Surfing: Baby boomers ride crest of a wave

By GREG ANSLEY

The waves were good last Saturday, running at 4 to 6ft (surfers remain stubbornly imperial) under a pale winter sun. Beyond the back line of breakers, the greying moustaches and reddening heads of the malibu riders swarmed around the bigger and better-shaped waves with their old-fashioned long boards.

Further inshore, a slightly smaller number of young surfers on their short boards gritted their teeth as malibu after malibu cruised across their path.

As it was in the 1960s, this is still the age of the baby boomer - the youngest of whom turned 40 last Saturday (officially, baby boomers were born between July 1, 1946 and June 30, 1961).

Australia and New Zealand both experienced a huge population explosion after the Second World War and both experienced the cultural and economic tidal wave of the boomers, which crested with the 1960s.

These boomers are a generation of Peter Pans. They refuse to accept gracefully, as their parents did, the decline into older years and irrelevance. They take their full measure of limited resources, and are careless of the resentment of their children.

And as this postwar population bulge moves, it reshapes and redefines the values and priorities of its environment. It nestles into each age grouping with an ease and self-assurance that no preceding generation has achieved.

Nor is any succeeding generation likely to equal the social, cultural and economic impact of the boomers.

The boomers rule because they outnumbered their parents by such a vast degree.

They are not, says Melbourne-based demographer Bernard Salt, the largest generation we have seen.

In both New Zealand and Australia the boomers are outnumbered by the Gen Xers (1961-1976). In Australia there 4.04 million boomers to 4.4 million Gen Xers. But baby boomers in Australia have continued to increase through immigration, Salt says.

The reason why boomers have had such a cultural impact at every stage of the life, from when they went to kindergarten, to school, to university, to the workforce and now into middle age, is because the preceding generation was so much smaller - (in Australia 2.5 million, Salt says).

So 4.04 million following into the next stage of the life from 2.5 million - that's the difference.

The reality of such figures can result in bitter humour. What's the difference, some of today's youngsters like to ask, between leeches and baby-boomers? Leeches die quicker.

Such population quirks are the territory explored annually by Salt, a one-time historian whose annual demographic studies of New Zealand and Australia for business consultancy KPMG blend with social commentary and futurology.

And it is, as other studies confirm, still territory heavily marked by the generation that exploded from the young men and women desperate to rebuild conventions of home and family after the appalling waste of the Second World War.

This year Salt has produced his study as a book - The Big Shift: Welcome to the Third Australian Culture - which explores the trends that will shape life in New Zealand and Australia for the next few decades.

Salt describes himself as a quintessential baby boomer, part of the generation that will dominate the first 20 years of the new millennium as thoroughly as it ruled the final quarter-century of the last.

This will not be a comfortable time, instead it will be marked by conflict between generations for resources and influence.

Australia is already sensing the future. Politically, Treasurer Peter Costello's May budget took note of growing grey anger and pumped $A1 billion ($1.27 billion) into tax and other measures designed to keep retirees in the fold, and this even before the vast boomer exodus from the workforce begins.

Medically, the demand for hip replacements soared 26 per cent between 1994 and 1998, and for knee replacements by 43 per cent.

Culturally, Canberra is now edging businesses toward a new emphasis on keeping their old workers. And across the nation silver-haired boardrooms have welcomed similar federal exhortations to remove tight restrictions applying to company directors aged over 72.

Economically, the boomers will have $A140 billion in their bank accounts from superannuation and inheritances, with their typical desire to spend it - this time around, on new cars, restaurants, hobbies, late-life studies, travel and the like.

Salt says that while absolute numbers are obviously different, and there are minor variations in population composition, life for the next two decades will be similar for both New Zealand and Australia.

"I don't think New Zealand had the same relative level of immigration in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that we had.

"In our immigration programme we imported people in their 20s and 30s - we get a whole lifetime's taxpaying out of them - so I think it's a little more pronounced in Australia.

"But it is still there in New Zealand, simply because you had forces personnel overseas that came back with the values of [having a] home, family and children that were ascendant during the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s."

In both countries the under-15 segment of the population is shrinking - from 27 per cent to 21 per cent in Australia since 1976, and from 30 per cent to 23 per cent in New Zealand. The proportion of over-65s rose from 9 per cent to 12 per cent in both. This is going to continue.

In the past decade the median age of New Zealanders rose from 31 to 34 years and that will climb to 45 by 2051. By then, one in every five Kiwis will be over 65.

In the meantime, and for at least the next decade, the boomers will be a force in both countries.

"The thing that I find interesting about the baby boomers is the way in which at every stage of the life cycle through which they pass they change the rules, move the goalposts," Salt says.

When John Lennon at age 28 in 1968 said "Don't trust anyone over 30," it crystallised the inter-generational conflict. Now, in 2001, the view is that, well, 40 is the new 30, you're as young as you feel.

"It's actually very trendy and acceptable and hip and happening to be 40 and at the peak of your career and to be living a cosmopolitan life down by the Viaduct. It's a legitimisation of middle age, which is ascendant at the moment."

Salt's view is reinforced by the increasing appearance of advertising targeting the affluent and middle-aged, the re-emergence of models 20 years after their conventional use-by date. There is also the flush of fitness, health and lifestyle products and services thriving on a generation that refuses to age.

An Access Economics study on population ageing and the economy for Australia's Federal Government concludes that this is only the beginning.

At present the over-55s account for one in every five Australians, but they head households that own almost 40 per cent of the nation's household wealth, 54 per cent of its financial assets, and account for 25 per cent of all disposable income.

The spending of this group over the next 10 years is forecast to grow, even after allowing for inflation, by 61 per cent - double the national average. Unburdened by mortgages, school fees and the like, the boomers are about to pour out this wealth in an entirely new splurge.

Spending patterns will change, away from home improvements, renovation, furniture and home electrics. Instead, Access Economics predicts, boomers will precipitate a major shift from family cars to small vehicles, change the shape of entire manufacturing lines - from the cut of jeans to the weight of gardening tools - and build fewer and smaller new homes with higher-quality fittings and more emphasis on safety and security.

Shopping malls will have fewer sports and music stores but more book shops, and travel agents will increasingly pitch to a market that has less time for backpackers and more for travellers wanting extra comforts.

All will want to reinforce the boomers' view of themselves.

"Go through any of your family album snapshots and look back at your parents and your parents' parents at age 40, or in their late 40s and 50s," Salt says.

"They're old. They looked old at the time and looking back now they still look old."

Compare that with the mindset and the attitude, the clothing and the fashions of 40-somethings at the moment.

It's a complete turnaround. It was youth culture right down the line in the late 1960s and early 1970s - now it's chic black clothing, black being a slimming colour. It's not daggy to be 40 any more.

Encouraged by government moves to keep them in the workforce, boomers will not retire. Retirement, Salt says, is for old people.

In The Big Shift he writes that boomers will seek and secure new working and living arrangements, repartnering and rethinking their lives and inventing a trendy new term to describe the process.

They will rediscover religion, or at least spirituality, as it suddenly dawns on them that they will eventually die.

But ultimately, Salt says, time will catch up and the wheel will turn, possibly for the worse.

It may well turn nasty, as the younger and resentful Gen Xers and Dotcommers and Generation Zs reject boomers' bullying and lobbying for a greater share of the national budget to be directed toward health and, effectively, away from education.

But after we have refocused on middle age, there will be a backlash.

Salt believes that, as youth becomes more rare, it will become more valued.

Eventually youth will be viewed as the most precious element of our community.

And this backlash, probably in the 2020s, will be much to the chagrin of the ageing, failing, languishing baby boomers - by then busily making peace with their maker.