Our oldies have never had it so good

Don’t let anyone tell you Scott Morrison is out of touch. When he says that, if he had the money, he’d increase the age pension rather than the dole, he’s reflecting the views of most older Australians. Everyone knows it’s the old who are the deserving poor.

Except it ain’t true. It was true once, but not for many years.

You might expect the Prime Minister to be better informed than the average punter, but Morrison is from the new breed of politician who see a leader’s job as to reflect the voters’ misperceptions back to them. Read the focus group reports, not the briefing notes.

Something Morrison clearly hasn’t read is the research briefs published last week summarising the findings of the Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research – an outfit funded by the federal government to ensure it (and the rest of us) are well-informed about matters such as the adequacy of the age pension.

According to the centre’s director, Professor John Piggott, of the University of NSW, “our analysis shows that standards of living of older people have improved over the last decade . . . Households reaching retirement age today have incomes about 45 per cent higher than those reaching the same milestone 10 years ago.”

That’s a real increase of 45 per cent, after taking account of inflation. How could it be possible? Because the pension is indexed to wages rather than prices, and wages grow by a per cent or two a year faster than prices (until recently, anyway).

As well, the Rudd government made a discretionary increase in pensions on top of indexation.

The centre’s figures show that 62 per cent of age pensioners get it at the full rate, with a quarter getting a part-rate pension because of their other income, and another 13 per cent on a part-rate because of the high value of their non-housing assets.

The centre finds that the rate of poverty (measured as less than half the median household disposable income) among everyone aged 65 and over is only a fraction higher than for everyone aged 15 to 64.

Even so, by now it’s wrong to think of many people retiring with nothing to support them but the pension. Our retirement income system rests on three pillars, with the means-tested, flat-rate age pension being only the first.

The second pillar is compulsory employer superannuation contributions under the “super guarantee”, which began formally in 1992 and reached 9 per cent of wages in 2002. Today it’s 9.5 per cent.

By now, therefore, most people should be retiring with some super savings, maybe quite a lot. The centre says that, in 2016, the median (most typical) super balance for individuals aged 60 to 64 was $68,000, whereas the arithmetic average was three times that, at $214,000 – pushed up by a small number of very much higher balances (including mine).

The median is held down by the typically much lower balances of women, which average 64 per cent less than men’s. Even here, however, the centre says the gap has almost halved over the past decade.

The retirement income system’s third pillar is voluntary super contributions, which are “tax-advantaged”.

Compulsory and voluntary super contributions are already sufficient to mean that 40 per cent of people on the age pension have super and investments as their main source of income. And 20 per cent of older people have so much other income as to make them ineligible for the pension.

But the system actually has a fourth pillar: home ownership. (And a fifth: assets and other savings outside the first four pillars.)

Get this: three-quarters of age pensioners own their home. The centre estimates that, on average, living rent-free in your own home yields a saving of more than $10,000 a year. (As well, the oldest households receive health-related savings averaging about $25,000 a year.)

So significant is the fourth pillar of home-ownership that it’s implicitly assumed in judging the age pension’s adequacy – meaning the quarter of age pensioners who mainly rent privately are justified in complaining about the trouble they have making ends meet.

About 40 per cent of renters aged 65 and over are below the poverty line. And, among those of them living alone, the poverty rate rises to 60 per cent.

If Morrison really cared about the elderly poor, he’d raise the pension rent supplement, which wouldn’t cost much.

In truth, however, his remarks last week were probably more about signalling: the aged – particularly the better-off aged; those dreading Labor’s plan to abolish unused dividend franking credits - should see themselves as part of his party’s “base”, whose interests he represents and will fight for.

Renters of any age aren't part of the base. Nor are the young part of it – and others with a greater risk of finding themselves on the dole – so their interests take a lower priority. Don’t say he didn’t tell you.

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There are delusions for young and old

There are things oldies tell young people that the youngsters should believe, and things they shouldn’t. One thing I wouldn’t believe is the confident predictions about the huge number of different jobs and careers they’re likely to have.

One thing I would believe is that eligibility for the age pension is likely to have risen to 70 by the time they get there, whatever Prime Minister Scott Morrison says about it being off the table.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard adults – usually teachers - assuring school kids they’ll end up having 17 changes in employer across five different careers.

It sounds as if it’s the conclusion of some careful scientific study by experts. But as far as I can tell, if there is such a study it’s been lost in the annals of time.

Which is a pity because other experts need to go back to such a study and tell us just how careful and scientific the study was. Doesn’t sound it to me.

Rather, the line’s become an urban myth – widely repeated and accepted as true because it’s so often repeated.

Those who peer into the “future of work” are always telling us the rising generation needs to be endowed with “21st century skills” such creativity, team work and critical thinking. True.

And our youth could start by applying some critical thinking to the prediction of exactly how many jobs and careers they’ll be having in a working life that hasn’t even started. More critical thinking than the silly adults who keep repeating a finding of whose origin and authority they know nothing.

A key critical-thinking question is: how on earth would you know? How could anyone, no matter how expert, look 45 or 55 years into the future and count the number of jobs and careers young people will end up having, even on average?

We can’t forecast with any confidence what the next five years will hold, let alone the next 55. Any genuine expert would hedge any guess they made with a dozen caveats and qualifications. Anyone who can be as certain as 17 and five is more entertainer than expert.

Do you remember when Julia Gillard dispatched Kevin Rudd in 2010? She had a to-do list of problems inherited from Rudd – including his mining tax and emissions trading scheme - that needed to be dispatched forthwith in readiness for an election.

Malcolm Turnbull’s successor seems to have a similar to-do list. Actually, the plan to raise the age pension age to 70 is inherited from Tony Abbott. It’s one of the few cost-saving measures remaining from the many included, but since abandoned, in Abbott’s first budget in 2014 – a budget so politically disastrous it has blighted the Coalition government throughout its life.

The higher pension age proposal was implacably opposed by Labor and Senate crossbenchers alike. It was already a dead letter and it’s no surprise Morrison has dumped it.

You can believe that, should Morrison be elected, he’ll stick to his promise. But the eligibility age wasn’t to reach 70 until July 2035, and a lot could change between now and then. Say, 17 prime ministers and five changes of ruling party.

We’ve been raising the pension age since the early 1990s and we still are. This has raised little controversy. So it’s not hard to believe that, by the time today’s school students are approaching 70, the age pension age will have drifted up from 67 to 70.

In 1993, the Keating government decided to increase the pension age for women from 60 to 65, phased in over 20 years.

In 2009, the Rudd government decided to phase up the pension age for men and women from 65 to 67, starting six years later. At present we’re up to 65 and six months, and it will rise by six months every two years until it reaches 67 in 2023.

Abbott’s plan was to wait a further two years then, from July 2025, raise the age by six months every two years until it reached 70 by 2035.

A point to ponder is that it was Labor governments that are getting us up to 67, even though Labor has so righteously opposed adding a further three years. Maybe it’s OK if they do it.

There’s no age at which people must retire. The rationale for raising the age at which we become eligible for retirement assistance from the taxpayer is we’re living ever longer, healthier lives.

That’s a good thing. But it comes at a cost to the community – particularly to younger taxpayers – if we insist that those extra years of healthy life must be spent in longer years of retirement rather than work, thus raising the proportion of non-workers to workers.

As I’ve noted recently, one way we’ve used to slow the ageing of our population is high levels of younger immigrants – but this too carries costs many people don’t want to pay.

The notion that retirement beats working is the great delusion of middle age. If the ever-diminishing minority of workers doing hard physical labour fear their bodies won’t last the extra few years, that’s partly why we have the disability support pension. We should stop stigmatising it.

If it’s too hard for older workers to find jobs, that’s an attitudinal problem among employers we should be – and are – reducing.

If workers find their jobs so unpleasant they can’t wait to retire, that’s a communitywide problem of misguided employers we should be correcting directly, to the benefit of all wage slaves.

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Immigration is sharply slowing the ageing of our population

Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe thinks Australia’s strong population growth in recent years is a wonderful thing, and he sings its praises in a speech this week.

I’m not sure he’s right. Like most economists and business people, Lowe is a lot more conscious of the economic benefits of population growth than the economic costs. As for the social and environmental costs, they’re for someone else to worry about.

But whatever your views, you’ll be heaps better informed after you’ve seen what he says about our changing “population dynamics” and absorbed his tutorial on demography.

Over the past decade, our population has grown at an average rate of about 1.6 per cent a year. This is faster than in previous decades. It’s also faster than every advanced economy bar Singapore.

Most other rich countries – including the US and Britain – grew by well under 1 per cent a year over the period. The populations of Italy, Russia and Germany were stagnant, and fell in Japan and Greece. China’s annual growth averaged only 0.5 per cent.

What’s driving our growth is increased immigration, of course. Over recent times, net overseas migration has added about 1 per cent a year to the population, with “natural increase” (births minus deaths) adding only about 0.7 per cent.

Our rate of natural increase is pretty steady. It perked up a bit a decade ago, but quickly resumed its slow decline, as more couples have smaller families and some have none.

Net migration, by contrast, goes through a lot of peaks and troughs – which, not by chance, correlate well with the ups and downs of the business cycle.

We think of the government controlling immigration with a big lever (making it “exogenous” or coming from outside the system, as economists say, pinching the word from medicos) but many demographers see immigration as “endogenous” or determined within the system.

This has become truer as permanent migration becomes dominated by workers with skills we need, rather than by family reunion, and there’s more temporary migration by overseas students and skilled workers brought in by employers to fill a temporary shortage.

The resources boom showed temporary skilled migration was great at helping us control (wage-driven) inflation, one of Lowe’s primary concerns as boss of the central bank.

But I worry our young people are paying the price for this greater macro-economic flexibility. We’re schooling our employers not to bother training plenty of apprentices ready for the next shortage because it’s easier to wait until the shortage emerges and then pull in a tradesperson or three from overseas.

