The federal government is preparing a budget badged as "intergenerational fairness". The idea it sells is simple: young people are struggling to get ahead because older generations have grabbed all the goodies for themselves.

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The idea is as appealing as it is wrong. There are two reasons why the traditional aspirations that generation after generation of Australians has cherished are becoming more difficult to achieve.

The first is that the economy is slowing. Businesses, adapting to the new environment, are no longer creating the opportunities previous generations enjoyed.

The second is that governments have shifted their focus from restarting the economic engine to handing out the dwindling spoils in an attempt to buy votes.

When these handouts go to young Australians, the government calls it intergenerational fairness. It's anything but.

As national debt mounts, the government is borrowing from young people's future prospects to give them trinkets that won't hold their value. Canberra is buying power at the expense of national prosperity.

What's missing from this conversation is any serious reckoning with the bill being run up in young Australians' names.

Net government debt is now heading towards $1 trillion, not because of a one-off crisis, but because spending has been structurally ratcheted higher. That doesn't look like intergenerational fairness; it looks like intergenerational buck-passing.

Future taxpayers - today's young people - will be left servicing this debt through higher taxes or lower growth.

Yet there is a striking silence from Labor about how this trajectory will be corrected.

If anything, the political incentive runs the other way: promise more handouts today and leave the consequences for tomorrow.

In a recent study of 18-34 year old Australians, the Centre for Independent Studies found that, instead of making young people's aspirations more accessible, handout policies act as a pacifier - a substitute vision for the future governments believe is more within their power to deliver than the one that young people........

© Canberra Times