When we talk about generational inequality, the question should not be whether young Australians have as much as their parents or grandparents have today. The question is whether they have the same chance to build it. Anglicare Australia’s new research suggests they increasingly do not.
Tue 25 Aug 2026 08.00 AEST
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It should surprise nobody that a 70-year-old has more wealth than a 25-year-old.
Older people have had decades longer to work, save, pay off debt and accumulate assets. Many have spent a lifetime building the security they now enjoy. This is what a successful society should allow people to do.
So when we talk about generational inequality, the question should not be whether young Australians have as much as their parents or grandparents have today. The question is whether they have the same chance to build it. Anglicare Australia’s new research suggests they increasingly do not.
Our latest report looks beyond simple comparisons between young and old. Instead, it asks how people today are faring compared with previous generations when they were at the same stage of life. A 25-year-old earning less than a 55-year-old tells us very little. A 25-year-old doing worse than 25-year-olds did in previous generations tells us something much more troubling.
For much of Australia’s post-war history, the trajectory was upwards. Each generation could broadly expect to earn more, buy a home, build assets and become more secure as they moved through life.
That pathway is now breaking down. Housing offers the clearest example. Australia’s overall home ownership rate rose dramatically during the twentieth century, reaching more than 70 per cent in the 1960s. But the national figure conceals what has happened since.
Home ownership among younger Australians has been falling for decades. Crucially, this is not simply because people are buying their first home a few years later. Ownership has fallen substantially among people aged 35-44 as well. The gap is following people further into adulthood. The pathway itself has weakened.
That has enormous consequences for wealth. For previous generations, buying a home was not only about having somewhere secure to live. Paying down a mortgage allowed ordinary working households to gradually build an asset. Rising house prices then delivered further wealth gains.
Today’s younger Australians face the opposite equation. They enter adulthood facing much higher house prices, weaker income growth, more debt and higher living costs. Those who cannot buy spend longer in the private rental market, often paying high rents while trying to save a deposit against an asset whose price may be rising faster than their savings.
That matters because wealth builds wealth. People who already own assets benefit when those assets rise in value. They can use equity to buy another property, invest elsewhere, help their children into the market or simply enjoy the security of owning their home outright.
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Those outside the market do not simply have less wealth today. They miss the gains that would have helped them build wealth tomorrow. Our report finds that the share of national household wealth held by people aged 65 and over rose markedly between 2003-04 and 2019-20. Younger, and several working-age groups saw their shares fall.
Again, the conclusion should not be that older people have too much. The concern is that the economic escalator that carried previous generations towards greater security is slowing down for the people stepping onto it now, and that threatens to create another divide within younger generations themselves.
Some young Australians will get help with a deposit or eventually inherit valuable property. Others will get nothing. The so-called great wealth transfer will not simply move wealth neatly from older Australians to young Australians. It will concentrate advantage within families, widening the divide between those who inherit assets and those who do not.
All of that risks turning Australia into something closer to an ‘inheritocracy’, where the circumstances of your birth matter more than the income you earn through your work.
Governments helped create these conditions, and governments can change them. The recent reforms to negative gearing and capital gains tax are an important start. For decades, our tax system gave people buying their second or third property advantages unavailable to someone simply trying to buy their first. Reducing those incentives and directing investment towards new housing begins to rebalance the system.
But tax reform cannot undo decades of housing inequality on its own. Australia also needs a major investment in social and affordable housing. We need a rental market that offers genuine security to people who may rent for much longer than previous generations. And we need economic settings that allow people to build security through work, rather than making property ownership or inheritance the price of admission.
The measure of a fair society is not whether every generation has the same amount of wealth at the same moment in time. It is whether the people coming after us have the same opportunities to build a decent and secure life: for most of Australia’s modern history, we expected them to have an even better one.
We should be deeply concerned that, for the first time in generations, that expectation is going backwards.
Kasy Chambers is the executive director of Anglicare Australia
