Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We are really screwing it up for the next generation. Take an average 18-year-old today. If she enrols in university, it will cost her around $30,000. When I started uni, it was free. While at uni, she might pay 40 per cent of her income in rent. I paid half that. Say she finishes her degree and she wants to buy a house. Today, a house costs eight times the average national income. In the 1980s it was four times the average national income. That young person will be trying to save money while paying more for rent, groceries, transport and university than my generation. Maybe, despite the challenges, she does eventually get to buy a home. Then she gets to face bigger issues. Her generation will be facing a climate crisis that we have created and have failed to address, while paying off her tertiary education and also supporting an ageing population.

Thinking that young people are lazy is lazy thinking. My generation isn't listening to young people. We are at serious risk of becoming the first generation in human history to leave the world worse off than we found it. All parents want their kids to have it better than they do. For our children and our grandchildren, we must build homes. We must give young people access to affordable education. We must make groceries and electricity cheaper. We must take real climate action. Politics shouldn't be about the next election—it should be about the next generation.