Sorry, back to Lowe’s speech. He notes that growth in the number of people here on temporary visas adds to the size of our population. For instance, there are now more than half a million overseas students studying in Australia.

Here’s a stat you probably didn’t know: about a sixth of foreign students are permitted to stay and work here after finishing their studies. This boosts our population. Always a man to look on the bright side, Lowe reminds us it also boosts the nation’s “human capital”.

Plus, he’s too polite to say, it does so free of charge. It’s a neat trick: we charge foreign parents in developing countries full freight to educate their children, then allow the best of 'em to stay on.

But wait, there’s more: we also benefit from our stronger overseas connections when foreign students return home, Lowe says.

Now for his big reveal. Particularly because of our emphasis on skilled workers and students (as opposed to bringing out nonna and nonno), the median age of new migrants is between 20 and 25, more that 10 years younger than the median age of the rest of us.

At the time of Treasury’s first intergenerational report in 2002, our present median age of 37 was expected to rise rapidly to more than 45 by 2040. But after the past decade of increased immigration of young people, the latest estimate is that the median age will be only about 40 by then.

“This is a big change in a relatively short period of time, and reminds us that demographic trends are not set in stone,” Lowe says.

This means that, on the question of population ageing, and looking at the latest projections over the next quarter of a century, we compare well with other advanced economies, he says.

First, our median age of 37 makes Australia one of the youngest countries. We are ageing more slowly than most of the others, meaning we’re projected to stay relatively young. This is better than earlier projections suggesting we’d move to the middle of the pack.

Second, we have a higher fertility rate than most rich countries. Australians tend to have larger families than those in many other countries. (Note, not large, but larger than the others.)

Third, our average life expectancy is at the higher end of the range, and is expected to keep rising.

Fourth, our old-age dependency ratio – people 65 and older, compared to people of working age, 15 to 64 – is rising, but less quickly than in most other countries.

And our relative youth and higher fertility rate means our dependency ratio is expect to stay lower than other countries’ for the next 25 years or so. Only then is it projected to rise rapidly.

The first intergenerational report expected that the disproportionate bulge of baby boomers reaching normal retirement age would lead to a steady decline in the proportion of people participating in the labour force.

It hasn’t happened. The reverse, in fact – for fascinating reasons I’ll save for another day.

To economists, this slower rate of population ageing – that is, slower rise in the old-age dependency ratio – is great news. It means the economy’s growth in coming years won’t slow as much as they were expecting (see point above about the participation rate).

It also means ageing will put less pressure on future federal and state budgets. But let me give you a tip: there are so many other pressures we probably won’t notice its absence.

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How Labor is taking on the greedy elderly

Talk about missing the point. The media spent all last week working themselves into a lather over Labor's newly announced policy to abolish cash refunds for unused dividend imputation credits. (If you have no idea what that means, it probably wouldn't affect you.)

This promise would be terribly unfair to dirt-poor self-funded retirees, we were told. And it was utter stupidity for Bill Shorten to drop such a monumentally unpopular proposal in the last week of the Batman byelection, which he was now safe to lose.

Except, of course, that Labor won comfortably, with little sign the policy had much effect.

The media smarties' greater failure was their inability to see the bigger picture: the next federal election is shaping as a battle between the generations, with Labor championing the put-upon young and the Coalition defending the privileged old.

According to Canberra conventional wisdom, this too is crazy-brave territory for Labor. The ageing of the population means Grey Power is our fastest growing political force.

Those of retirement age (which includes me) have little more pressing to do than to worry incessantly about their finances, and have developed an unshakable sense of entitlement ("I've paid taxes all my life ..."). Any concession they've been granted, no matter how unjustified or unaffordable, can't be taken back, we're assured.

Well, I'm not so sure.

As a political force, Grey Power has one huge weakness: of all the age groups, the over-65s are those least likely to change their vote. The great majority vote for the Coalition, so Labor doesn't have a lot to lose.

It's among the non-aged (sorry) that most swinging voters are found, and it's by picking up enough swingers that a party wins.

Haven't you noticed how, since 2013, the Coalition has been reacting to Labor's pro-younger policies by flying to the defence of the better-off old? The conservatives are allowing themselves to be "wedged" – separated from the majority of voters.

The Canberra smarties also used to believe negative gearing was politically untouchable. But Labor went to the 2016 election promising to curtail it – while the Libs predicted it would send house prices crashing – and came within a whisker of winning. Labor's persisting with the policy.

Labor went to that election with another pro-younger policy: cutting the tax breaks going to exceptionally well-off superannuants (including me). This time, Malcolm Turnbull, needing help to pay for his company tax cuts, produced his own, Treasury-crafted version of Labor's idea.

The issue didn't feature greatly in the election campaign, but after the Coalition had won, the exceptionally well-off superannuants in the Liberal heartland turned on Turnbull. This advantaged Labor by adding to the disunity in the Coalition's ranks. Turnbull modified his super changes, but not greatly.

And now Labor is planning to remove another super tax concession that goes overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, to superannuants with large share portfolios. The Coalition hasn't resisted the temptation to side with its well-off elderly heartland, nor have the media resisted the temptation to promote its (and the super industry's) misrepresentation of the policy as an attack on struggling retirees (who just happen to own a lot of shares).

How is this another of Labor's pro-younger policies? That will be easier seen if, as seems likely, Labor uses the saving to pay for a promise of income tax cuts for people earning less than $87,000 a year – few of which would go to the retired rather than to the workers who pay for the retired's largely income tax-free status.

If you think an election campaign based on conflict between the generations is not a good thing, I agree. Unless what you mean by that is that the better-off aged should be allowed to retain their relatively recently conferred tax advantages, and the taxpaying non-old should continue to lump it.

It's a pity John Howard and Peter Costello (the chap who kept issuing reports warning that population ageing would play merry hell with the budget) didn't worry more about future generational conflict when they spent most of their 11 years in office slipping new benefits for the aged, particularly self-funded retirees, into the budget.

They started with the private health insurance tax rebate (the biggest users of private health insurance services are 60 to 79-year olds) and moved on to giving the alleged self-funded retirees the "seniors and pensioners tax offset", also making it easier for them to get health cards and pay the pensioners' rate for pharmaceuticals.

In 1999, they gave negative gearing a huge boost by introducing a 50 per cent discount on capital gains tax. And they decided that anyone who paid so little income tax they couldn't take full advantage of their dividend imputation credits should be sent a refund for the balance.

On the younger side of the ledger, while they didn't invent HECS debts for university students, they greatly increased them.

Then, in 2007, Costello introduced sweeping super changes, making super payouts completely tax-free for people over 60. He also made a lot of supposedly self-funded people eligible for a part pension.

Since this largesse was quite unaffordable, Labor and Coalition governments have been chipping it back ever since.

Even so, we retain an income tax system where how much you pay sometimes depends on the size of your income, but other times on how old you are. And that's not going to lead to intergenerational conflict?

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Oldies looked after while young don't notice

If I was going to wander around the inner city chalking messages on the pavement in copperplate, they wouldn't say Eternity. They'd say Wake Up. Why? Because, contrary to rumour, the Nanny State doesn't exist.

If you fail to pay attention because you assume that the market economy will always deliver you a square deal, you're heading for disillusionment. If you think it's the government's job to ensure no one ever rips you off, you have much to learn.

Indeed, it's just as likely to be the pollies who decided to short-change you when they realised you were too busy watching reality television to notice.

Take the great debate about tax reform. Now the best-informed are telling us the government has thought better of changing the goods and services tax, I fear the debate will turn in a distinctly more boring direction – to reducing the generosity of tax concessions for superannuation.

Mention super and everyone over 50 pricks up their ears, while everyone under 50 wonders what's on telly tonight. To date, that's meant that the over-50s have been looked after at the expense of the under-50s.

To date, the debate over super tax concessions has been about their rapidly growing cost – about $25 billion a year in reduced tax collections – and the fact that the lion's share of this loss to the budget goes to high-income earners (like me). That is, it's a question of fairness between rich and poor.

But in their latest paper on super tax concessions, to be released on Wednesday, John Daley, Brendan Coates and Danielle Wood, of the Grattan Institute, argue that the reform of super can also be advocated on the grounds of fairness between the old and the young.

It's not something often talked about, but our budget and social security arrangements – as with all advanced economies – have a "generational bargain" built into them.

The bargain is simple: except perhaps for the period when they're raising a family, people of working age generally pay more in tax than they get back in benefits, with the difference used to provide those who are too old to work with a lot more in benefits than the little they pay in taxes.

Since we all expect to get old one day, this was regarded as a quite fair bargain between the generations. And until recently, paying for it all wasn't a big problem, because the number of workers was growing a lot faster than the number of oldies.

What's changed is the ageing of the population and the retirement of the baby boomers, which means the number of oldies needing to be supported from the budget has started growing a lot faster than the number of workers.

But Daley and his co-authors point out that it's not just demography that's undermining the generational bargain. The politicians have been making it worse by increasing the generosity of benefits to the old.

In Australia's case, John Howard was always slipping extra benefits to the alleged "self-funded retirees", who he regarded as a key part of the Liberal heartland. He gave them the senior Australians tax offset and made it easier for them to get health cards and the pensioners' rate for pharmaceutical benefits.

Then Peter Costello came along and made a lot of supposedly self-funded people eligible for a part pension, as well as making super payouts completely tax-free for people over 60.

Not to be outdone, Kevin Rudd granted pensioners a big discretionary increase on top of regular indexation to average weekly earnings.

Daley and his colleagues show that the largest increases in government spending have been on healthcare (where federal and state governments spend twice as much on each 60-year-old as on a 30-year-old) and the age pension.

