The principle that those who are best off should be paying more tax as a proportion than those of more modest income is a fundamental one. That includes baby boomers.

The 2026 federal budget will be dedicated in part to the idea of generational equity, the idea that older Australians own too much at the expense of younger Australians, and that something ought to be done about it. This may be an urgent task. Particularly if Pauline Hanson gets her way and we cut immigration, even of white people. Under her policies our population will have declined by about 20 per cent by 2055.

I belong to that wicked generation of baby boomers, now becoming the most senior generation, said to have been the greediest generation of all – the ones who have virtually guaranteed that succeeding generations, alive or not yet born, will, on average, be poorer than we have been. Added to our general wickedness is also the charge that we were a generation that never faced general war or general depression and prospered from the thrift and sacrifice of our parents’ generation, which had suffered considerably from both.

I must bear my share of the general condemnation with all the fortitude I can muster, though I do not think it all deserved, or at least deserved by all of us. The boomer generation is largely the Whitlam generation, who came to benefit from massive increases in funds devoted to public education, and, for a time, free or much cheaper university fees which saw boomer Australians (and their descendants) transition into the middle classes. In our time, Australians got access to free, or much cheaper, health care. Somewhat under-remarked are the efforts of the 1960s and 1970s to electrify, sewer and water cities and towns and to connect them with bitumen. This had a massive, if probably undercounted, effect on the standard of living. Boomers were among those who soon took these initiatives for granted. So do the generations after us.

The social security system was considerably improved to provide public access to welfare benefits, single mothers benefits, childcare, aged care and community care. There was, for the first time, a major public investment in improving the lives of Indigenous Australians. It was during the period that the boomer generation was coming into its own that Australia opened itself to the world and to world markets and achieved most of the productivity growth in the period since the end of the Second World War. Much to Pauline Hanson’s regret, Australia ceased to be a monoculture of complaining and under-educated people eating a diet of chops, three veg and greasy fish and chips, and became a vibrant multicultural community with richer culture, diet and more interesting jobs.

We rode an international wave of social change towards greater tolerance, more outward-looking and more liberal thinking that sought to improve the common wealth of Australians and of our neighbours in the Pacific, Asia and Africa. That very improvement in the standard of living prompted political calls for using increasing public wealth to help some of those who had been left out. After the Colombo Plan, a Menzies Government........

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