The population is ageing. In 40 years, seven million Australians—a quarter of the population—will be aged 65 or older. The number of people aged 85 or older will have reached about 1.4 million, up from about 300,000 today. Children will be a far smaller proportion of the population.
So what’s the answer to this as a public policy dilemma? Start building more health facilities and nursing homes to deal with the demographic shift? Or build more schools and increase one’s investment in the education that the younger people have?
The second answer is the logical one, though not necessarily the one that leaps to mind. So far as the ageing of the population means that there will be greater pressure on the community to look after the old, the ones who will be bearing the burden will be the working population.
But that’s not the answer invited by those who are putting demographic shift on the agenda, and seeking, in the process, to fashion themselves as far-sighted politicians thinking of the longer term rather than short-term gain. The answer for them is that the slow, if steady, shift to an ageing population represents a ‘crisis’, requiring that government pull in its belt now so that it will have the money on hand later to deal with the massive costs and changes to the system that will be necessary. Otherwise, the implication is that there will have to be higher taxes, uncontrolled costs running far faster than economic growth, and, of course, an increasing burden placed on an ever-diminishing workforce.
It’s all 24-carat, copper-bottomed, ocean-going nonsense. The best thing to do about the ageing of the population is nothing. Or at least nothing on that account. There is no crisis in prospect, no threat of a burden that the community or the economy, as we know it, cannot absorb, and much more to look forward to about an ageing population than there is to fear. And that is assuming that we can safely forecast the future, based on what we know today, or that projections about the size and composition of society and the economy based on what is happening
Indeed, one of the greatest problems of the new, older society, is scarcely mentioned. Even now, most of the wealth of Australia is in the hands of the old. As we get older and live longer, the proportion increases at a rate faster than