"Both of these spending categories grew substantially faster than gross domestic product, not because of the ageing of the population, but because of explicit and implicit choices to spend more per person of a given age," they say.

In 2010, and after removing the effect of inflation, the two levels of government spent $9400 a year more per household over 65 than they did six years earlier. At the same time, the average amount of income tax paid by those 65 and over fell in real terms, despite an increase in incomes.

This generosity has been funded by running budget deficits and borrowing to cover them. Who'll be paying the interest on that debt? Not the oldies.

Over the past decade, according to Grattan's calculations, older households captured most of the growth in Australia's wealth. Households aged between 65 and 74 years today are $400,000 (or 27 per cent) wealthier in real terms than households of that age 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, the wealth of households aged 25 to 34 years fell by $2000 (or 4 per cent).

This is partly explained by rising house prices, of course. Older households are far more likely to own their home than younger households. And, of course, the value of their home is ignored when assessing their eligibility for an age pension.

If the young do take an interest in the reform of super tax concessions, they'll find they're being asked to agree to exclude themselves from the largess being enjoyed by the older generation. But until a halt is called, the generational unfairness will keep worsening.

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Material success is coming at a social price

While there's been much worry of late that the economy isn't growing fast enough to get unemployment down, it remains true that our economic performance since the global financial crisis has been the envy of most other rich countries.

But it's old news that, while economic growth matters for employment – especially with our immigration-fuelled population growth – gross domestic product is a quite inadequate measure of the nation's wellbeing.

No doubt it was such criticism that, in 2002, prompted the Bureau of Statistics to introduce a four-yearly "general social survey" of about 13,000 households to give us more information on how Australians are faring from a personal and social perspective.

The bureau has now released the results of its fourth survey, for 2014. So what is this more humanistic second guess telling us about whether we're making progress?

On the face of it, we're doing fine. Look deeper, however, and cracks are apparent.

The survey measured our "subjective wellbeing" by asking people to assess their overall satisfaction with life – not how they feel at the moment, or how they feel about particular aspects of their life – on a scale of nought to 10.

Our average answer was 7.6, which is significantly higher than the average of 6.6 for all the countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It was also up on what we said four years ago.

But the most useful thing to note is the categories of people whose ratings were well below the nationwide average: people with a disability (7.2), one-parent families with children (7.0), the unemployed (6.8) and people with a mental health problem, 6.6. Governments wanting to raise the nation's wellbeing now know where to start.

And when the bureau delved deeper, areas of slippage became apparent. One important factor affecting us that's ignored in the calculation of GDP – and in the thinking of most economists, politicians and business people – has been dubbed "social capital".

Social capital is seen as a resource available to both individuals and communities, arising from such things as networks of mutual support, reciprocity and trust. You can break it down into more measurable components, such as community support, social participation, trust and trustworthiness, the size of people's networks and people's ability to have some control over issues important to them.

There's plenty of research showing these things are strongly linked to the wellbeing of individuals and communities. But the survey reveals all is not well with various aspects of our social capital.

One indicator of how much we support each other is the amount of voluntary work we do for organisations. This has declined for the first time since the bureau began measuring it in 1995.

By 2010, the proportion of people aged over 18 who were volunteering had reached 36 per cent. But by last year it had fallen back to 31 per cent. There's also been a decline in the proportion of people providing informal help to neighbours and the like.

Voluntary work not only helps the people who are helped, of course, it also helps increase the wellbeing of the helpers. Not a good sign.

On social participation, the survey shows people are now less likely to be involved in social groups such as sport or physical recreation, arts or heritage groups and religious groups.

Civic participation – involvement in a union, professional association, political party, environmental or animal welfare group, human or civil rights group, or even a body corporate or tenants' association – is also down.

Of course, as the bureau notes, the way people meet and interact is changing. Some people suggest that young people in particular prefer to engage in politics by means of online activism – joining online advocacy groups or using social media to collect and disseminate information.

Other ways people support each other have been stable. In 2014, the proportion of people caring for someone with a disability, illness or old age was 19 per cent, little changed from previous years.

The proportion of people providing support to relatives living outside the carer's home, 31 per cent, was also little changed. This is likely to reflect the ageing of the population.

Last year nearly everyone – 95 per cent – felt able to get support from outside their home in a time of crisis, unchanged from earlier years. Similarly, weekly electronic contact with family and friends by telephone, text message or video link remained high at 92 per cent.

By contrast, face-to-face contact fell from 79 per cent to 76 per cent.

And people were less likely than they were in 2010 to feel able to have a say within their community all or most of the time – 25 per cent compared with 29 per cent.

There's been no change in the proportion of people agreeing that most people can be trusted – 54 per cent – but, to me, that seems a lot lower than it should be.

On the question of work-life balance, Australians are feeling time-poor, with 45 per cent of women and 36 per cent of men saying they were always or often pressed for time. This is higher than for other rich countries.

We may be doing better in the GDP stakes than most other advanced countries are, but we seem to be paying a high social price for our greater material success.

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Governments let oldies screw the younger generation

When I see the way the Abbott government – like its Labor predecessor – happily presides over a system stacked against the younger generation, it makes me wonder why they're not rioting in the streets. Answer is, it's thanks to the evil genius of our politicians.

Young people tend to be more idealistic than those of us who've lived longer and seen more. So when they see the low level to which standards of political behaviour have fallen – the promises so casually broken, the lies told, the way the pollies profess to care about the welfare of the next generation but don't walk the walk – they're even more inclined than the rest of us to turn their back on politics and public policy.

Which means, of course, that most young people have only a vague inkling of the extent to which successive governments have been screwing them.

The pollies' problem is that they'd love to please everyone, but don't have sufficient resources. So they have to short-change someone, and the victims they pick – apart from those who have no friends to stick up for them – are the people who aren't paying attention to what the pollies are up to.

The people who pay most attention are the oldies – whose number is being swelled by the retiring Baby Boomers – who have so little else to worry about they even imagine injustices that aren't real. The great majority of oldies own their own homes, but other home owners are equally zealous in protecting their privileges.

This is the most topical instance in which governments are allowing the old to screw the young. Apart from the fact that our homes get bigger and better over the years, house prices rise when the demand for them exceeds their supply.

Both sides of politics believe in high levels of immigration, but haven't bothered to ensure sufficient additional homes are being built to accommodate the growing population. So reducing impediments to the building of additional homes – mainly a responsibility of the state governments – is the fundamental solution to the problem of housing affordability.

But distortions in our tax laws – distortions other countries long ago corrected – are adding unnecessarily to the demand for houses by making them a tax-preferred form of investment. This is "negative gearing", which means first home buyers are having to compete against well-established older investors with a lot more collateral.

It wouldn't be a problem if negatively geared investors were adding as much to supply as they are to demand, but they prefer buying established homes.

The government could easily fix this distortion, and do it in a way that didn't precipitate an immediate exodus of investors from the market but, to date, neither side has been prepared to do so.

Why not? Because the pollies are much more afraid of the anger they'd arouse among oldies benefiting from the tax lurk – and all the business people who see themselves as getting a cut of the proceeds – than they are of all the young people who don't quite understand how they're being worked over by their elders.

The fact is that the rate of home ownership – which once was as high as 70 per cent – is steadily falling as higher and higher proportions of people in younger generations fail to make it onto glittering merry-go-round of owner-occupation.

So, having got themselves ensconced on the merry-go-round, the older generation and the politicians in thrall to it are now effectively repelling boarders.

This means a high proportion of the younger generation will be renters all their lives, including in retirement. And that means they'll get screwed by the system which, in the name of encouraging home ownership, has always been loaded against renters.

For a start, our tenancy laws afford renters less security of tenure and fewer rights than in European countries where life-long renting is the norm.

But tax and benefit arrangements also discriminate against renters. Invest in your own home and you escape paying capital gains tax when you sell it; invest in anything else and you don't.

Own your home when you retire and its value, no matter how high, is excluded from the assets test in assessing your eligibility for a full pension; choose to save in any other way and you're zapped.

This crazy arrangement discourages the old from selling the family home and moving to something smaller and more appropriate.

The truth is, living on the age pension is bearable provided you own your home. In other words, the people who have most trouble getting by on the pension are those obliged to rent in the private market.

When Kevin Rudd inquired into the adequacy of the age pension he was told it was really only the private renters who had a big problem. He ignored the report, granting a big increase to single pensioners regardless of their housing status, plus a smaller increase to people on the married rate so they wouldn't feel left out.

All this is of little interest to young people, of course. They know they're never going to get old.

If I were a youngster I mightn't be rioting in the streets, but I certainly wouldn't be voting for any party that wasn't promising to fix negative gearing. If you're more afraid of greedy oldies than you are of me, I'll be voting against you.

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We've become a nation of graspers

Did you see an older bloke with a goatee beard ask Joe Hockey a question about the budget's changes to the assets test for the age pension on the ABC's Q&A program a few weeks back?

He was Dante Crisante, a retired chemist, according to a subsequent interview he did with the Financial Review.

A lot of relatively well-off retirees have been complaining about the changes, which could reduce or eliminate their entitlement to the pension. They've been wondering what changes they could make to their finances to get around the new rules.

Hockey probably assumed Crisante was asking on his own behalf. He replied that he wasn't an investment adviser. But Crisante was asking a policy question, aimed at highlighting the long-standing anomaly that someone's home is excluded from the value of their assets for the purposes of the assets test. (Bad luck for people who've rented all their lives.)

Turns out Crisante doesn't receive the pension and says he never wants to get it. Which means that the man who wanted to "end the age of entitlement", and who drew invidious distinctions between lifters and leaners, missed a golden opportunity to congratulate Crisante and hold him up as an example for other comfortably off old people to follow. Maybe put him up for a gong on Australia Day.

