, they payed higher tax when earning their money, higher tax on earnings on their investments, AND higher tax when they come to use their savings.
So the intergenerational flow of money is not a one way street.
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I think that Gareth is trying to highlight a very key element in the New Zealand psyche, namely the personification of media driven bias towards youth.
This takes many forms but is especially prevalent with right wing politics and their mandate of generational servitude. The well-documented inequality within New Zealand has seen home ownership rise out of the reach of normal middle class New Zealanders with run away inflation because of speculation and education being made available only for the wealthy. No wonder there is a rise in nearly every social ill that we used to be relatively free of.
If youth do not have as many opportunities, have less access to education, earn less, pay more for everything and have a society that expresses its open distaste and downright hatred towards them, then it is no wonder we have the highest youth suicide rate in the developed World. That’s a statistic the bigots can really be proud off.
Basically the poor have been turned into slaves. This can be directly credited to the current and previous Governments policies to cut social spending, inflate costs while keeping wages low, even though New Zealand has been making record returns and is still relatively wealthy. Plundering the countryside with unsustainable industries is very profitable after all.
People who support the regime of subjugation believe such things as: every educated person will leave for better wages overseas, youth are the main cause of crime and class distinction needs to be further entrenched with unlawful policies. Social engineering through un-diplomatic processes has clearly not been beneficial to the average New Zealander. The right wings policies are not working; just take a look at all the new jails recently built.
The established older generation, who had many more opportunities, have a responsibility to help, not hinder the youth of today.
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Lucy and Josh. I am talking about the cost to service a mortgage. Not house prices. The monthly cost of servicing a 75% mortgage in the early 80′s for a standard 3 bedroom was about $1600 per month. Even though the price of the house in dollar terms has tripled the monthly cost of the 75% mortgage is still only $2300. Source. National bank.
Basic living costs are harder now for every one because real incomes have dropped. Not only for the young. http://www.unite.org.nz/?q=node/704 .
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Josh,
You dont have to do anything. Just stay as you are and moan about it. I really dont care. Even your reference to the archtypical figure is a cop out. Whimps the lot of you.
Typical “Woe Is Me” attitude. Thank goodness not ALL youth have that attitude. What was that quote again?
If you have nothing but lemons – go and make lemonade”.
Work with what you have got, not with what you would like.
If you feel like a slave then you are one. Stop being one and the world opens up. It is all a matter of attitude. Surely you can get enough likeminded person like yourself and organise an alternative?
Kerry, you forgot that we had a period of 20% interest rates on morgages.
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@ Gerrit. Firstly I am not youth and I am not a slave because I have the means to escape the system. I have made an educated statement concerning the current pervasive and ageist right wing political environment we are all expected to accept. I think you are a wimp Garret for accepting and supporting that unsustainable system.
Clearly you have a philosophy of blaming the victim, in this case the youth for feeling downtrodden because they have been un-empowered. Whether or not the majority of youth “think like this” the reality of the situation is that bigotry on many levels is alive and well within New Zealand, disproportionately and detrimentally affecting the young.
When the environment is oppressive, a good attitude will only go so far. Your analogy translates as: Lemons = unemployed, homeless and incarceration while lemonade = jobs, home ownership and freedom. Your statement is perhaps not as magnanimous as you would wish.
The simple fact is that houses cost more and are inaccessible to the average law abiding citizen. Work the figures as much as you like.
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26%. Just when we were buying our first house.
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It might appear to be a war on youth, but in reality its just a continuation of the thing this N-ACT Govt. said they were going to do away with….. “THE NANNY STATE”. You cant do anything the 1950s generation disagree with, for fear of having your toes stamped on. Im a Gen X’er who grew up around the dreaded ‘war on the weed’ & 30 years on it still remains a criminal offence to smoke it, even in the privacy of your own home.. not hurting anyone or disrupting anyone elses precious lives. If a neighbour even suspects you are ‘indulging’ they can call 111 & next thing the brave boys/girls in blue are demanding to search your premises (without a warrant).. now thats a world ‘gone MAD’
Kia-ora
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Todd.
I dont “blame” anyone. That is the problem with the youth today, they need someone to blame, someone to heave responsibility on for the woes that are besetting them.
