Never Gets Old
The Treasurer this week proposed offering retired Australians new job opportunities. The knee-jerk response from many was hackneyed and unhelpful. By Tim James.
The ratio of working-age Australians to retirees, technically known as the dependency ratio, is falling. Whichever of the two groups you are currently in, you should feel cause for reflection.
In 1975, the ratio was 7.4; in 2015 it was 4.5; by the time millennials retire it is forecast to be just 2.7. In other words, today’s grandparents are living in a society with relatively fewer human resources than the one their own grandparents retired in. But by the time their own grandchildren retire, the demographic changes will be greater still.
“Our ageing population puts pressure on our health, aged care and pension systems, we need to develop policies that respond effectively to this challenge,” Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia this week.
But there is hope, which is reflected in a statistical trend going in the opposite direction. The workforce participation rate of over-65s has more than doubled in the past 20 years, from 6 per cent to almost 15 per cent, Frydenberg said.
On a similar note, he said Australian workers undertook 80 per cent of all their training before the age of 21. If seniors are to continue increasing their participation rate, as they must, more training and education later in life will be necessary.
Frydenberg was simply proposing that retirees be offered more choices. He was not saying they should be forced back into the workforce. Nor was he anything but calm and considered during his speech.
Regrettably, the response from some reporters adopted the opposite tone.
“’I can’t believe he said that’ Older Australians hit back at Frydenberg” read the headline in The Sydney Morning Herald quoting a retired school teacher who is training to become a remedial masseur. It was difficult to find anything in the article substantiating the gentleman’s complaint.
Under the headline “Where’s the respect for our older generations,” the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s John Rolfe said older Australians who can’t find work “are not a burden”.
Frydenberg never said they were.
Some reporters are simply negative about anything the Treasurer says.
The Council on the Ageing, however, which is more directly affected by what the Treasurer was proposing, welcomed his comments.
The first Intergenerational Report of 2002 said the retirement of the oldest baby boomers in the mid 2010s would put increasing pressure on the federal Budget. That decade is now almost over and those pressures are upon us.
The Treasurer will deliver the next Intergenerational Report next year. One hopes the current antipathy towards anybody who speaks frankly and seeks plausible solutions will by then have subsided.
The Treasurer has made it clear this is about choice and opportunity for older Australians. Unfortunately some people are choosing to interpret the Treasurer’s calm and considered comments as incendiary, using this as an excuse to attack the Treasurer.
We must have, as Josh Frydenberg has repeatedly said, a calm and considered approach to these demographic and economic shifts we all know are happening. All Australians deserve such a way forward.