It's possible, however, that even had Hockey known Crisante didn't have his hand out for a handout, he wouldn't have been game to praise him for his self-reliance. He might have been afraid of offending too many people; too many of his own supporters (not that a Labor politician would have been any braver).

The point is, something bad has happened to Australians over the years: we've become a nation of graspers. There was a time when the comfortably off were too proud to put their hand out for the pension. "The pension is for those people who need it. I don't need it, so I won't be joining the queue at Centrelink, thanks."

But those days are long gone. These days we display our wealth by the suburb we live in, the flash house we live in, the flash car we drive and the flash clothes we wear. But none of that stops us arranging our affairs so as to claim a pittance more from the taxpayer.

I suppose it's a good thing there's now no shame attached to being an age pensioner. But it's gone too far when it means there's no shame in claiming a pension or part-pension you don't really need.

And, as I've experienced myself in recent years, there's a whole industry of financial advisers out there these days making their living – a lucrative one, by all accounts – advising older people on how to maximise their call on other taxpayers.

Not just how to minimise the amount of tax you pay on your superannuation – how to put as little as possible into the community kitty – but also how to maximise the pension and associated benefits you receive; how to get as much as possible out of the kitty.

We do all that, most other people do all that, then we wonder why our governments have so much trouble getting their budgets to balance. We even tell ourselves how worried we are about these governments leaving so much debt to be picked up by our grandkids.

Notice how it's always those terrible politicians doing terrible things to our grandchildren. It's never the collective consequences of their grandparents being selfish.

Actually, it's funny. An important part of our motive in using our last years to pay as little tax as possible and make the biggest claim on other taxpayers as possible is our desire to maximise our children's inheritance.

It's a form of selfishness we see as unselfish. Ripping off the system to help our children. Rip off your fellow taxpayers before they rip you off, a great philosophy of life to pass on. Surprisingly, selfishness is catching. Some people find their children even more anxious than they are to maximise their inheritance.

In vain do politicians protest – quietly, and only occasionally – that the billions lost in tax breaks on super every year are sacrificed to help people with their living costs in retirement, not to help the old maximise their kids' inheritance.

In the popular reaction to the latest changes to the assets test, angry oldies are talking of finding ways to prevent the government from cutting their pension. Move to a more expensive house, one far bigger than you need or want to look after?

Give a lot away to your kids in advance? The government has low limits on how much you can give away each year without reducing your pension entitlement, but that's OK, just lie to the government. Lying to governments isn't really lying, is it?

This wouldn't be the first time old people, in their mania for extracting the last dollar of supposed entitlement from the government, have done crazy things. Years ago people would keep thousands in non-interest-bearing cheque accounts so as to avoid reducing their pension.

Rather than losing one dollar of pension they preferred to lose two dollars of interest. Volunteer for the big banks to rip you off? Sure.

The government had to introduce "deeming" to stop pensioners from self-harming. We've become a nation of graspers.

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We face a year of furious debate leading to very little

Let me start my year with a confession: listening to the Australian of the Year, Rosie Batty, arguing at length for more attention to be paid to domestic violence, my first thought was she was laying it on a bit thick. There are lots of problems in the world and domestic violence is just one of them.

But then another thought occurred: this year we'll be listening to hundreds of men banging on about problems far less important than domestic violence. The vast majority of the problems we hear about - and I write about - will be economic. Is the economy speeding up or slowing down? Will the Reserve Bank cut interest rates at its next board meeting?

Above all, they'll be worried about preventing a slowing in the rate of improvement of our standard of living. That is, they'll be almost wholly concerned with the material, tangible aspect of our lives. Few will concern the more feminine, airy fairy "social" side of our lives.

For the most part, our politicians will leave such touchy-feely concerns to single-issue campaigners such as Rosie Batty. They focus on the really big, important issues, and think about the lesser, social issues only when the Rosie Battys gain enough public support for the pollies to decide they'd better be seen doing something.

Truth is, the political year we face won't be any fun (except for the media). It will be another year in the difficult education of not-so-young Tony. He's having trouble learning what John Howard well knew: even prime ministers don't have much power to do as they please.

You can push through a few silly self-indulgences, such as reinstituting knighthoods, but even that will cost you politically. And what you can't do is reshape the world in a way that favours the rich and powerful while the rest of us nod approvingly.

This year a lot of ugly chickens will come home to roost. Part of the way Abbott got himself elected was to promise he'd do nothing unpopular in his first term. All the "reforms" being urged on him by the big end of town would be inquired into and, if it was decided radical changes were needed, they'd be taken to the next election for voter approval.

Abbott dragged his feet in commissioning these inquiries, but it will be full-on this year. Ostensibly, much of the agonising will arise from our refusal to contemplate paying higher taxes in return for greater government services and from the Coalition's claim to be able to achieve lower taxes.

In reality, the problem is the government's refusal to solve its revenue problem by cracking down on all the rorting of the tax system by business and high income-earners. Turns out many of these people are prepared to make an exception to their fatwa against higher taxes: surely an increase in the goods and services tax wouldn't hurt?

We face a year of contention as business rent-seekers seek to further advantage themselves, all in the name of much-needed "reform" and ensuring the continued rapid rise of our material standard of living (starting, of course, with theirs).

But ask yourself this: can you really see the ever-popular Tony going into next year's federal election with a proposal to increase the GST or any planned industrial relations changes his opponents could characterise as the restoration of Work Choices? And, even if he did, can you see him winning?

See? We face a year of furious economic and political debate leading to very little.

If you haven't guessed, I'm not facing such a year with any enthusiasm. And Rosie Batty reminds me we'll be earnestly debating over running repairs to the capitalist system while largely ignoring the social issues that, for far too many of us, stop our high material standard of living from translating into a high quality of life.

Take the question of increased longevity. Joe Hockey has signalled we'll be hearing a lot about this after the release of another intergenerational report in a few weeks' time.

The pollies will pay quick lip-service to the notion that living longer may not be such as bad thing, before portraying it as a terrible problem threatening "unsustainable" growth in government spending on pensions, aged care and healthcare.

But I have good news for those who obsess about the economic while ignoring the social. There is increasing evidence that how long people live is strongly influenced by the quality of their relationships with family and friends, particularly their face-to-face contact.

Around the world there is evidence of the number of people's very close relationships declining, of more people living alone and increasing loneliness. Australia is unlikely to be an exception.

So the solution to the fiscal longevity problem is at hand. All we have to do is hope people's intimate relationships continue to decline and loneliness continues to increase. And the best news is we've already instituted the main policy response needed: malign neglect.

Of course, it would speed things up if we were to step up the federal and state funding cuts to community organisations that help people in need. I'd start with Meals on Wheels. And don't forget that ignoring the obesity epidemic will do much to stop babies living to 150.

I reckon we should make it a national KPI to get life expectancy down to 75 by 2055.

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The good news about ageing

Politicians and economists have been banging on about the ageing of the population for ages, but how much do we actually know about the likely economic consequences? Not much - until now.

We've been told incessantly that ageing spells bad news for the budget - greatly increased spending on pensions and healthcare - with ageing used to help justify the harsh spending cuts proposed in this year's budget.

In truth, it has suited the powers-that-be to exaggerate ageing's effect on the budget. And oldies are right to resent the way ageing has been presented as nothing but a terrible problem. If the fact that we're living longer, healthier lives is a "problem", it's the best kind of problem to have.

So let's ignore the budget and focus on ageing's other economic consequences, some of which are good. We'll do so with help from a speech given last week by Dr Christopher Kent, an assistant governor of the Reserve Bank.

Kent says population ageing is driven by three factors: the boom in babies in the early years after World War II (1945 to 1960), the subsequent sharp drop in fertility rates that created a baby-boomer bulge, plus rising longevity thanks to decades of prosperity and advances in medical science.

The authorities have been warning about the coming consequences of ageing for so long - and how bad it will be by 2040 - that I suspect many people have given up waiting for it to start.

Well, get this: although it's got a long way to go, it's already started. The baby boomers have been retiring since the turn of the century, thus reducing the share of the population that's of usual working age (15 to 64).

Kent says that, taken by itself, ageing is estimated to have subtracted from the labour force participation rate by between 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points a year over the past decade and a half. This effect has increased a little in recent years as baby boomers have begun reaching 65.

Point is, ageing's biggest and most obvious effect is not on the budget, it's on the labour market. Everyone alive contributes to the demand for labour, but only those of us willing and able to work contribute to its supply.

So ageing constitutes a reduction in the supply of labour relative to the demand. That suggests we can expect it to cause unemployment to be lower than otherwise (which is not to say it won't continue to go up and down with the business cycle).

Since Australians have worried that there aren't enough jobs to go around ever since the middle of Gough Whitlam's reign, that sounds like good news to me. We're in the process of switching from not enough jobs to not enough workers.

(What I wonder is how long it will take for our mentality to shift. The perception that there's never enough jobs is now so deeply ingrained that any shyster with a profit-making scheme he claims will "create jobs" is greeted as a hero and demands that he be showered with subsidies.)

And with demand for labour stronger than supply, this implies upward pressure on wages. Again, sounds like good news to me. Kent adds that the converse of higher wage rates is lower returns to capital.

Kent points out that the pressure on labour supply will be felt most by industries that rely more heavily on labour, mainly service industries. Prominent among those industries will be aged care and healthcare, of course.

But, Kent adds, there's likely to be scope for labour to be reallocated among service industries, with a lower proportion of young people meaning we'll require fewer workers to care for and educate children.

There'll also be relatively less demand for workers to produce goods. That's for several reasons. First, because older people tend to devote less of their spending to goods and more services.

Second, because all of us tend to spend an increasing share of our rising incomes on services. There are limits to our consumption of food, wearing of clothes and how many TVs, fridges and cars we can cram into our house.

Third, because of its greater reliance on machines, the production of goods is more amenable to continuous improvement in labour productivity than is the production of services. As one economist famously observed, you can't improve the productivity of a quartet by reducing the number of players.

