Baby boomers, the architects of this market-liberalised wasteland, are now lumbering into their old age, only to find their own Perillosian Bronze Bull’s heavy bronze doors swinging shut behind them, writes Dr James Schuurmans-Stekhoven.
ACCORDING TO ANCIENT LEGEND, the Greek tyrant Phalaris of Agrigento once posted a lavish reward for whoever constructed the most horrific torture device imaginable.
Seeking the tyrant’s reward, Perillos of Athens presented a hollow bronze bull equipped with boilers and an intricate arrangement of acoustic pipes designed to turn its victim's agonised shrieks and steam into the melodic roar of an enraged beast.
Phalaris, awestruck by the sadistic ingenuity of the machine, then promptly ordered Perillos locked inside its metallic belly to test the acoustics himself.
Australia’s baby boomers have spent half a century engineering a socio-economic brazen bull, pocketing the rewards of prosperity, and proudly admiring their own political machinations – all while blinded by their ravenous materialism gain – much like the naïve Perillos now face the consequences of their scheme.
They stepped into adulthood through the grand public foyer of Whitlam-era free education, slammed the heavy iron doors shut behind themselves, and bolted a user-pays toll booth across every doorway leading to a prosperous future for younger generations.
They cheered for a goods and services tax (GST) only after furnishing their suburban property empires with durable goods, boats and cars, engineered capital gains tax discounts to turn housing into a speculative casino, and systematically transferred every conceivable public liability onto the balance sheets of their own parents and children.
To cloak this generational "smash-and-grab" in a veneer of moral legitimacy, they ushered in New Public Management — an ingeniously awful technocratic subterfuge that Perillos himself couldn’t have outdone.
Under the sacrosanct managerial banner of “efficiency”, hospitals, universities, and social services were shackled to a soul-crushing regime of KPIs, throughput metrics, and corporate bean-counting that has failed the Silent Generation, who meekly accepted their lot.
This was never genuine administrative reform; it was a lethal sleight-of-hand designed to denude the village commons, deflect blame onto overworked frontline staff, and conceal the systematic looting of the public purse.
As tracked in analyses of Australia’s intergenerational imbalance, over the past four decades the public sector dismantling was a twisted private insurance policy protecting boomer asset accumulation at the direct expense of everyone else.
Now, the bill has arrived, and history is enacting its dark, unpitying plot twist.
The architects of this market-liberalised wasteland are now lumbering into their old age, only to find the bull’s heavy bronze doors swinging shut behind them.
By their very own Perillosian design, they will find no one waiting to care for them. Those who might have offered compassionate care were devoured long ago by the very machinery of economic precarity the boomers engineered.
In their obsessive worship of hyper-individualism – where every social relation was commodified and the sociopathic ethos of “covering one’s own behind” and “greed is good” was elevated to a supreme civic virtue – they vicariously trained and rewarded an emerging generation of corporate functionaries and technocratic sociopaths to manage their twilight years.
Their deliberately unfunded university system survived economically largely by passing every undergraduate regardless of their knowledge, skill or ethics; and dear boomer, this ironically included students majoring in aged and health care.
Because they systematically dismantled every collective mechanism of solidarity, they left behind no institutional scaffolding, no empathy, and zero structural mechanisms of redress for the sub-standard, outsourced Phalarisian aged care system into which they are now being shoved.
And should these boomers dare appeal to a social contract – a contract that they spent decades tearing to shreds – the rest of us should uniformly and not so politely remind them of their ill-gotten gains.
As the broader intergenerational equity debate lays bare, greed was never a sustainable social model; it was merely a death pact disguised as a balance sheet.
The brazen bull of their own making is sealed shut, the fire beneath it is roaring, and should their screams find no audience, who is ultimately to blame?
Dr James Schuurmans-Stekhoven is a psychologist, academic and multi-disciplinary researcher.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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