Last week, News Corp columnist Bernard Salt wrote a column linking the inability of many young Aussies to enter the housing market with their love of eating expensive smashed avocado breakfasts in trendy inner-city cafes.
It was written in the voice of an ageing, you kids get off my damn lawn-y baby boomer, wandering into a hipster cafe and judging at the spending habits of young people, and it included pearlers like:
“I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more. I can afford to eat this for lunch because I am middle-aged and have raised my family. But how can young people afford to eat like this? Shouldn’t they be economising by eating at home? How often are they eating out? Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on a house.”
The column sparked a mighty backlash from young people who are legitimately trying to scrape a deposit together to enter our nightmare of a housing market, and inspired a number of cafes to offer discounts on smashed avo out of solidarity.
In a follow-up piece, published earlier today in The Australian, Salt has done a pretty wild 180 on his previous effort, saying it was all one big stitch-up, and if we’d all read it properly, we would have seen that the joke was really on out-of-touch boomers.
Salt has spent the last week or so getting hammered on social media, and seeing the commentary on his piece go viral as far away as the BBC World Service and America’s CNN network.
In today’s column, he said that the piece was intended as “a satire of the middle-aged”, highlighting “their bodily breakdown and the conservatism of their thinking.” He wrote:
“I used the stage of a cafe to parody boomers’ ageing: they can’t sit on milk crates because of their tight hamstrings; they can’t read the menu because their eyes are failing; they can’t follow conversation because of the music. They are even befuddled by toilet signage. And then they silently think (for they could never say such a thing out loud because all hell would break loose): “How can young people afford to eat here; shouldn’t they be at home saving for a house?””
Salt’s current tack is that he sympathises with young Australia, and we should all be thankful to him for finally bringing the nation’s attention to the issue of housing affordability (which surely hadn’t been an issue on anyone’s radar before now):
My column last week was a satire of boomer ageing and conservatism not an attack on millennials. Pleased that affordability is now an issue pic.twitter.com/AS4EIvbM0h
— Bernard Salt (@BernardSalt) October 21, 2016
Cheers, m8.
If you’re in the mood to chew over Salt’s latest column while enjoying a delicious breakfast of smashed avocado, we made a helpful list of some of the best places around the nation for you to do that. Enjoy.
Source: The Australian.
Photo: Instagram.
