One retired couple sits in a television studio and casually mentions they have spent $170,000 on travel in four years. South America, India, the Maldives, Alaska. They are not embarrassed. They have a Facebook group about it. It is called Spending the Kids Inheritance - SKI, for short - and the shelf in their home dedicated to cheap souvenir mugs and cruise ship models is called, with genuine affection, the shit shelf.
This is the face of the boomer economy. And it is not going away anytime soon.
Australia's baby boomers - the generation born between roughly 1946 and 1964 - are retiring into the most comfortable financial position any generation in the country has ever occupied. They make up just over one fifth of the population but own more than half of Australia's wealth. They are travelling more, spending more, and increasingly handing cash directly to their children to help them buy homes that would otherwise be entirely out of reach. The question now sitting at the centre of Australian economic policy is not whether this generation got lucky. It is what happens when that wealth - all of it, the properties and the superannuation and the share portfolios - starts moving.
The background
To understand how boomers got here, start with timing. They bought their first homes in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, when Sydney's median house price sat somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000. One woman on the SBS Insight forum bought her first apartment in her early 20s for $42,000. She was earning $21,000 a year at the time. That is a price-to-income ratio of two. Today, the average Australian home costs close to $977,000. A buyer needs to earn roughly $149,000 a year to afford the mortgage - before the deposit.
The gap between those two worlds is not mostly explained by hard work. It is explained by policy. In the latter half of their careers, boomers benefited from major changes to Australia's superannuation system - the compulsory retirement savings scheme, funded by a portion of wages. Contributions going into super are taxed at a much lower rate than regular income, and once a boomer retires, any earnings inside their super fund are taxed at zero. Australia is one of only three countries in the world that does not tax the pension phase of superannuation at all. That single design choice has allowed wealthy retirees to shelter enormous sums from the tax system entirely.
There is also negative gearing - a tax rule that lets property investors deduct losses on rental properties from their total taxable income - and changes to capital gains tax (CGT, the tax owed when you sell an asset for more than you paid for it) that made property investment significantly more attractive from the late 1990s onwards. These two policies together helped drive a 30-year surge in property prices. Boomers, who were already on the ladder, watched their net worth inflate alongside it.
The economist speaking throughout the SBS Insight discussion of this episode puts it plainly: boomers learned to accumulate. Recessions in the late 1960s, the stagflation of the 1970s, the severe downturn of 1991 - these were the economic weather they grew up in. The response was to save, to hold, never to lose. That instinct, combined with three decades of rising asset prices, produced what is now estimated to be a $1.9 trillion AUD fortune held by the boomer generation alone. To put that number in scale: it is roughly equivalent to the combined market value of every company listed on Australia's ASX 200 index, the country's benchmark stock exchange.
What is actually happening
The SBS Insight episode - which originally aired in 2024 and was republished in March 2026 - gathers a group of boomers, their adult children, an economist, and a social researcher to work through the tension between a generation sitting on enormous wealth and the one below it trying to get started. What emerges is less a debate than a portrait of a structural problem that personal virtue cannot solve.
The boomers in the room are largely self-aware. Some are spending freely, some are quietly passing wealth to their children, and some - like a man named Angus, who has less than $3,000 in superannuation after two divorces and expects to work until 75 to pay off his mortgage - are not wealthy at all. Around one in six boomers in Australia do not own their own home. Women aged 55 and over are one of the fastest-growing groups experiencing homelessness. The "wealthy boomer" is a statistical average that hides enormous inequality within the generation itself.
But the average is still the story, economically speaking. Baby boomers had the highest average net worth in Australia at $2.375 million, according to a 2026 KPMG analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics data. Around 40% of that wealth is held in property, and most of that property carries no remaining mortgage. In 2024, analysts estimated that Australia's over-60s are expected to transfer $3.5 trillion to younger generations over the next 20 years - roughly $175 billion per year.
That transfer is already underway, just not through wills. It is happening through what Australians now casually call the Bank of Mum and Dad. More than 60% of first home buyers in Australia now receive some form of financial assistance from their parents to buy their first home, and the Bank of Mum and Dad is estimated to be collectively worth about $35 billion. The average deposit gift in 2025 sits at $74,040 - up more than $4,000 since 2021 - and 75% of parents giving financial support say they do not expect to be repaid.
