Australian Millennials have a strangely romanticised taste for socialism.
According to a recent survey for the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies, 58% have a “favourable” view of socialism, and 59% think “capitalism has failed and the government should exercise more economic control”.
Even more troubling are results showing a profound ignorance of history, with a third unaware of who Stalin was, half unaware of Mao and over 40% ignorant of Lenin. Yet together these socialist ‘icons’ were responsible for almost 85 million deaths.
The simple explanation for this is that capitalism has been too successful – and the struggles to fight socialism too far in the past – for many millennials to appreciate what they have.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, after all, occurred almost 30 years ago – before many Millennials were born. Significantly, the great battles against socialism were fought far away in Europe, well away from an Australia insulated from the Cold War. The lived experience of any number of former Eastern Bloc nations simply doesn’t resonate.
But Australian Millennials also have some justification for their frustrations with the way things currently are. Most complete their tertiary studies saddled with a large student debt that can take decades to pay off. Others feel excluded from Australia’s increasingly unaffordable property markets – surveys show home ownership is a fundamental Millennial aspiration, with 38% aspiring to own a property in the next three years.
Add to this the lowest wage growth in years at 1.9%, and moves to further casualise the workforce and reduce weekend penalty rates, and their skepticism of free enterprise and desire for a more interventionist government look less surprising.
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