35. Age Pensions

Hi. I am Greg and I want to grumble about proposals to raise the pension age.

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

28. Pay Day Lending

Hi, I am Greg and I want to grumble about pay day lending. Maybe I spent too much time over summer watching sport on TV, but I got sick of being bombarded with advertisements offering me nimble loans or shouting CashTrain. I could also see a cash wizard, and if I couldn’t sell junk to Cash Converters I could perhaps get a loan there. So much cash available so easily (loans approved in less than 60 minutes).

Payday lending, that is, short term loans for relatively small amounts may be useful to get tide you over a cash shortage if something sudden comes up, but as Humphrey Bogart famously said in Casablanca, “for a price Ugati, for a price”. And what a price it is – interest rates equivalent to 48% per annum interest, plus an establishment fee of around 20% of the loan sum. Using one company’s loan calculator, a $500 loan for just over two weeks would cost more than a $120 bucks. And then there are extra charges if you change the term of the loan, or make late payments, or if they have to send you follow-up letters.

Of course, it is good that these fees are disclosed clearly on the company websites, but it is a bit nauseating when the companies trumpet that they are being upfront and that there are no hidden fees and charges. The disclosure is required by law and they don’t mention that their fees are often the maximum permitted by law. Or that the payday lending industry fought tooth and nail against better regulation and caps on when they were introduced a couple of years ago.

Despite the advertising, they’re not my best mate – my best mate wouldn’t charge me effectively 25% interest on a short term loan. But that is the point, people who are better off usually have access to credit or other financial resources. And those that don’t pay a premium for their poverty.

But maybe it is all ok. If I get into financial trouble, there is another whole series of adverts with the extremely rich Tammy May telling us that My Budget will sort out my finances – and add to hers.

There are better ways to help people struggling with sudden bills and cost of living pressures, but with private interests cashing in on poverty, I can only wonder how long it will be before charities’ financial counselling and assistance programs are seen as “anti-competitive”, or government funding of services is accused of crowding-out the private sector.

I am Greg and I am grumbling.


This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast.


First Broadcast: 11 February 2014

11. Poverty

Hi, I’m Greg and I want to grumble about poverty, or about how as a society we talked too much about poverty – and then we stopped.

It seemed like a good idea in the early 1970s when a bloke called Henderson headed an inquiry which set a benchmark for how much income would be required to meet the basic needs of a family of two adults and two children. It was a narrow family stereotype (well, it was 40 years ago) but conceptually the idea of such a benchmark poverty line is not too different from what another bloke called Justice Higgins did way back at the start of the last century when he set a minimum wage that helped make Australia a more decent society – even if defined in masculine terms of a male bread-winner.

But far from shining a light on poverty in Australia, the poverty line generated endless debates. The academic ink flowed not just around the maths and methodology, but around whether poverty was defined by a set of basic needs or as relative to how much others in the society had.

The debate went on, until others pointed out that money was a narrow measure and there were a whole range of other social barriers holding people down. Education, class, race, sex and sexuality combined in various and often brutal ways to create disadvantage and deprivation, and it was clear that money alone was not the answer. And then it became too hard or just too old-fashioned to talk about poverty and the middle class focus went elsewhere – even though the poor were still poor and the gap between rich and poor was growing.

Sadly now, in anti-poverty week, those still wanting to highlight poverty can’t give you a simple answer as to what the poverty line is, or how many people are living below it. Instead they have to chant ritual incantations about poverty being multi-dimensional, and qualify statements and apologise in advance before talking about income levels. In highlighting the complexity of the problem, we robbed ourselves of the language to talk about poverty.

Of course education, class, race, sex, geography, health and a range of other things are important determinants of poverty, but I have a fairly strong suspicion that if you are missing meals or your electricity is cut off because you can’t pay the bills, or if you are trying to live on $35 a day on a Newstart allowance, lack of money is pretty fundamental.

So let’s talk about all the power structures, cultures and barriers that keep people poor, but show me the money as well! And let’s have a debate not about where or how to draw the poverty line, but about what to do about poverty in our rich country.

But until then, I am Greg, and I am grumbling.

This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast at https://radio.adelaide.edu.au/gregs-grumbles-11/

First Broadcast: 15 October 2013