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Bernard Hickey is a financial journalist who has worked as the former Managing Editor of Business at Fairfax and held positions at Reuters and the Financial Times Group. Today, he is the Managing Editor of interest.co.nz and a regular contributor to the New Zealand Herald business section. A rather controversial figure – he is known to get on the wrong side of Paula Bennett from time to time – one of the areas he is most invested in is the idea of intergenerational theft. Critic spoke to him about this and other issues last week.
 
First and foremost, how would you describe the concept of intergenerational theft and its position in New Zealand society?
 
So, just to paint the big picture here, there are a lot of people who were born after the Second World War who will retire in the next ten or twenty years. Many of those people [who] graduated in the early ‘70s had a free education, probably graduated into reasonably high employment in the mid-to-late seventies ... and were able to buy a house quite cheaply. The people who fit into that territory are Helen Clark, John Key – they were the lucky generation in New Zealand. 
 
And so how does that contrast with the outlook for the generation that is just coming through universities now?
 
Your generation, Generation Y and also the generation before you, Generation X, now face a different situation ... house prices doubled between 2002 and 2007, that is unprecedented. It created about $300 billion in wealth for those people who own property. Those people who are graduating now are probably graduating with a student debt; they are graduating into an employment market that is dead. New Zealand unemployment is upwards of 25 percent. They will not be able to own their own home under their salary. 
 
Is there anything that the student or graduate population can do to counteract these effects or is it just a matter of sitting back and watching these predictions develop?
 
A lot of graduates will leave New Zealand, particularly on their OE, and many will work overseas for a long period of time. The key question is, when they come back, or when they want to come back? That is when they have some influence. They can say to John Key or whoever is in charge,

you need to improve things for me to come back. If you don't, I won't come back. 
 
How successful do you see the New Zealand media is in portraying this zeitgeist?
 
Not very. Largely because it is run by older people who don't see a problem. They're fine, they're rich. In twenty years’ time their kids will have to pay much higher taxes to pay for their retirement and healthcare costs. And that is where it really starts to bite and people start to understand the scale of the problem. And if you want to see what that looks like, just go and have a look at Greece or Iceland right now.      
 
Assuming John Key gets in at the next election, which many people say he is likely to do, do you think we are likely to see any changes in his second term, more so than say his first?
 
Winston Churchill once said, “Great leaders make changes in their first six months, or they never make changes at all.” And I think he is right. John Key had a mandate [but] ... He chose to remain very popular rather than use some of that popularity to drive through some change. He showed himself to be a poll-driven politician and not a leader.