All this implies the prices of services are likely to rise relative to those of goods.

But now, gentle reader, if I've trained you well enough you'll have noticed a weakness in my argument so far. I've described only the immediate effects of ageing - what economists call the "first-round effects".

That's where most people's analysis stops, but economic analysis keeps going. One of the most important questions economists ask is: "And then what happens?" It's the second-round and subsequent effects economics is supposed to illuminate.

Seen from an economist's mindset, what I've described is a change in relative prices: the price of (or return on) labour relative to the price of (or return on) capital. The prices of services relative to the prices of goods.

Kent says it's important that these relative price changes not be prevented from occurring. Why? So market forces can go to work on them, adapting to them, modifying them and, to some extent, reversing them.

The higher relative price of labour should encourage more middle-aged people to take jobs and more oldies to delay their full retirement, thus reducing the upward pressure on wages a bit. The higher relative prices of services should encourage more people to acquire the education and training needed to work in the services sector.

And greater longevity should encourage workers to save more for their longer time in retirement.

That's what happens in market economies: things adjust.

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Why health spending is sustainable and will be sustained

If you had a problem that required an operation and the doctor offered a procedure with a 90 per cent success rate or one with a 10 per cent failure rate, which would you pick? Most people say they prefer the one with the high success rate but, of course, they're equally risky. Point is, we can react quite differently to the same information depending on how it has been "framed", as the psychologists say.

When politicians engage in "spin" they're framing a problem or a solution in a way they hope will maximise the public's sympathy, a way that highlights those aspects the pollies want to draw attention to and draws attention away from aspects they don't want us to think about.

As Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey soften us up for an especially tough budget in May, we'll be subjected to much spin. Already the idea of imposing a $6 patient co-payment on GP visits has been floated, to which federal Health Minister Peter Dutton added the comment that the growth in the cost of Medicare was "unsustainable".

Spending on healthcare is highly germane to Treasury's projections that, if no changes are made to policies, the federal budget is likely to stay in annual deficit for the next 10, even 40 years.

But let me frame the projected growth in spending on healthcare in a way you won't hear from the pollies. It's a safe prediction that the real incomes of workers and households will continue growing by a per cent or two each year in the coming 10 or 40 years, just as they have in the past 40.

So, as each year passes our incomes will grow a little faster than the prices we're paying for the things we buy, leaving us to decide how to spend that extra "real" income. Every income earner and family will make their own decisions, but our past behaviour gives us a fair idea of what we'll decide.

We won't be devoting our additional real income to spending more on food, clothing and other basics. Their share of our total spending is likely to continue falling. We will be spending a higher proportion of our incomes on housing - hopefully on better-quality housing rather than just keeping up with rising prices - and on improvements in household electronics such as television, home computers and the like. We'll probably spend more on educating ourselves and our children.

And it's a safe bet we'll want to spend more on healthcare. It's hardly surprising that, as we become more prosperous, we're prepared to devote a higher share of our income to staving off death and ensuring those extra years are as free from pain and disability as possible.

Can you think of a higher priority? And the good news is that medical science is forever coming up with better pills and prosthetics, as well as better and less invasive surgery. The bad news is that the new stuff is invariably much more expensive than the technology it replaces.

And, as surgeons get better at doing particular operations, they're able to perform them on a wider range of patients, particularly the elderly.

After I started suffering angina about the time of the Sydney Olympics, and ended up having open-heart surgery, my GP told me that until this operation was developed, all the medicos could have done was give me pills that didn't work. I would just have had to keep tottering about until a heart attack carried me off. By now I'd be long dead.

If healthcare was something we bought in the marketplace, like most things we buy, that would be the end of the story. We'd go on spending a growing proportion of our increasing real incomes on healthcare and there isn't an economist or politician in the country who would see a problem.

In fact, most of the nation's spending on healthcare is done by governments, federal and state. Public hospitals are "free", visits to doctors are subsidised by the federal government and pharmaceuticals - and chemists - are subsidised by the feds.

We do it this way because, like people in almost every rich country, we believe healthcare shouldn't be denied to those who can't afford it. That's fine. But doing it this way introduces a host of additional problems: scope for greater inefficiency in the delivery of care, ideological responses from those who believe government spending is wasteful and excessive by definition and cognitive dissonance by all those punters who want ever more healthcare available to them, but don't want to pay more tax to cover the cost.

We know from successive Treasury studies that the ever-rising cost of healthcare - caused not so much by the ageing of the population as by the ever-rising cost of advances in medical technology - is by far the greatest reason for the projected increase in budget deficits. It's rarely made clear, however, that all these studies assume a limit on the growth in taxation.

Contrary to politicians' framing of the matter, the growing cost of healthcare is sustainable for the simple reason the electorate's demands leave them with no choice but to sustain it. What's unsustainable is the politicians' pretence that taxes won't have to rise.

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Rise in living standard set to slow

It's a funny thing about the awful truth: people are much more inclined to talk about it after elections than before. And it seems as though, of late, our top economists have done little but tell us our economic future is a lot more "challenging" than was contemplated during the election campaign.

The first sobering message is that getting the budget back to balance won't be as easy as it suited both sides to pretend in the three-year campaign. Indeed, it could be a struggle that goes on for at least a decade - depending on how long it takes us to face up to some tough decisions.

The next soberer is that our material standard of living is likely to improve at a much slower rate in the coming decade than it did in the last one. We got that warning in a speech last week by Dr David Gruen, the top macro-economy manager in Treasury. And we got it again in a speech this week by Dr Philip Lowe, deputy governor of the Reserve Bank.

The simple way to see what's happening to our standard of living is just to take real gross national income and divide it by the population, to give real income per person.

According to Treasury's calculations, this grew at an average rate of about 2 per cent a year during the 1970s, '80s and '90s. Over the 13 years to this year, it grew by 2.3 per cent a year. But over the coming decade to 2023, Treasury's best guess is the rate of real improvement will slow to a bit less than 1 per cent a year.

That's more than a halving in our rate of material advance. What is it that's expected to cause this marked slowdown? Well, that's a long story. Settle back.

The greatest single factor causing our standard of living to rise almost continuously over the years is improvement in the productivity of labour - that is, increased output of goods and services per hour worked. Labour productivity improves when workers are given more machines to work with, when workers' skills improve because of education and training, when improvements in public infrastructure allow firms to operate more efficiently and, particularly, because of technological advance: the invention of new and improved products and production processes.

The next most important contributor to our material standard of living is "labour utilisation": the proportion of the population that's of the right age to be in the labour force (often taken as everyone aged 15 to 64), the proportion of people of working age who actually are in the labour force, the proportion of these who are employed rather than unemployed, and the average hours worked by people employed (many of whom will be only part-time).

The standard story from economists is that the nation's income increases when we produce more goods and services. But it's not quite that simple. It's not just how much we produce, it's also what that is worth when we sell it to foreigners so we can buy what we want from them.

About 10 years ago the world started paying us a lot more for our minerals and energy - we called it the resources boom - and this increased the income we derived from the stuff we were producing. As Lowe puts it, "over time we have been able to buy more and more flat-screen televisions for each tonne of iron ore that we have sold overseas".

Economists call this an improvement in our "terms of trade" - prices we receive for exports relative to the prices we pay for imports. And the main reason our standard of living rose by a high 2.3 per cent over the past 13 years is the big improvement in our terms of trade.

It contributed about 0.8 percentage points of that 2.3 per cent growth, more than making up for a weaker rate of improvement in the productivity of labour.

But, as we all know, the fabulous prices we were getting for our coal and iron ore started falling back a year or two ago, and Treasury expects them to fall a fair bit further. Indeed, it expects the deterioration in our terms of trade to subtract about 0.5 percentage points from the annual growth in real national income per person.

And there's a second factor we'll have going against us. Until recently, we've been enjoying a "demographic dividend" as the population of working age grew faster than the overall population (mainly because of the falling rate of fertility).

Over the 30 years to 2010, the proportion of the population aged 15 to 64 rose from a bit more than 64 per cent to a peak of about 67 per cent. But now, with the continuing retirement of the baby-boomers, it's projected to fall to about 62 per cent over the coming 30 years.

So whereas until now the demographic dividend has contributed to the rate of improvement in our standard of living, over the coming decade demography will subtract from that rate (we'll have fewer producers relative to consumers).

Now, there's nothing we can do to stop world minerals prices falling back and not a lot we can do to delay the retirement of the baby-boomers. So, ready for the commercial message from your friendly econocrats?

Lowe says that "over the next decade or so, if we are to achieve anything like the type of growth in real per capita income that we have become used to, then a substantial increase in productivity growth will be required.

"If this lift in productivity growth does not take place, then we will have to adjust to some combination of slower growth in real wages, slower growth in profits, smaller gains in asset prices and slower growth in government revenues and services."

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Election well over, now for the truth

For three years Tony Abbott and company told us all our political problems were caused by Labor, and if only we elected the Coalition our problems would be no more. For three years Labor told us the budget would be back to ever-growing surpluses in next to no time.

And for six years - which coincided with our biggest boom since the Gold Rush - both sides of politics told us Australian families were having terrible trouble coping with the rising cost of living.

They encouraged us to feel sorry for ourselves, accepted the blame for the heavy burdens we were labouring under, and implied they could do more to help.

What they didn't tell us was the truth: that for most of us, wages and pensions were rising faster than the cost of living - meaning our standard of living has actually been improving - but that this was due partly to the resources boom, which couldn't last, and partly to the government doing more for us in the budget than it could afford to go on doing unless we were prepared to pay a lot more tax.

In the recent election campaign both sides promised a much enhanced scheme to help the disabled and significantly increased funding for schools. To these Abbott added more generous paid parental leave, abolition of the mining tax and abolition of the carbon tax.

