Yes Pinky my point wasn't so much whether the OP had a point with regard to modern kids, I just found a delicious irony in the fact that GA employers, having spent the last several decades creating and benefiting from this ridiculous system where young pilots get paid nothing or next-to-nothing, are now crying over falling standards.
Because of the tremendously high hours requirement that Australian airlines have historically had, and GA has been the only place where young up-and-comers can get those hours, the GA employers have for a very long time been artificially shielded from the principle of pay-peanuts-get-monkeys. We all had no choice but to bend over and take it in order to get those precious first couple of thousand hours in the logbook.
The game has changed a lot in the last decade with the Jetstar cadetships etc and I would contend that GA hours have come to be seen as less valuable than they once were. On that basis, the bargain of mutual exploitation between GA employers and up-and-coming pilots, is a lot less attractive all of a sudden.
If I was a clued up school leaving kid with an interest in piloting these days, I'd look at the ridiculous price of training, the state of the industry, ask when's the last time Qantas hired and realistically what are my chances, pretty much zero, ok then what are my alternatives i.e. low cost airlines, what do they pay, how much debt am I going to take on, how much crap am I going to have to go through and for how long in order to get to where I want to be, I'd do a risk vs cost vs benefit analysis on the whole thing ... then I'd walk away and do a law degree. It's that bad. I really believe a lot of potentially good young pilots are coming to that same conclusion now.
For what it's worth I don't even believe there's such a thing as "generation Y". There may indeed be a certain percentage of lazy spoon-fed self entitled brats out there, but there is certainly also plenty of excellent, clued up, hard working young folk as well. Same as it always was. The question really should be what can we as an industry do to ensure that when these kids are leaving school and choosing their careers, we get less of the type A's and more of the type B's?