Gareth Hughes talks about
Crickey we dont need to, modern youth has all the backbone of a jellyfish. Who needs to declare war, modern youth is so cowered we just say boo and they tremble at the knees.
You really are just not getting it.
Lemon is what youth have today to work with (and with economic conditioning tightning they may well be very sour)
Lemonade = a vehicle of self responsibilty that provides your means to achieve whatever one can desire. It is not the end game, just the means of empowerment to play the game of life.
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I agree with the fact that all young people are seen as deliquients when it is a minority. I feel it is unfair that any one group gets blamed for things when everyone is responsible.
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Let’s play the blame game, with all its gross generalizations and bigotry.
Well I’m not sure where you are from Gerrit, but in most of the real New Zealand if you go to the local disaffected youth and start calling them wimps and cowards, you are likely to end up schooled.
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someone complained that Roger Douglas was voted out after one term. Incorrect. Labour won the 87 election – and won more seats than they did in 84.
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@ Karleigh 8:29 PM
Agreed, Karleigh. I am 52, I’m just finishing my second bottle of wine for the evening. I can still reason and type well enough to be coherent. I’m not going to beat anyone up tonight and will be at work early tomorrow with a (relatively) clear head. Because of my age, I am respected by most people I interact with (apart from a few RWNJs who don’t respect anyone who doesn’t worship Rand and Hayek).
But people your age get demonised all the time, for doing nothing worse than what a huge number of older people do. Sure, the behaviour often isn’t cool, but why should young people get stereotyped when people my age do it as well. I know from my own experience that many of the people who give youth a hard time are the same people who drive home from their work drinks or after work at pub, the Cozzie Club or the RSA when they are absolutely munted themselves.
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Kerry @3.54pm; Indeed the demise of Helen Clark is a subject that
Political Scientists ought to bear in mind constantly.
Though the Gnats were down to about 12%, the Electorate had definitely formed an opinion.
Personally, returning to nz during Clark’s last few years – I was absolutely horrified that such attitudes and behaviour could be paraded under Labour’s Banner – it was a damned near fascist tyranny – and yet some still hold them to be ‘left-wing’. What a sad charade.
So we went from the baboon cage to the snake-pit – poor fella my country.
I feel the Greens will continue to do better – if not (having received the full measure of my tax ‘cuts’), I’ll be swapping nz for Bhutan – upgrade my life dramatically.
And our youth? Well, I decided to sponsor one recently – a fine decent intelligent loyal and thoughtfull young fellow.
However, as a Maori, his chances of gaining employment close to his abilities is zero.
I’m the only person he knows who thinks his life is worthwhile.
All of the ‘youth services’ officers I have spoken to give him no chance whatsoever.
Disgusting.
A war on youth? – more like genocide.
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Josh,
You wrote: “Legitimacy of a government is dervived from the people, and there were obviously enough people out there to have granted legitimacy to the 4th and 5th Labour Government as to increase neoliberalism and privatization.”
I can see where you are coming from, but I think you’re being a bit too harsh on the generation who voted in the fourth Labour government.
Firstly, the Labour party did not campaign on the neo-liberal policies they implemented with such vigor and speed. People voted them in to get rid of Muldoon, but got Douglas instead. I don’t think anyone predicted what would happen.
Douglas’ deregulation of the economy and privatisation of state assets was deeply unpopular amongst Labour party supporters. Basically the Labour government lied to and betrayed its traditional support base. For example, deregulation of the economy led to a flood of cheap imports which decimated much of New Zealand’s manufacturing industry. Workers in these industries now faced unemployment and were then hit with increased taxation in the form of GST, whilst at the same time those on high incomes received tax cuts of thousands of dollars per year. State assets were sold to the private sector at prices way below their value, often _after_ the government had made substantial investment and “efficiency improvements” to make them more attractive for sale.
What was a Labour supporter to do? Vote National and get something worse (though for much of the 1980s Labour was far right of National)? Remember that at the time the electoral system was first past the post, so minor parties such as Social Credit could only get a couple of seats with over 20% of the vote (1981 results). Incidentally, in the 1987 election, Labour lost a lot of support from its traditional working class base, and _gained_ support in places such as Remuera (look up the election results if you don’t believe me).
