EveryAGE Counts: Seven in ten older Australians believe 'ageism against older people is a serious problem,’ but those in their 50s and 60s are significantly more likely to hold this view than those in their 80s and 90s, according to landmark new national polling commissioned for the nation's second Ageism Awareness Day today (Oct 7).

The research also finds a strong majority of older Australians want the government to invest in a national awareness campaign about ageism and its effects. 

A new network has been launched calling on the Australian Government to support a UN Convention on the Human Rights of Older Persons.

It's interesting how so many sentences and ideas now trail off into the inevitable denouement "… but that didn't happen because of Covid"…"We had to change plans because of Covid." It's as though Sir Humphrey Covid is some VIP, for whom doors must be opened and the seas must part. Or, as though Covid is an unexpected first born baby to a couple in their 40s whose lives are now utterly transformed. "We couldn't celebrate Henry's birthday this year because of … Baby Covid." "Covid" could be anything or anyone terribly important - one's mother in law arriving from Europe or a visitation from a long dead relative. All must stop … for Covid!

One of my friends refuses to name this interloper, usually spoken of with such reverence. This seems an excellent way of handling the situation!

Sir Humphrey is noted more for what he prevents, rather than what he facilitates or mandates. Think of the thousands of people who have not attended football matches they otherwise would have flocked to, and further ,who have not caught planes, boarded cruise ships for exotic ports, nor played bingo in the ornate lounges of the oversized ships. Think of all the three-course breakfasts that have not been eaten in the multitudinous choice of ship and hotel dining rooms all over the world! Sir Humphrey has put a decisive stop to these hedonistic activities.

Millions of people have not attended work for months, because of one entity, already named and and derisively "knighted."

All these aforementioned effects are from the point of view of us "ordinary people." It is our friends and relatives plans that have given way to COVID-19. But what about if we look further out to decisions beyond our sphere of influence ? It seems that "Sir Humphrey" has affected activities on a much greater scale.

Even chronic wage depression, and endemic high rates of unemployment, will stop. These, associated with globalised out-sourcing, must stop for Covid. These, which blew out further after the Kennet-led destruction of state awards and John Howard’s new use of the Corporation clause in the Constitution, with a new stream of cheap immigrant labour (see above) - must stop for Covid. So we are now looking at the first increases in employment rates and wages prospects, for decades.

It has been hard, according to Australian farmers, to find fruit-pickers, since the highly exploitable backpacker stream dried up with Sir Humphrey Covid. See [Fruit Picking Jobs Australia]. However, Australians complain that they are often rejected when they apply to work. In fact a lot of Australians are working in the industry, now the farmers don’t have a choice to exploit disoriented young migrants. See, ”Thousands of unemployed Australians do go for fruit-picking”. Of course, if there are not enough Australians to pick the fruit for low wages, the fruit growers could get together and raise their prices. For this to be viable, Australia would have to stop importing fruit from countries with endemic slave labour, and Australians would have to buy fruit by the piece, rather than in large quantities that often are not eaten and go bad in the bowl. Low carb dieters and Dr Lustig (see, for instance, “Fat Chance Fructose 2.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3WkXJokBAU), would all say that we have been encouraged to eat far too much fruit and fructose-laden processed foods, so raising the price of fruit would be all to the good.

Yes, Sir Humphrey, but ...

You would think that governments would be quaking in their boots as their personal and party investments in real-estate threatened to take a dive and the property developer-industry mafias and triads would start cruising with kalachnikovs past politicians’ private residences late at night. But this has not happened – because the governments control the remaining levers that regulate land and housing prices and they ARE the mafia. [See, for instance, Labor Inc.]

Yes, with the sudden drop in mass migration, both temporary, landed, and permanent, many expected a huge drop in land and housing prices. However, this did not happen, due to the Federal government outrageously permitting people to cash-in on their superannuation, and the Reserve bank dropping borrowing interest rates. This created even more buyers than usual. The pressure on supply led to higher prices. The pressure has extended to the regions, raising both purchase and rental prices in places where the homeless have traditionally fled in search of affordable rentals.

