Current social conservative politics have led to a welfare state that is increasingly focused on working families with children. This is true of the Howard Government and more recently in the US the $300 rebate (to keep the economy strong or some rubbish) was an extra $300 per child. Richard Florida argues the inverse is true:
Furthermore, one group that has been neglected by most communities, at least until recently, is young people. Young people have typically been thought of as transients who contribute little to a city's bottom line. But in the creative age they matter for two reasons. First they are workhorses. ... [and] Second, people are staying single longer.He argues that young people are a driving force behind dynamic creative economies, and are more important economically than the traditional suburban nuclear family to economic wealth and success for a region.
Not exclusively however, and the aspects of a city that attracts the educated youth worker, also attracts the aging worker with a family. Lifestyles do not stop because of child birth. This returns to Florida's main argument where the quality of life in a city or region is a deciding factor in attracting 'the creative class' to the local economy, which inevitably attracts in turn creative companies who want to employ their labor.
Politically I think young people are under-represented and I do believe that there is an element of the world having changed on many of the old politicians that inhabit our political structures such that they are endemically out of touch. The responses to terrorism were not the ones of the abundant libertous age, they were a cold war response. The same with the social welfare of the Howard years, it was typical big-government social engineering.
The Westminster System helps entrench the career politician, Howard being a good example. I don't see that issue changing soon. On the Liberal benches the nearest one to having a real job of the potential leaders is Turnball. The current Prime Minister is another careerist having moved through a professional career in diplomacy to electoral politics.
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