One of the people in the forum, a woman named Lorna, pulled roughly $375,000 from her superannuation to go halves with her daughter Zoe on a property. Zoe is 36. She had spent over $100,000 on medical bills that wiped out her deposit savings, and without her mother's help, she says homeownership was not realistic in the next five to fifteen years. The transaction was straightforward. Lorna had a healthy superannuation balance. She used it while she was still alive. The bank was willing to lend the rest once the existing debt was cleared.
The economy, in this telling, increasingly runs on inherited proximity to wealth.
The money trail
The mechanics of the boomer economy are not accidental. They follow the logic of policy set over decades, and that policy consistently favoured asset holders over wage earners.
Consider the tax structure first. Australia's personal income tax rate is among the higher ones in the developed world. Wages are taxed heavily. But once money is moved into superannuation, it is taxed at a concessional 15% on earnings - and, once in the pension phase, at zero. There is no inheritance tax in Australia - one of only a small number of OECD countries without one. Capital gains on investment properties held for more than 12 months are discounted by 50% before tax is applied. The entire system is structured to reward those who already have assets and can move money into tax-advantaged vehicles.
The housing market follows the same logic. Around 80% of boomers do not plan to downsize their family homes, according to the economist in the Insight discussion. That number matters because those homes represent unoccupied supply in areas where demand is concentrated - typically the inner and middle suburbs of Australia's major cities where most employment, infrastructure, and social networks exist. In 2024-25, baby boomers held an average of $1.36 million in property wealth per household, compared to $890,000 for millennials. But the gap in net terms is far wider: boomers carry average debts of just $160,000 against those properties, while millennials carry average debts of $460,000.
Why won't boomers move? The economist makes a structural argument. Stamp duty - a state government tax on property transactions, typically 3-5% of the purchase price - makes downsizing expensive. If Sonia, a boomer in the discussion who owns a $3 million Sydney home, were to sell and buy something smaller, she would pay tens of thousands in stamp duty without any meaningful improvement in her day-to-day life. The policy effectively freezes her in place. And each home that stays frozen is one fewer home available in the suburb for a family trying to buy.
On the spending side, the dynamics are slightly different. Boomer consumer spending is real but it is not primarily what is driving inflation. The economist in the Insight discussion is careful about this: inflation in Australia has been driven by essentials - energy, food, healthcare, housing - not by retirement tourism or cruise ships. Boomers buying Disney souvenirs and Alaskan cruises are putting money into the economy, but the inflationary pressure comes from somewhere structurally different. The SKI generation is a story about wealth concentration and spending behaviour, not a macroeconomic driver of price rises.
The real economic consequence is distributional. A gift of $10,000 or more from parents makes a first home purchase around 90% more likely, according to Australian Housing Monitor research. That is not a marginal effect - it is a near-determinative one. Property access is ceasing to be a function of income and savings, and increasingly becoming a function of family wealth. The 25-34 age group recorded the largest five-year increase in household wealth between 2019-20 and 2024-25, rising 63% - but that increase was largely driven by those who bought property during the brief window of ultra-low interest rates in 2020 and 2021, a window that has since closed.
The inheritance wave will intensify this. The $3.5 trillion wealth transfer is expected to create an estimated 400,000 new millionaires in Australia. Those new millionaires will, by and large, be the children of people who were already wealthy. Arthur, the 33-year-old engineer in the Insight forum, has no inheritance coming. He lives in a share house, is trying to save enough to qualify for a mortgage on a one-bedroom apartment, and watches house prices rise faster than his savings rate. His father, Angus, expects to die with nothing. The system has not failed both men equally.
What people are doing about it
The practical responses are scattered across the income spectrum and mostly involve individuals improvising around structural conditions that no one is quite ready to change.
At the wealthier end, boomers are increasingly doing what Lorna did: using superannuation drawdowns to transfer wealth to children while still alive, rather than waiting for inheritance. The logic is simple - a $375,000 property contribution in your daughter's 30s does more good than the same amount arriving when she is 55. Demographer Bernard Salt has noted that boomers are unlikely to wait until death to pass on wealth, given that millennials would be grandparents themselves before inheriting anything under a traditional model.
Some are going further. In the Insight discussion, one retired couple - Leon and Leanne - helped both their adult sons into the property market, effectively selling them a property at roughly half its market value. They frame it as teaching financial literacy: how to manage tenants, understand capital gains, navigate debt. It is also a $200,000-$400,000 gift dressed in educational language, and they know it.