Instead of a famine, it’s been a feast for the land-speculators, and misery has compounded for the homeless and precarious. If Jimmy Dore is right (see also, below), this will form part of a cycle: as a proportion of people default on their mortgages, with the next financial crash or when the Reserve Bank raises interest rates again, the banks will just put them on the market again, and again, and again.

With Australia’s borders closed indefinitely, however, outsourced-state land-companies and their colleagues in private development, fear that persistent lack of mass migration will ultimately outlast the super-cash-and-low-interest-loans-bonanza-in-demand. Then, they fear, land and housing prices will finally fall to reasonable levels, far too low for the growth lobby’s addiction to the high prices.

They have a strategy though. As readers of /node/2363 know, the growth lobby in government and corporate form has been trying to liberate big houses on big lots from the tenacious claws of undeserving old ladies, who rattle about so wastefully within them, unreasonably refusing to die and make way for more deserving younger age-cohorts. For this purpose the Liberal (Turnbull) government initiated a ‘downsizing tax-break” from July 2018, whereby if you are 65 years old or older and meet the eligibility requirements, you may be able to make a downsizer contribution into your superannuation of up to $300,000 from the proceeds of selling your home. (They don’t check the size of your new home.)

And, of course, there is another string to this house-liberation strategy, involving nursing-homes, whereby you sacrifice your home towards the cost of your ‘care’ in a nursing home. Over 65s are not real welcome in ordinary hospitals these days, and tend to finish up in nursing homes when anything goes wrong, overfilling them. Thankfully, COVID-19 has helped liberate nursing homes as well as houses, but apparently this may not be enough.

Which brings us to the ultimate strategy – or should I say - ‘final solution’? The AstraZenica vaccine. Introduced with a friendly face, initially, AstraZenica has acquired a spectral character, not unlike those Grim Reapers of the 1980s AIDS safe-sex ads. It has gradually been withdrawn from use by younger cohorts, until now, only those usually considered ‘too old to work’ - the ones who are imagined to rattle alone in rambling residences in leafy suburbs – qualify for AstraZenica, and only for AstraZenica. We are told that the average odds of their dying from the ‘rare blood clotting disorder’ linked to the AstraZenica vaccine are lower than the average odds of their dying of COVID-19 – if they get it. And they are damned if they do take the vaccine and damned if they don’t, because one or the other may still get them.

Are the risks of enough elderly thus liberating large lots in leafy suburbs for subdivision statistically high enough to compensate for low migration for a few years? It is difficult to estimate exactly, but every little bit helps, Sir Humphrey.

In this Youtube broadcast of 23 March, Jimmy Dore gives his interpretation of how United States' Democrats planned to cause ordinary Americans to lose their houses as a consequence of the 2009 financial crisis! Incredibly, they seem to have colluded with Wall Street creditors to enable them to be able to seize mortgaged homes when mortgagees found themselves unable to make repayments.

Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) believes there is nothing to fear from the downward projection of population size in the Inter-Generational Report (IGR) from 40 million to 38.8 million by 2061. National President Jenny Goldie says what is to be feared are the environmental, social and economic cost of adding another 13 million people to the population.

“The IGR fails to take into account the costs of infrastructure which amounts to at least $100,000 in public money for each new person, be they immigrant or born here,” says Ms Goldie.

“The IGR fails to take into account the environmental costs of urban encroachment on natural bushland, threatening iconic species such as the koala, and adding to carbon emissions,” she says. “It fails to address the social costs of crowding, housing unaffordability and longer waiting times that generally accompany population growth.

“Having more people generally means a bigger GDP but not necessarily GDP per capita, which is a better measure of living standards. In fact, GDP is well past its use-by date and, before the end of the IGR time frame, will have ceased to be used. In looking so far into the future, we should be using a range of the newer measures of living standards and well-being.”

