Born in 1947, I have enjoyed and exploited the benefits and opportunities that landed disproportionately on the baby boomers as the post war population bubble in western democracies is accurately portrayed.

While I wasn't usually first at the coal face, I can still reflect happily on what the brightest and most courageous of our generation achieved in much younger days. Empowered significantly by rock 'n' roll, we ended the Vietnam war and irreversibly turned the tide against segregation by race, gender and sexuality.

But then we patted ourselves on our backs and wandered off to indulge our whims through what should have been our most productive years, leaving the political processes on autopilot in blind faith that the authoritarian devil had been finally defeated.

But the seeds of what was to come had been inadvertently sown while we were still at school. With computers still on the horizon, youngsters who needed to escape school at the end of what we now call year 9 were eagerly swallowed up by the tax department as pen pushers. They would eventually be certified as accountants through on-the-job training.

Then when it became time for those who could to go to university, and while medicine and law were already diverting our top percentile as they still do to this day, you needed good year 12 results to get into all the other established courses. The singular exception was commerce where the entry mark was 10% below that of other faculties, so that other path to accountancy also became the territory of those lacking the smarts to do anything better with their lives.

But the biggest mistake was yet to come, and it came more through lack of action that any explicit decision. At some point when nobody was taking any notice, we slid from giving national financial matters real attention only on the night of the federal budget to giving those same dull accountants a veto over the wider political process, not just in government but in corporations and eventually in industrial scale charities.

Symptomatic of the limitations of baby boomer accountants was their failure to ever truly comprehend any arithmetical process beyond addition. They even fell back on double entry accounting to avoid subtraction. So you should not be surprised that they are completely at a loss with respect to the binomial expansion of 1.03 raised to the power 100, the result of which extrapolates the level of economic growth being factored into current policy extrapolated over the likely life span of many of the Costello-subsidised children being born today. Yes, we baby boomers may well see close to that 20 fold economic growth in our own lifetimes, but to be factoring in even the start of such overgrowth again in the first world is arrogant stupidity.

So let me apologise again for us baby boomers having our cake and eating it too.

In my own case, I so busied myself with "important" things I wanted to be doing that for more than a decade I blissfully ignored the authoritarian resurgence in any of its conflicted guises: nanny state, family values or, more recently, security. While studying a modicum of psychology as an undergraduate I had placed far too much import on the then perfectly sensible use of a test for authoritarian tendencies as a demonstration of testing for psychological dysfunction. While I now understand far too late how we got this all so wrong, the problem has been further compounded by our failure to solve a problem that meanwhile had my complete attention: how to produce a critical mass of thinkers with a deep comprehension of emergent complex systems which must replace compartmentalised reductionist science as the primary means of producing new knowledge and understanding for the new millennium. Assumptions of authority get us nowhere on that journey.

It would be far too easy to suggest that baby boomers abdication of moral responsibility was uniformly a product of the bright thinking global but acting local on whatever took their fancy. Many just addicted themselves to self indulgence, living the lives of lords in the anonymity of suburbia or, more recently, sea/tree-changed. Many more addicted themselves to mind altering substances. And all too many of those whose birthdays came out of the barrel never really recovered from Vietnam.

We baby boomers also started the discontinuity in the pass down of extended family values that allowed following generations to try to suffocate their youngsters in blankets of illusory safety which might have made an even bigger mess of the challenge-challenged generations if less kids had continued to take responsibility for their own growing into their own hands despite the adult world's worst efforts to imprison them in childhood fantasies.

Having indulged ourselves for sixty years in the best life could offer, we baby boomers are now largely preoccupied working out how to spend our kids' inheritance on retirement indulgences before we have to finally face our fears for a geriatric care system we have been happy to sweep under the carpet along with our parents. The younger generations can no doubt look forward to us failing to relinquish our grip on the wheels of power until we have spent the rest of their inheritance on adding all manner of comforts to geriatric care, hang education and hang the environment.

I'm sorry, but that's just how it has to be.