What they didn't tell us was that, when you go out beyond the next four years, they had no way of paying for their promises on top of all their existing commitments, which will get ever-more expensive.

So the stories we're hearing now of the federal and state governments' longer-term budget problems must be coming as an unpleasant surprise to a lot of people.

First we had a Productivity Commission report reminding us that increased spending on age pensions, age care and healthcare (for everyone, not just the increasing proportion of old people) - not to mention the cost of superannuation tax concessions - would put growing pressure on the budget, and do so at a time when a smaller proportion of the population was working and paying income tax.

The commission recommended that the age pension age be phased up to 70 and that old people who own their homes be required to borrow against them to help cover the cost of their aged care.

Then we had a report from Melbourne's Grattan Institute estimating that the combined federal and state government budget deficit is likely to grow to $60 billion a year over the coming 10 years.

The institute provided a menu of tax increases for the politicians to pick from: broadening the goods and services tax to cover food and private spending on health and education, removing the tax-free threshold for payroll tax, getting rid of the health insurance tax rebate, restoring the indexation of petrol excise, making the family home subject to capital gains tax, eliminating the 50 per cent discount on the gains tax, or getting rid of negative gearing.

On the spending side, the pollies could cut spending on transport infrastructure, halve industry support, increase university HECS fees, greatly increase school class sizes, cut defence spending or make savings on healthcare.

But Grattan zeroed in on retirement income support. It's already planned to phase up the age pension age to 67 by 2023, but the institute proposes lifting it to 70 by 2025. It's already planned to lift the minimum age for access to superannuation from 55 to 60 in 2024, but the institute proposes lifting it to 70 by 2035. These two measures would save about $12 billion a year.

It suggests including the family home in the assets test for the age pension (saving about $7 billion a year) and reducing the tax concession on super contributions for higher income-earners (saving $6 billion).

This story that the budget will come under pressure is nothing new. We've already had it from three reports prepared by Treasury, from previous Productivity Commission reports and many others.

So let me ask you: What sort of conclusions and recommendations do you expect the Abbott government's commission of audit to come up with? My guess is, not very different to what we've been hearing - though, since it has been contracted out to the Business Council, it may go out of its way to direct the pain away from big business and the well-off.

Since we have to make a lot of tough choices if we're to avoid the North Atlantic economies' record of racking up ever-growing budget deficits and debt for decade after decade, I think pushing back the retirement age makes a lot of sense - more sense than many of the other items on the list.

The already retired and all those not far off retirement wouldn't be affected. But the notion that, despite ever-greater longevity, better health and less physical work, we should remain free in perpetuity to live in taxpayer-funded retirement for 30 years or more is insupportable.

For at least the past six years self-centredness has reigned supreme, with everyone - from big business to alleged battlers - demanding the government do more for them, but insisting others pay for any improvements.

It can't go on. Let's hope Tony's got the ticker to turn things around - and do it fairly.

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How demography is affecting us right now

WORKING out what's happening in the jobs market is trickier than you may think - and has just got trickier. On the face of it, this week's figures from the Bureau of Statistics are simple: they show employment grew by a bit more than 10,000 last month and the rate of unemployment was steady at 5.4 per cent.

But it's not that simple. The rate at which people of working age participated in the labour force (either by holding a job or actively seeking one) fell from 65.1 per cent to 65 per cent of the labour force.

At times like these, with the growth in employment slowing and the number of job vacancies falling, a decline in the participation rate is usually taken as a sign the number of ''discouraged jobseekers'' is rising. These are people who'd like to work but who, believing there are no jobs available, have stopped actively seeking one, meaning they're no longer counted as unemployed.

So, many economists would take the fall in the participation rate last month to mean the jobs market deteriorated despite the unchanged rate of unemployment.

But if we want to play this game we should really start two years ago, in January 2011, when (using the trend figures) the unemployment rate reached a low of 5 per cent. Since then it's risen only to 5.4 per cent, which doesn't seem much.

Over the same period, however, the ''part rate'' has fallen from a peak of 65.8 per cent to 65 per cent. Saul Eslake, of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, calculates that had this decline not occurred, all else being equal the unemployment rate in December last year would have been 6.6 per cent, not 5.4 per cent.

Fortunately, however, it's still not that simple. Heard of the ageing of the population? Whereas for decades it was pushing our participation rate up, it's now started pushing it down, meaning it's no longer safe to assume a fall is all the work of discouraged jobseekers.

This is an unfamiliar but important story, so settle back for a primer on demography.

We are living at a time in the world's long history when longevity is steadily rising (because of improvements in public health, increasing affluence and advances in medical science) but fertility is falling (because of improvements in contraception and rising affluence). A country's ''total fertility rate'' is the average number of children women are projected to bear over their lives.

As The Economist magazine has explained, when a country's fertility rate falls sharply, the children born before the fall become ''a sort of generational bulge surging through a society''.

In the case of the developed countries, the sharp and continuing fall in fertility was caused by the advent of the contraceptive pill, and the surging generation became known as the baby boomers. But something similar happened a few decades later in those developing countries that began developing rapidly. Access to contraception improved, girls became better educated and families decided to have fewer children.

A country in this situation enjoys a ''demographic dividend''. After a while, the earlier generation becomes old enough to be part of the labour force (they reach the age of 15) and this happens while old people are dying fairly early and fewer babies are being born.

So the country enjoys a big improvement in its ''dependency ratio'' - the ratio of people who are dependent on others for their living (because they are either too young or too old to work) to those of working age (which is often defined as everyone over 15, but for these purposes should be limited to those aged 15 to 64).

The decrease in the dependency ratio - that is, the increase in the number of potential workers relative to the number of people they have to support - is the demographic dividend. It means a country can grow faster and become richer (measured as income per person) - provided you can find jobs for all those who want to work.

The dividend continues for several decades and actually gets bigger as the bulge generation enters the ''prime working age'' of 25 to 54. It has helped keep our participation rate rising and made a significant contribution to Australia's rate of economic growth for the past 30 or 40 years.

Can you see where this story is heading? Eventually, the demographic dividend becomes a negative as the bulge generation continues to age and eventually starts retiring. As Dr David Gruen of Treasury put it last year, the tail-wind of the past becomes the head-wind of the future.

When a baby boomer stops working, the working population falls by one and the dependent population increases by one, meaning the bulge of baby boomers produces a rapid deterioration in the dependency ratio. It also means we should see a decline in the participation rate as more of the population moves from the age range where they're highly likely to be working to one where they're much less likely to be working.

The first baby boomers were born in 1946, which was 67 years ago. The last were born in 1964, which was 49 years ago.

So by now you'd expect to see the participation rate falling for reasons that are completely demographic and have nothing to do with the state of the economy and the jobs market.

Sorry, one more complication. We've known for some years that the trend to early retirement has reversed and more older workers are delaying their retirement or finding ways to keep working for a few days a week. In other words, some baby boomers aren't retiring as expected - maybe because they're not feeling old and tired or maybe because they haven't saved enough to allow them to retire in the comfort to which they've become accustomed.

Obviously, to the extent this is happening it's working to counter the purely demographic decline in the part rate. So what is happening?

The econocrats have done some figuring which shows that, over the year to December, ageing contributed minus 0.3 percentage points to the participation rate, while the trend to delay retirement contributed plus 0.1 percentage points.

In other words, the demographic dividend has reversed, although it's being partly offset by the trend of some baby boomers delaying their retirement.

So most but not all of the overall fall in the part rate can be regarded as a rise in hidden unemployment.

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How to improve investment advice to retirees

They say that at every stage of life the baby boomers reach, the world changes to accommodate their needs. So now the boomers are starting to reach retirement, it's the investment advisers' turn to lift their game.

To date, the superannuation industry's greatest attention has been paid to the accumulation phase: how much people need to save to ensure an adequate income in retirement. But the boomers' interest is switching to the retirement phase: how their savings should be managed to best effect.

And there are signs financial planners are working to improve the advice they give retirees. This seems clear from a recent speech by Dominic Stevens, of the annuities provider Challenger. Stevens made extensive use of an article by Joseph Tomlinson, "A Utility-based Approach to Evaluating Investment Strategies", published in the US Journal of Financial Planning. I'll be drawing on both sources.

To date, most advice to retirees has focused on "asset allocation" - how their investments should be divided between shares and fixed-interest securities - and on setting a safe rate at which money can be withdrawn and spent without it running out before the retiree dies.

Tomlinson's objective is to provide advice that is less one-size-fits-all, encompasses more eventualities and incorporates the insights of behavioural economics. These days, computers make it easier to provide more accurate advice and deliver it in user-friendly programs.

Remember, no one knows what the future holds. Who knows what will happen to the sharemarket - or any other financial market? So advice is based on reasonable assumptions and on averages, and advisers seek to estimate expected returns.

But more can be done to allow for the personal preferences of the particular retiree and to take account of the range of likely outcomes around the average.

The first issue is the "risk-return trade-off". The higher returns some investments offer - shares versus fixed interest, for instance - usually reflect a higher degree of risk: risk you won't get your money back, and risk that returns will vary a lot from year to year. It's generally accepted that old people who need to live off their savings can't afford to run the same degree of risk as young people with many years to recover from sharemarket setbacks.

These days more attention is being paid to "sequencing risk". Say you need to live off your savings for 15 years and it's reasonable to expect there'll be two bad years for the sharemarket in that time. Just when those two years occur makes a big difference.

If they come late, it won't be so bad; if they come early you could be almost wiped out and never recover. This suggests retirees need to hold more of their savings in fixed interest than many do.

In any case, most people are "risk averse". Consider this choice: which would you prefer, the certainly of earning $100, or a 50 per cent chance of earning nothing and a 50 per cent chance of earning $200?

If you were "rational" you wouldn't care either way because both options have the same "expected value" (for the second: 50 per cent of $0 plus 50 per cent of $200 equals $100).