Ms Goldie says neither should we fear an ageing population.

“The projection that there will only be 2.7 workers per person aged over 65 in 40 years’ time will probably be wrong,” says Ms Goldie. “In fact, as the working age population shrinks and the labour market tightens, fewer people will be unemployed, and employers will improve wages and conditions to attract job-seekers.

“This will have the effect of drawing more people into the workforce who were not working, or keeping people in work who would otherwise have retired. In other words, the participation rate will improve.”

Ms Goldie says rising health expenditure, while a problem in narrow fiscal terms, is actually a good thing, by keeping people happier and healthier for longer, and by reducing human suffering.

The new Intergenerational Report (IGR) has projected Covid will make Australia’s population smaller and older than earlier predicted, but that need not be a problem if we can take real steps to end the blight of ageism, according to the EveryAGE Counts campaign. EveryAGE Counts is funded by the The Benevolent Society

In launching the IGR, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the government remains committed to funding essential services while maintaining a sustainable tax burden. EveryAGE Counts Campaign Director Marlene Krasovitsky, said the key to achieving these goals is making a concerted effort to fight ageism.

"Ageism is now a huge drag on our economic growth," Ms Krasovitsky said.

"Our assumption that everyone over 65 is rushing to retirement does not stand to scrutiny. The latest data from the COTA Federation last week showed only 49 per cent of those over 65 had retired, down significantly from 2018 when 60 per cent were retired. The reality is most older Australians are living longer, healthier lives and they want, or need, to work longer. So what’s holding them back? Ageism.

"The IGR notes that the increased participation rate amongst older workers in recent years has been supported by greater life expectancy and better health, as well as greater work flexibility. But further gains are missed because of ageist recruitment processes and workplaces. Too many older workers want to work, but miss out because of negative assumptions based only on their age.

"37 per cent of Australians have experienced discrimination since turning 50, and that’s up from 23 per cent in 2018. 26 per cent have experienced employment related discrimination. If we want to maintain funding for essential services and infrastructure we need to lift the labour force participation rates of older people who want or need to work.That means we have to address ageism at its root – the stereotypes, assumptions, and discrimination that currently lock older people out of work.

“The IGR has found pretty much all participation increases over the next 40 years will come from people above the age of 40.Those projections will be hampered if we do nothing about the ageism that keeps keen older workers jobless. We simply can’t afford to continue carrying around ageist notions about older Australians. These mindsets are holding us back."

Ms Krasovitsky said the 2021 Intergenerational Report should prompt the federal government to invest in a program to start lowering the rates of ageism and age-based discrimination in Australia.

"We need a sustained public and workplace education campaign to challenge the myths and negative attitudes about older people in the workforce," Ms Krasovitsky said.

"We should be making sure people understand the channels through which they can speak up when they experience age-based discrimination. And we should encourage organisations to develop and implement age inclusive approaches. We also know that multigenerational workforces are good for business and raise productivity. There’s no silver bullet for ending ageism, but we need to start tackling this problem systemically now. It’s a vital means of boosting economic growth in the years ahead, given the IGR’s projections."

Candobetter dot net Editors would like to point out some other fallacies in Treasurer Josh Frydenberg's assumptions. One is that migrants make the population younger. This is usually based on the idea that migrants are of a lower average age than the average age of the Australian population. What this assumption overlooks, however, is that all migrants enter this country at an older age - usually a much older age - than babies born here. See /taxonomy/term/2837. See some of our other articles on ageism and immigrationism here: /taxonomy/term/451.

Add up all the neglected costs of downsizing and retirees have good reason to be wary of making the move. It’s time to debunk the myth of zero housing costs in retirement if we want to understand why retirees resist downsizing. Retirees have at least five reasons to be wary of the costs of downsizing. [Article first published at https://theconversation.com/downsizing-cost-trap-awaits-retirees-five-reasons-to-be-wary-80895 on 31 July 2017.]