So maybe people in the 1980s granted Labour legitimacy in one sense … after all, we could have revolted. There were significant protests, but New Zealander’s tend not to be particularly militant (compared to some European nations for example). However to put the blame on the older generation is a bit like blaming the Chilean’s in the 1970s for Pinochet. You’d be better to look at other divisions in society, for example class, to explain how the fourth Labour government managed to achieve what it did.
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Todd
Boy oh boy, more woe is me, more I’m a poor victim stuff. Those nasty oldies really are soooooooooo bad to me. I’m just going to sit in the corner and cry. Whimps
From South Auckland, deep and dark Manurewa. Where is “real” New Zealand?
More blame game. If you are from a “real” New Zealand place you are down trodden.
It is not where you are from it is the size of the ticker and the attitude you bring forth that enables you to turn lemons into lemonade and lemonade into the person you want to be.
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Gareth, you claim the abolition of youth rates as a victory I’m not sure that inexperienced workers being forced to provide the same value in the work place as older workers is actually an advantage, it sounds more like protecting older workers from competition. At least that’s what the unemployment figures are showing: http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com/2010/05/youth-unemployment.html Smilarly, I’m not sure that no longer being forced to join inefficient and unwieldy organisations called Students Associations is much of a loss. Meanwhile, U.S. evidence shows strong correlations between the kind of high oversight land use planning that the Greens favour and unaffordable housing. There are intergenerational issues, Gareth, I’m just not sure whose side you’re on.
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Toad, Kerry, Mark and others
Serious question. Is youth today far more externally referenced then the older generation where at their age?
To me it seems that youth today cant do anything without first referencing their social network and getting peer approval.
Their desire, their self esteem, seems to be non existant unless it gets approval from an external source.
Are their expectations more externally driven then our generation?
Sadly I have a few mates my age commit suicide because their self esteem and self worth was getting eroded as they entered their sixties and the realisation that their reference points for self fulfilment were externally focussed. They could not cope with life without the constant reinforcement from external sources to their worth.
Not sure if I’m getting the message across right but are, youth and the about to retire, more prone to not being able to function without external reference to the ego?
It would seem that todays it is more important the know what other people think of you and want you to do, rather than what you yourself think and want.
Mark,
Respectfully and with great admiration for your efforts, do you think
this guy you are supporting is looking at his skin and buying into the premise that his peers say he is a Maori thus unemployable? Same problem, external references are more important?
You are the only person who thinks his life is important, does he not think his life is important?
Is he becoming dependent on you for self fulfilment and, heavens forbid, you (and possible New Zealand society) is becoming co-dependent upon the likes of the guy your are supporting.
As one who had to battle co-dependency and external reference in the past, I know it is a dangerous place to be, not just for the dependent but also the co-dependent.
Which is why I might have been wrong to take the mickey out of Josh but the the warning bells regarding dependency and co-dependency were ringing loud.
Hope this all makes sense.
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Gerrit,
I’m not sure about the answer to your question (not being a youth). However I seem to recall that peer pressure was a pretty important thing when I was younger. I’m not sure things have changed that much (except when I was a youth the pressure might have been to smoke tobacco, now days it might include a lot more dangerous drugs).
It is good for people to act on what they personally think and want to do, but one must always remember to think about the effect of ones actions on others. For example, if one wants to accumulate large sums of money at the expense of someone else going without, is this acceptable? Of course you might tell me that the economy is not a zero sum game, and everyone could become wealthy if they just had the right motivation. Fair enough … but the question I would pose is show me a single example from anywhere in the world where this has been achieved.
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Samiuela,
This goes much deeper then the need for wealth. Seeking even greater wealth is but a mnaifistation of needing external references for self actualisation (look I got all this wealth, I must be great).
A self fulfilled person would only seek out enough wealth to satisfy their own needs. If they received more they would share, no doubt.
This theorising is more up Sapients alley then mine.
Maslow’s theories on the heirachy of needs had a great influence on me when battling co-dependency. If we look at the levels of heirachy very few understand self actualisation and what it takes to get there.
If Maslow was taught in schools would society be better off or understand ourselves internally a bit better?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Our understanding of others and their needs would greatly improve.
Though I would struggle with the pidgeon holing of the heirache levels if we were not openminded to changes in others.