If you much preferred the certain $100, that makes you risk averse (and normal). If you fancied the chance of walking away with $200, that makes you a "risk seeker". Risk aversion is pretty much the only departure from "rational" behaviour that economists regularly allow for.

A vital question in working out how much of your savings you should withdraw each year (a common rule of thumb is 4 per cent) is how long you'll live. You can't know, of course.

The advisers' standard approach is to look up in the government's actuarial life tables the average life expectancy for someone of your sex and age.

If the answer was 20 years, this would be used for your planning. But a lot of people will fall a bit below or a bit above the average, and Tomlinson's more sophisticated calculations take account of this wider range of probabilities. At present, the main objective in setting your withdrawal rate is to ensure you don't suffer "plan failure" - run out of money before you die.

The alternative to running out is to die with money left - the "bequest amount".

Conventional economics assumes that, dollar for dollar, your pain at having your money run out before you're ready to die would be equal to your pleasure at knowing you'll be leaving a bequest to your relos.

But this seems highly unlikely. As Stevens argues, if a retiree was living on $30,000 a year and that dropped to $20,000, it would have a more profound negative effect that the positive effect of income increasing to $40,000.

The two psychologists who pioneered behavioural economics, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, call this "loss aversion" (as opposed to risk aversion). They found that most people hate losing $100 about twice as much as they like gaining $100. Since running out of money before you die is a much bigger deal than losing small sums while you're working, it's likely retirees' loss aversion is a lot greater than the usual rate of 2:1. Some preliminary surveys suggest it might be as high as 10:1.

If so, this means retirees' desire to avoid running out of money (and having to fall back on the age pension) is a lot stronger than investment advisers' conventional calculations assume. And this, in turn, suggests retirees' choice of investments ought to be a lot more cautious than it often is.

Tomlinson argues that particular retirees' degree of loss aversion ought to be taken directly into account when determining the best investment strategy to meet their needs. When you do so, the bottom line of the calculation is not the average expected return on their savings but the average expected utility from those savings.

His refinement takes account of the possible size of plan failure - whether your savings are gone one year before you die or 10 years - not just whether or not failure is likely.

It also acknowledges the size of bequests is likely to suffer from diminishing marginal utility. Each extra dollar gives you less satisfaction than the one before.

Shifting the focus from expected returns to expected utility could make investment advisers' advice a lot more realistic and thus a lot more helpful.

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Aged care dilemma: tap homes, or let taxpayers pay

There's a lot more to life than money. But it's money - how much things cost and who will pay for them - that causes many of the arguments in families and most of the arguments in politics. Nowhere is that truer than in aged care.

We all agree that old people must be adequately cared for in their declining years and that governments must ensure this happens. But where does private responsibility end and public responsibility begin? More to the point, how should the cost of care be shared between the individuals involved, their heirs and successors, and the taxpayer?

The scope for duck-shoving - the temptation to push costs off on to someone else, particularly the anonymous taxpayer - is enormous. Trouble is, governments represent the taxpayer. Elected politicians know that if the demands they make on taxpayers get too high or grow too rapidly, they're in trouble.

Unless we're careful, we end up with government paralysis: politicians who aren't game to push more of the costs back on to individuals and their families, but aren't prepared to impose a lot more cost on the taxpayer.

The result is an aged care system that isn't working properly. Where some old people who need care aren't getting it because the government has imposed arbitrary limits on how much it's prepared to spend; where some individuals are getting a much bigger public subsidy than is fair, while others are paying a lot more than is fair, and where institutions are underfunded and the people who work for them are underpaid.

As last week's draft report from the Productivity Commission reminds us, that's where our aged care system is now and where it will stay until we find federal leaders with the courage to stand up to both the duck-shovers and the reluctant taxpayers.

But, actually, the system won't stay as it is for long. The ageing of the population means a lot more people will be requiring aged care in coming years, particularly when the bulge of baby boomers reaches old age.

The commission says there's no way the cost of aged care to federal taxpayers will fail to grow significantly over the years. So, barring the unlikely event of offsetting cuts in other government spending, we will have to pay higher taxes.

We can, however, limit the growth in cost to the taxpayer - as well as alleviating other deficiencies in the present system - by making the system more efficient and requiring greater contributions to aged care costs from those individuals in a position to make them.

What would be fair? The commission starts by dividing the total costs faced by old people requiring care into four categories.

First is the cost of accommodation, which is equivalent to rent or mortgage payments and home maintenance. Next are everyday living expenses, such as for food, clothing, laundry, heating and social activities.

Third is the cost of healthcare, such as nursing, therapies and palliative care. And fourth is "personal care" - the additional costs of being looked after because of frailty or disability.

The commission argues that accommodation and everyday living expenses should be the responsibility of individuals, but with a safety net for people of limited means. (Remember, this is why people receive the age pension. Those ineligible for the pension - or for a full pension - have other, private means to call on.)

The commission argues that health services should attract a universal (that is, non-means-tested) subsidy, as is a key principle of Medicare.

On the cost of personal care, the commission says individuals should be required to contribute according to their capacity to pay, but shouldn't be exposed to catastrophic costs of care. It suggests maximum lifetime payments be capped at $60,000.

We tend to think of the elderly as among the poorest in the community, but that's because we focus on their usually modest incomes. But it's a different story when the focus is on their assets.

The distribution of wealth has been shifting towards older Australians since the mid-1980s, and this trend is likely to continue. It's estimated that, in 2000, the 12 per cent of the population aged 65 and over held about 22 per cent of the total net wealth of households. It's projected that by 2030, the aged's share of the population will rise by 7 percentage points, but their share of net wealth will more than double to 47 per cent.

Where's all this wealth coming from? From the rising value of the family home. The rate of home ownership among the elderly is very much higher than among the rest of us. Yet the value of people's homes is largely ignored when calculating their aged-care charges and subsidies - until the house is sold, when everything changes.

This is what the commission says must change to make the cost-sharing fairer to those oldies who've never owned their homes or have recently sold their home, not to mention working taxpayers who may be far less well placed in the housing market.

Taking account of the value of people's homes in assessing their ability to contribute to the cost of their care - which the commission says should vary between 5 per cent to 25 per cent - would increase the pressure on people to sell their home or at least borrow against it.

It proposes widening the use of accommodation bonds - where money is lent to the care institution interest-free - but with the proviso that the size of bonds reflects the actual cost of accommodation.

Many old people and their inheritance-conscious children will hate the sound of all this. But since even John Howard lacked the courage to impose these reforms, it's doubtful whether Julia Gillard will be game to touch them.

The only trouble is, our treatment of people receiving and providing aged care will continue to worsen until we as a nation are prepared to call a halt to the duck-shoving.

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HOW AGEING AND THE RESOURCES BOOM WILL AFFECT WORKERS

Talk to Centrelink Financial Information Service Officers, Brisbane
March 24, 2010

With the recent publication of the federal government’s third intergenerational report since 2002 we’ve had another surge of concern about the ageing of the population. I want to try to clarify for you what this is likely to involve. It’s been generally portrayed as a bad thing - a threat - but, though it will certainly bring changes, many of those changes will be for the better. Let’s start by being clear on what ageing involves.

What is population ageing?

All of us get older every year, so what does it mean to say the population is ageing? It means the average age of all the people in Australia is rising - though by a lot less than 12 months each year. The average age would be falling if a lot more babies were being born to counter the fact that we’re getting older as individuals but, in fact, women are having fewer children than they used to in earlier decades (even though the fertility rate recovered a little in the noughties). The other factor is that the death rate is falling as we live longer lives. So a lower birth rate and rising longevity are the main causes of population ageing, but it’s being made more acute by the fact that the great bulge in the population that is the baby boomers (people born between 1945 and 1960), which is working its way through like a pig in a python, has reached the point where they’re turning 65 and starting to retire.

The latest report tells us that the number of people aged 65 to 84 is projected to more than double over the next 40 years, while the number over 85 more than quadruples. At present there are five people of working age to support every person of 65 or over, but this is projected to fall by almost half (to 2.7).

The ‘problem’ of ageing is exaggerated

Since a big part of the cause of ageing is that we’re living longer, you’d think this would be seen as a good thing, something to be celebrated. But ageing is almost always portrayed as a bad thing - a cause of many problems - and the latest intergenerational report is no exception. It tells us ageing will cause the economy to grow more slowly - our material standard of living won’t rise as quickly as it has been. As well, we’re told, increased spending on the aged will put great pressure on the federal budget, creating a ‘fiscal gap’ between government spending and revenue equal to 2.75 per cent of GDP by 2050, which is equivalent to about $35 billion a year in today’s dollars.

It’s true that the economy’s likely to grow a little more slowly in coming decades, mainly because of slower growth in the number of people joining the workforce. However, when you examine the report and its projections you find that most of the expected growth in government spending comes not from costs associated with the higher number of old people, but from the rising cost of new health technology and the likelihood that all of us will be demanding more and better healthcare. So the budget will have a problem with inexorably rising spending on healthcare. But though the politicians don’t like to admit it, the obvious solution to that problem is that we’ll all have to pay more tax from our rising incomes over the next 40 years.

It’s true that most other developed countries - the US, Britain, Europe, even New Zealand - will face serious budgetary problems coping with the growing cost of aged pensions and aged care. But that’s because their unfunded pension schemes are much more generous than ours, being unmeans-tested and, in many cases, related to the individual’s pre-retirement income. We don’t have problems to anything like the same degree because our age pension is so frugal, being means-tested and flat-rate. The compulsory super scheme we’ve put in to supplement the age pension - so that most people will retire with a combination of age pension and private pension - is an accumulation scheme that makes no promises about how much you’ll end up with.