Retirees living in middle-ring suburbs face frequent calls to downsize into apartments to free up larger allotments in these suburbs for redevelopment. Retirees who fail to downsize into smaller units and apartments are viewed as being a greedy, baby-boomer elite, stealing financial security from younger generations.

It also makes sense to policymakers for retirees to move into less spacious accommodation and make way for high-density housing. Housing think-tank AHURI fosters this view. Yet seniors remain resistant to moving, in part because of the ongoing costs they would face.

The concept of zero housing costs in retirement is based on a 1940s view of a well-maintained, single dwelling on a single allotment of land where the mortgage has been paid off. This concept is incompatible with medium- and high-density housing and refusing to acknowledge ongoing housing costs may cause significant poverty for retirees.

Reason 1 – upfront moving costs are high

When a house is sold the owner receives the sale funds minus the real estate and legal fees. When the same person then buys a different property to live in, they pay legal fees plus stamp duty.

For cities such as Melbourne and Sydney, these costs are likely to exceed A$70,000.

These high transfer costs may mean it is not cost-effective for the person to move.

Reason 2 – levies are high

Because apartment owners pay body corporate levies, people often assume this is just the same as periodic payment of rates, water, insurance and other costs. It is not.

Fees remissions for low-income retirees for rates, power, insurance and water are difficult to apply within a body corporate environment. As a consequence, these are usually not applied to owners of apartments.

The costs of maintaining essential services, such as mandatory fire-alarm testing, yearly engineering certification, lift and air-conditioning inspections, significantly increase ownership costs.

When additional services are supplied, such as swimming pools, gyms and rooftop gardens, these also require periodic inspections. Garbage collection, cleaning, gardening, concierge and strata management services also must be paid.

Owners of standard suburban homes choose whether they want these services, with those on fixed incomes going without them.

Annual levies for apartment buildings vary, but expect to pay between $10,000 and $15,000. They may be more than this.

Reason 3 – costs of maintenance

Apartments are often sold as a maintenance-free solution for older people. The maintenance is not free. It needs to be paid for.

Maintenance costs are higher in an apartment than a standard suburban home because there are more items and services to be maintained and fixed. Lifts and air conditioning need periodic servicing and fixing. This is in addition to the mandatory inspections listed above.

Reason 4 – loss of financial security

It is a mistaken belief that the maintenance costs that form part of the body corporate fee include periodic property upgrades. This relates to items that are owned collectively with other apartment owners.

Major servicing at the ten-year mark and usually each five-to-seven years after that include painting, floor-covering replacement, and lift and air-conditioning repair or replacement.

Major upgrades may also include garden redesign or other external building enhancement including environmental upgrades. All owners share these upgrade costs.

Costs of upgrading the inside of an apartment (a bathroom disability upgrade, for example) are additional again.

Once the body corporate committee members pledge funds towards an upgrade, all owners are required to raise their share of the funds, whether they can afford it or not. Communal choice outweighs an individual owner’s need to delay upgrade costs.

Owners who buy apartments that are part of a body corporate effectively lose control of their future financial decisions.

Reason 5 – loss of security of tenure

Loss of security of tenure is usually associated with renters. However, the recent introduction of termination legislation in New South Wales gives other owners the right to vote to terminate a strata title scheme. When this occurs, all owners, including reluctant owners of apartments within that scheme, are compelled to sell.

There are valid reasons why termination legislation is desirable, as many older apartment complexes are reaching the end of their useful life.

Even so, as termination legislation is rolled out across the states, owner- occupiers effectively lose control of how long they will own a property for. They no longer have security of tenure, which means retirees may face an uncertain housing future in their old age.

Further reading: Why strata law shake-up won’t deliver cheaper housing

Downsizing raises poverty risks

Because current data sets do not adequately take account of ongoing costs associated with apartment living, the effect of downsizing on individual households is masked.

Downsizing retirees into the apartment sector creates ongoing financial stress for older people. Creating tax incentives to move does not tackle these ongoing costs.

