Judging by the relentless tide of Baby Boomer bashing, it’s become a crime to be born in the 20 years after World War II. On Saturday, the lead story in the Herald berated Boomers for “hanging on to bigger family homes … while others struggle with overcrowding”. If they were half-decent human beings, they would get out of the homes they’d lived in for decades and free them up for families – rich ones, presumably, since all Boomers own multimillion-dollar homes.

We now have a cohort of younger commentators furiously mining the data and cherry-picking the numbers to find new reasons to excoriate Baby Boomers.

“Let’s hold on to it just to spite young people.”Credit: AFR

We’ve even seen the Herald blame Boomers for depriving the city of energy, creativity and dynamism because young people can’t afford to rent apartments from the nasty “older property-owning classes” who lack all these things. Today, big-spending Boomers copped the blame for inflation, interest rate rises, and the cost of living crisis.

(For the record, the Reserve Bank attributes inflation mainly to international factors. And the only group increasing its real spending are the over 70s, by about 2 per cent. The story turned figures from a report into a generational conflict rather than the real story about how inflation is harming poorer Australians more.)

In the naughties, Boomers were castigated for fuelling a fiscal crisis because it was predicted that, as they aged, they would be a drain on the public purse (pensions, hospitals etc) and become a “burden” on younger workers. They were blamed for not saving enough for their retirement, even though superannuation came in when they were halfway through their working lives.

More recently they were responsible for the housing crisis, and now they are reproached for causing further interest rate crisis. Once they were too poor, now they are too rich.

And they’re so selfish, sitting on their piles of wealth while wielding their political power to “lock out” younger people from housing, secure employment, cheap education and even, with their lock-out laws, entertainment.

We need a reality check.