I am not necessarily against changing the pension age, or tightening some of the restrictions so that we are not subsidising relatively wealthy people, but it is such a mono-dimensional debate.
“Be prepared to work until your 70” the headline says – but what does it mean for people who aren’t working? We already have a real problem of mature age unemployment – people who may have worked for 30 or 40 years, but who find themselves out of work and facing age discrimination in the employment market.
Sure, if you are a CEO, an academic or a highly paid consultant there might be jobs for 60 year olds which value that lifetime of experience, but for many people, if you are made redundant or out of work in your 60s it might be near impossible to get another job.
For those people, raising the pension age is not about the inconvenience of staying in work longer, but living for longer on the much lower unemployment income support rather than getting the higher benefits of the age pension. The difference is about $120 a week in the base rate, so raising the pension age may sentence older unemployed workers to another 1, 2 or 5 years of living below the poverty line.
If we are going to have a conversation about raising the pension age, can we have a real discussion which includes:
- how we are going to change workplace cultures to provide job possibilities for older employees;
- whether we can create a part-time job pathways for older workers to ease into retirement, or to just share work more fairly; and
- how we can index pensions so that pensioners do not begin to slip backwards relative to the rest of the population – in the same way that those on CPI-indexed benefits like Newstart and Austudy have been left behind.
And finally, if we keep people in work longer, who is going to do the vast amount of volunteer caring and community work that younger retirees do – because there is no doubt that retirees care for grandchildren, aging parents and siblings, and are the backbone of many community organisations?
These are genuinely hard issues. Much easier to just cut benefits to vulnerable people in order to fill a revenue hole at the same time as we cut mining and pollution taxes.
I am Greg and I am grumbling.
This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast.
First Broadcast: 15 April 2014