Centrelink payments for of $404 per week are well below the poverty line. Yet we expect retirees to willingly downsize and to be able to cede most of their Centrelink payments to cover high body corporate costs.

Requiring retirees to downsize for the greater urban good will shift poverty onto retirees who could barely manage in their previously owned standard suburban home.

Failing to understand the effect of high ongoing costs associated with apartment living and reinforcing the myth of zero housing costs in retirement will continue to lead to poor policy outcomes.

About three years ago, I made the big mistake of looking too closely into my bathroom mirror. Yuck! All I could see was nothing but wrinkles and gray hair. But wait -- I was never supposed to have actually ever gotten old! This was never supposed to have happened! But it did -- at least to my body if not my mind.

"So," I said to myself, "what the freak can I do with OLD?" I know! I'll become an actor! And so I did.

Fortunately, there are several film schools in my city where student directors are always looking for talent to use in their films -- especially talent that will work for free just to have an excuse to get out of the house. And so suddenly I found myself in big demand. I mean really. How many little old ladies do you know who are willing to throw themselves into an acting career? Not all that many. So I seemed to have pretty much cornered the market. Because there's really not all that much competition.

At auditions even for non-paying student-film roles, believe it or not, there are usually scores of child actors, ingenues and even beautiful leading ladies, all dying to try out for a part. But there just aren't that many little old ladies out there to compete with, thank you very much.

And so now I have found one very successful way of taking advantage of the age factor that is currently barreling down on all of us like a steam-roller with no way to avoid. And there are also bound to be other ways to make the most of our "senior" years too (such as finally realizing that "war" is a racket, an obscenity and a con-game, something that most people apparently have not reached the age of having finally acquired enough wisdom to realize at all -- and then working our hearts out to stop all "war" from ever happening again).

In the past three years, I have been in over one hundred student films, playing all kinds of grandma roles -- sweet loving grandmas, for instance. And society grandmas, dying cancer patient grandmas, cowgirl grandmas, evil grandmas, war-correspondent grandmas, psychotic grandmas, ghostly grandmas, college-professor grandmas and corpse grandmas, as well as grandmas who are doctors, lawyers and judges.

But my favorite grandma role of all time is playing a grandma zombie!

PS: Let's face it. Getting old sucks eggs. Nothing fun at all about having creaky joints, being mostly ignored for not being sexy enough, having trouble sleeping, facing possible dementia, living on cat food, facing multiple surgeries, having one's teeth fall out, etc. So we gotta always be constantly looking for ways to make growing older more fun on some level or another.

Turning into a grumpy frump, believing the lies and hatred being constantly broadcast on Fox News, and/or just plain giving up on life are definitely three ways not to have fun!

PPS: "Some will rob you with a shotgun, some with a fountain pen." Elders these days are being targeted as victims by bad guys in several different ways. Street thugs may mug elders for their pocket money -- but probate thugs can mug our elders for their life savings as well. http://marygsykes.com/2015/03/27/in-chicago-what-does-a-nursing-home-do-when-its-understaffed-break-out-the-chemical-restraints/

In Chicago, for instance, probate sharks seek out rich widows, get them declared incompetent, throw them into stark "assisted care" institutions where they are medicated into submission, clean out their safe deposit boxes and then throw them out into the streets to die when there is no money left. http://marygsykes.com/about/

Or else your sleazy relatives rob your rightful heirs of their rightful share of your estate after you're gone: First published here.

But nobody messes with zombie grandmas!