Travel companies are building entire businesses around this cohort. The CEO of Travel at 60, a company tailored specifically to the over-60s market, describes baby boomers as "driving the tourism industry" - particularly regional Australian tourism, which depends heavily on grey dollar spending to remain viable. Leanne and Leon's next trip includes an Alaskan cruise, a Mexican cruise, a Disney convention in Anaheim, and a Las Vegas anniversary. The travel company that booked it had a very good quarter.
At the policy level, the conversation has barely started. The economist in the discussion is direct: the government will eventually have to consider taxing boomers more, because around 60% of federal revenue comes from personal income tax, and as boomers exit the workforce and millennials replace them, that tax base shrinks. Aged care, healthcare, and welfare payments are simultaneously rising. The fiscal maths only go one direction. But inheritance tax - the most obvious structural lever - is considered politically impossible. No government, the economist notes flatly, could survive proposing it.
The social researcher in the discussion, Myra, has written about what she calls "generation scapegoat" - the tendency to blame the entire boomer cohort for the structural conditions that produced their wealth. Her point is that the real divide is not between generations but between classes. A wealthy boomer and a struggling boomer are not having the same life. And the children of wealthy boomers are already inheriting a different starting position from those whose parents have nothing.
The bottom line
Australia is sitting at the edge of the largest wealth transfer in its history, and the question is not whether the money will move - it will - but whether it will move in a way that reduces or amplifies the structural advantages already baked into the system. The Bank of Mum and Dad is already functioning as the de facto equaliser for families with assets. For the roughly 40% of first home buyers who do not have access to one, no amount of personal saving changes the fundamental equation. House prices are not a savings problem. They are a policy problem, built over decades, and the inheritance wave that follows will reward the people it finds already ahead.
Timeline
- 1946-1964 - Baby boomers born in Australia; generation shaped by parents' experiences of depression-era scarcity and wartime
- 1970s - Many boomers enter the workforce and begin purchasing first homes at price-to-income ratios of roughly 2-3x
- 1991-1992 - Australia's severe recession, described by Treasurer Paul Keating as "the recession we had to have"; boomers aged 25-45, at peak earning risk
- 1992 - Compulsory superannuation introduced in Australia; contributions set initially at 3% of wages, rising over subsequent decades
- 1999 - Capital gains tax discount introduced, halving the tax on investment assets held more than 12 months; widely credited with intensifying demand for investment property
- 2002-2018 - $1.5 trillion in wealth transferred between Australian generations in inheritances and gifts, according to Productivity Commission data
- 2018 - Annual inheritances and gifts reach $52 billion, more than double the 2002 figure
- 2019 - Average Australian house price: $646,000
- 2020-2021 - RBA cash rate cut to near zero during COVID-19 pandemic; brief window of ultra-low interest rates drives surge in first home buyer activity and a 63% rise in wealth for 25-34 year olds
- 2021 - Productivity Commission report estimates $3.5 trillion will transfer from boomers to younger generations by 2050
- 2024 - Average Australian house price reaches $976,800, a 51% rise since 2019; KPMG analysis shows boomers hold average net worth of $2.375 million; Bank of Mum and Dad collectively estimated at $35 billion
- March 2026 - SBS Insight republishes its Boomer Economy episode, reigniting public debate over generational wealth, housing policy, and the looming inheritance transfer
Summary
Who: Australia's baby boomer generation (born 1946-1964), their adult children, policymakers, and economists
What: A generation holding over half of Australia's wealth is spending freely in retirement, transferring billions to children through informal property support, and preparing to pass down an estimated $3.5 trillion in assets - an inheritance wave that will benefit some younger Australians while leaving those without wealthy parents further behind
When: The wealth transfer is already underway, with the largest acceleration expected through the 2030s as the oldest boomers reach their 80s
Where: Australia, with particular concentration in Sydney and Melbourne property markets where homes in established suburbs sell for $2-3 million
Why: Decades of tax policy - superannuation concessions, negative gearing, capital gains discounts - combined with the absence of any inheritance or estate tax, have allowed boomers to accumulate and shelter enormous wealth. The structural conditions that made this possible are not being meaningfully dismantled, meaning the transfer will largely reinforce existing class advantages rather than reduce them