Many ageing problems will solve themselves

The next point I want to make is that many of the ageing problems people point to will, to some extent, sort themselves out. Where they don’t, the government will sort them. The point is that our economy is ‘dynamic’ - it changes over time in response to situations that arise. People don’t just sit there accepting their fate, they try to do something about it. And though it’s wrong to imagine that ‘market forces’ have magical powers to eliminate all problems, it’s equally wrong to imagine they have no power to improve matters and that the only solutions come from government action.

Take for instance the often-heard complaint that the babyboomers can’t afford to retire because they haven’t saved enough. There’s truth in this complaint - even though I have to say that this problem arises because the babyboomers are sure they couldn’t get by on the age pension - even though all previous generations have - and even though they haven’t bother to save much. But here’s the real point I’m making: if it’s true the babyboomers can’t afford to retire then they won’t retire. They’ll keep working, even if only part-time. And every year they postpone their retirement is one extra year of saving plus one less year of having to support themselves in retirement.

And, indeed, this trend has already begun. In the 1980s and early 90s we saw a trend towards earlier and earlier retirement. Some of this was voluntary - such as federal public servants whose pension scheme had a quirk that encouraged them to retire just before they turned 55 - but a lot was involuntary, particularly for less-skilled blue-collar workers being made redundant from manufacturing. As you know, people are able to get access to their superannuation savings from the age of 55 - and earlier if they’re made redundant.

But that was a long time ago, and though some public servants may still be retiring early because of quirks in their super schemes, for about the past decade the tide has been turning and the proportion of 55 to 64 year-olds participating in the labour force has been rising, not falling. That is, people are tending to retire later. Since 2001 the participation rate for men aged 55 to 59 has risen from less than 72 per cent to more than 78 per cent. Since 1993 the participation rate for men aged 60 to 64 has risen from 54 per cent to almost 60 per cent. I expect this trend has a lot further to run.

You can see the federal government seeking to reinforce this trend, first by phasing up the female age pension age from 60 to 65; second, by introducing tax-free treatment of retirement income provided the individual has turned 60; and now in last year’s budget by beginning to phase the age pension age up to 67. The limited outcry over these moves is a sign they fit with people’s changing social attitudes. We’re living a lot longer than we used to, and are healthier than we used to be, so it follows that we can work for more years before we retire. It doesn’t make much sense for all of our extra years of life to be spent in retirement. What about manual workers whose bodies may not hold up for another two years to 67? We already make provision for them - disability support pension.

The pension age is being raised in most developed countries and I don’t think we’ve seen the last of our government’s efforts to raise the de facto retirement age. The next step - which may be recommended in the Henry tax reform report - would be to raise the age at which tax-free retirement benefits are available to align it with the age pension age. Nor do I think that 67 is the highest the pension age will go.

It’s often said that, whether or not older people want to keep working, they can’t because of employer prejudice against older workers. Older workers are the first to be laid off and the last to be rehired, we’re told. I’m sure there was a lot of truth to this complaint and there may be some lingering vestige of such a prejudice, but I’m equally sure it’s disappearing and probably largely gone.
Why? Because, at a time of population ageing, where skilled labour is perpetually in short supply, it’s a luxury employers can no longer afford. And most of them have already figured that out.

So I believe employers’ attitude towards older workers is in the process of reversing itself. One consequence of ageing is that fewer and fewer young people will be leaving education each year and joining the workforce (though this will be countered to some extent if we achieve high levels of skilled immigration). This being the case, employers will be anxious to retain the services of their existing, older - but skilled and experienced - workers. They’ll generally be sorry to see them retire and willing to offer the flexible arrangements necessary to have them stay on, even if only part-time.

Older workers possess something economists call ‘firm-specific knowledge’. They know how things are done; they know why they’re done that way and not some other way. When in the recessions of the early 1980s and the early 1990s big companies followed the corporate fashion of the time and sought to impress the sharemarket by announcing mass redundancies, they learnt the hard way that getting rid of your older workers involved also excising the firm’s ‘corporate memory’, so that it lost the ability to do certain things. Some of these key people had to be brought back, sometimes at great expense and as an admission of error. It’s no longer fashionable for big companies to try to impress with huge layoffs, and I suspect that part of the reason for this is the belated recognition that getting rid of your corporate memory isn’t a smart thing to do.

As older workers become more inclined to stay on, and employers become more desirous of having them stay on, governments are increasingly likely to change the tax laws to accommodate and encourage this trend. That’s because reversing the trend to early retirement represents the easiest and most obvious way to reduce the economic and budgetary costs of ageing. The next best way is to do more to help mothers return to the workforce and help more to work full-time rather than part-time. It’s probably no coincidence that we’re now finally seeing some action on paid parental leave.

The changing balance of supply and demand for labour

The key to understanding how ageing will affect workers is to understand the basic economic forces we’re dealing with - the changing balance of the supply and demand for labour. You also need to understand where we’re coming from. The economy is now emerging from a period of about 30 years - starting in the mid-1970s - when the number of people wanting to work greatly exceeded employers’ demand for workers and the rate of unemployment was always high. According to the economic textbook, such a position can’t be sustained because the price of labour (wages) will always adjust to bring supply and demand into balance. But the labour market doesn’t work the way textbooks say it does and, as I say, we went through a protracted period in which the supply of labour exceeded demand.

The supply of people wanting work was plentiful for three main reasons. First, because of the high fertility rate in the 50s, 60s and 70s, a lot of young people were entering the labour force each year. Second, because the bulge of babyboomers were at their prime working age. And third, because changing social attitudes and rising levels of educational attainment were prompting a lot of married women to return to the workforce.

As a consequence of this period of excess supply of labour, the balance of power in industrial relations shifted decisively in favour of employers. We saw a marked decline in strikes and other industrial disputes and, indeed, the steady decline of the union movement. More to the point for our present purposes, employers realised there was rarely any shortage of people wanting to work for them and so they became a lot more picky. They could demand higher levels of education than were needed to perform the tasks involved; they could favour married women over young people (more reliable); they could decline to interview any job applicant who’d been unemployed for more than a month or so and, above all, at a time of rapidly changing technology they could favour hiring young people over older people, whether those oldies were job applicants or existing employees. I can remember a time in the days of the Fraser government when there were concerns about high youth unemployment, it was considered virtuous to bundle older workers into retirement to make way for the younger generation.

Why did employers behave like this? Because the excess supply of labour allowed them to. The trouble is, because this excess lasted for 30 years, many people have come to regard it as part of the natural order - the way the world has always worked and always will.

In truth, that era has ended and we’ve entered a new era where employers’ demand for labour now exceeds the supply of people wanting to work. And this means the balance of industrial power is shifting from the employers back to the workers, just where it was in the post-war period that ended in the mid-70s. Why has the balance of supply and demand shifted? In a word, because of ageing. With an older population, you get more people who consume but don’t produce. So the demand for labour remains strong, but the supply of labour declines. To be more specific, we have fewer young people joining the workforce each year as the low rates of fertility in the 80s and 90s have their effect and as the babyboomers start surging into retirement.

The point is, it’s this change in the balance of demand and supply that gives workers the upper hand and forces employers to change their behaviour in line with the changed economic reality.

Employers will stop favouring young people over older people because they have to. There just won’t be enough young people entering the labour market to allow them to discriminate against older workers.

More generally, shortages of skilled labour will become commonplace, and rather than giving their workers a hard time, employers will have to try harder to retain the services not just of older workers but of all workers and discourage them from being poached by rival firms. Salaries will be higher, perks will be greater and employers will be a lot more solicitous of their workers’ welfare. Firms will vie to be seen as the ‘employer of choice’ in their industry. Why will they? Economic necessity.

This is the amazing thing about the portrayal of ageing as a great problem for the economy. It will be a problem for employers, but just the opposite for workers.

Before I move on, let me warn you about something. At about the time of the first intergenerational report in 2002, people focused their minds on ageing, looked at their existing workforces and noticed the high proportion of babyboomers, all of whom were about to retire. They did a bit of manpower planning and projected that, within 10 or 20 years there’d be huge shortages of doctors, nurses, teachers and many other professions. You could add all these shortages together and conclude that, with all these unfilled vacancies, the economy will surely grind to a halt. But I warn you against such a conclusion. Why? Because, as I said at the beginning, the economy is dynamic. Or to put it another way, because nature abhors a vacuum. Those massive projected shortages won’t transpire because, to a greater or lesser extent, people will find a way to overcome them. They’ll try to attract skilled immigrants, they’ll look for labour-saving solutions, they’ll allow nurses to do the work of doctors, or whatever.

I haven’t left myself much time to talk about the effect of the resources boom. In the last part of the noughties, immediately before the global financial crisis, we were in the grip of a resources boom, getting sky high prices for coal and iron ore as China and India undertake the massive and protracted installation of all manner of infrastructure needed to turn them into developed economies. The result for us was a booming economy, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and widespread shortages of skilled workers. We’ve been through resources booms before and the GFC seem to bring that one to an end as all the others had ended. But China and India turned out not to be greatly affected by the global recession. They have resumed their rapid march towards economic development, their demand for our resources has continued unabated and, after falling somewhat, resource prices are on the way up. We’re in for another period of huge investment in increased mining capacity, including a huge investment in LNG facilities. So the resources boom is back on, it seems like it won’t be long before the economy is back to full employment and skill shortages, and Asia’s heightened demand for our minerals and energy could run on for a decade or two.

If so, this will have profound effects on our economy. It will keep our exchange rate and interest rates high, and lead to a much bigger mining sector, but smaller manufacturing, agriculture and tourism sectors. It will change the mix of occupations accordingly, and it will change the nation’s geographic balance, favouring rapid growth in Western Australia and Queensland and much slower growth in the other states. Population will shift to the mining states as it has been for some time. That will be great for Queensland, though it will continue suffering the same problems it’s been suffering from for a while: growing pains.

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