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“An increase in the population and an ageing of that population will undoubtedly push house prices up further”.
Probably not. When myriads of boomers have to sell their houses to a few of the next generation to pay to get their bums wiped I suspect prices will drop.
While I sympathise with young people. Starting out and getting that first house, education etc has always entailed a degree of difficulty. The old dissing the young and vis-versa has been going on since at least the time of Plato and Socrates. http://plato-dialogues.org/faq/faq003.htm
I do not believe that young people are any different in any generation.
It is not productive to try and set one against the other when the fight is against people who believe that their own self interest should give them absolute rights to destroy communities and the lives of others.
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In the first instance, the 1984 election was more a case of National losing than Labour winning. Remember, the New Zealand Party got 12% of the total vote that election, and almost all their voters were traditional National voters. Add the two together, and make an allowance for First Past the Post, and National would have won in 1984 had it not been for the New Zealand Party.
Also, I don’t think anyone, even Lange or Douglas could have predicted what was going to happen – the situation was they won the election on the Saturday, and then on the Monday, they were told that the country was actually on the verge of running out of foreign currency. Then as the pieces came together, they realised that the country was running huge deficits and was up to its eyeballs in debt.
Thanks again to New Zealand party supporters. Bear in mind also that most of the reforms prior to 1987 were relatively mild, and the economy was booming. It was only after the 1987 crash that people started getting pissed off because we went into the deepest recession in half a century.
Well, that is what a lot of them did. Of course, Labour were very deceptive and hid the true state of New Zealand’s finances in 1990 and gave Bolger a shock when he entered office. At least we can be grateful that such an event will not happen again – the Fiscal Responsibility Act means that our government has open books and each party knows the state of the nation’s finances before the election.
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“Serious question. Is youth today far more externally referenced then the older generation where at their age?”
I do not think they are any different.
However one thing I think is different. People, including youth, are more self centred. I think this is from the neo-lib “greed is good” meme that we have been fed for 30 years.
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Ah, more blame the someone, anyone, any meme, any reason rather then the person looking back from the mirror taking responsibility.
Weak Kerry, very weak, like sheep we are than.
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Why should I take responsibility for things I have been personally fighting against for most of my life.
First time I have ever been called weak. Usually get told i am too tough.
Though my students and employees seem to appreciate the advantages of learning to work to high standards.
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Cut early childhood education, cut open entry to uni, give you rich mates a tax cut. Now what generation is being favoured here Kerry?
Cutting ECE was disgusting full stop and now we have structural deficits to make sure every other ladder of social mobility is going to be cut. I for one wont be breeding anytime soon.
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Jimmy. I and many members of my generation are opposing all of these things. If you read my posts you will see that I was against cuts to education and all the other things you mention.
But, actually my generation did not have open entry. Nor could we borrow money at zero interest to pay for our living costs. University was very much an upper class thing.
Maybe it was easier in that their were jobs available to earn a living while at university, but I remember most being rich kids who used their student allowance to infest the ski-fields.
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University students have always been a rather spoiled section of the population. I do not see much concern about the really disadvantaged.
You should be addressing your concerns to those who do not go to University. 50% unemployment. Almost no apprenticeships for the past 30 years. If you do get one (Not many available) it is unpaid, the study costs are as high (without a lawyers income to pay back the loan) and you can lose it any time the employers business drops.
They are the ones who really have it hard.
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Gerrit; Not a simple frame of reference but thanks for the effort.
I will have to get a more rounded event cycle to say what lies where – however – he’s not playing the race card – I’m not co-dependant, we are strangers – but his parents have left him – like abandoned…..something must be done.
Yes I would rather it wasn’t me – ($$$$) – never mind the ego, self fulfillment or affirmation – this is about getting him out of the rain and finding some food.
It’s a jungle in here!
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Only the rich are allowed to breed and receive an education with the new regime.
The crux of the matter is that when as a society, we disregard every facet of what makes us Kiwis, in favour of a totalitarian monetary system that has been shown to fail in other countries, the young, poor, dis-empowered and indigenous are always going to be the first to suffer. The rich however are only shooting themselves in the foot.
It saddens me to think of the wasted potential because of a few old men and their Neolithic social engineering, which is destroying what we hold dear.
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The real question is how far does the rot in politics go?
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