Video and transcript inside: Dr Karen Hitchcock: "My core message is that we really need to think about our ageing population as a triumph and really rethink what it means to be old and what it's possible to do when you're elderly. Most elderly people are not sick, most of them are not in nursing homes, but I think we can do a lot more to integrate elderly people back into our communities and try and reimagine what it is that we want our communities to be. I think we need to start from an ethical perspective of what we want our community to be, and then from that, imagine our society and then find ways to create it and fund it, rather than starting from an economic position." Congratulations to the 7.30 Report, Karen Hitchcock and Quarterly essay for criticising the appalling depiction and treatment of Australia's elderly, implicitly and explicitly advocated by the growth lobby in the mainstream media and government. See, for instance, "Should Jeannie Pratt and Elisabeth Murdoch downsize to high rises in Activity Centers to give young people more room?" The negative message about the elderly has been so overwhelming that most of us find it exhausting to fight. The ABC has often also carried this message uncritically. Perhaps it took a woman-led news commentary program - the 7.30 Report - to try to break this mould. Dr Karen Hitchcock (who is a staff physician in acute and general medicine at a large city public hospital) is a very effective ambassador for the elderly, although she is a young woman herself. Her work deserves our collective support and promotion.

Video and transcript originally broadcast and published from the ABC 7.30 Report at http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2015/s4196703.htm on 12 March 2015.

Elderly 'have internalised' message they're a burden on society, says physician Karen Hitchcock

Transcript

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: By 2050, about five per cent of Australia's population will be over the age of 85, with many of us expected to live to our mid-90s. The challenges of the ageing population are something we've been hearing a lot about in the past couple of weeks, since the Federal Government released its Intergenerational Report. The message is that more old people and falling budget revenues are going to put a huge strain on our health and welfare systems. But now one doctor is raising concerns about the way we're discussing the ageing population. She believes we're sending older Australians a message that they're an intolerable burden.

Karen Hitchcock is a staff physician in acute and general medicine at a major public hospital in Victoria and she's written the latest issue of the Quarterly Essay. It's entitled Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly, she joined me from our Melbourne studio.

Karen, we've been talking a lot recently about the economics of health care as the country deals with an ageing population and declining budget revenue. When you listen to economists and politicians talk about the ageing population and the growing pressures on the budget and sustainability and so on, as a doctor, what do you hear?

KAREN HITCHCOCK, PUBLIC HOSPITAL PHYSICIAN & AUTHOR: What I hear is that the fact of our ageing population is an overwhelmingly negative development. The elderly are portrayed as being a burden on their families and on the state and a drain on the economy.

LEIGH SALES: And what message do you think that the elderly hear?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Oh, I think that they've completely internalised this message that they're a burden. I see evidence of this every day on my hospital ward. Patients, elderly patients apologise for being sick, for being in hospital, for taking up a hospital bed that should be apparently for somebody else.

LEIGH SALES: How does that translate then in terms of the type of care that they want?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Well, I think that sometimes it can mean that they feel reluctant to accept the care that they need.

LEIGH SALES: Like, give me an example of, say, a patient where you've seen that.

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Um, well, I've - there's a lot of patients, but recently I looked after an elderly gentleman who said that he wanted to die and that he didn't want to be in hospital and that he was a nuisance and when I sat down and talked to him, it turned out that his wife had recently died, his dog that was his remaining companion had died and he felt that he had no place in society anymore and that he was a burden.

LEIGH SALES: And so how, as a doctor, did you address that?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: I called him a couple of weeks after he left hospital, given that he had said he never wanted to come back to hospital, just to try and work out a plan for him and he said to me that he says silly things when he's sick. Of course he wants to come back to hospital and that he was very, very happy because he'd managed to get another dog, go back to his part-time work.

LEIGH SALES: What's your attitude towards advanced care directive, which are documents that people sign giving instructions about the sort of treatment that they would like if they're faced with potential end-of-life issues, which of course is often things that older people sign?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: They're being heavily promoted at the moment as something that should be universally adopted and I think that they do have a place, particularly if people have advanced malignancy and are going to die imminently or particularly when people have particular treatments that they don't want to have. But I think that saying that every single citizen in Australia should have an advanced care directive is dangerous and I think that to say that they're unambiguously good sort of relies upon an understanding of the human subject that is breathtakingly simplistic. People change their mind. It's very difficult for us to know how we're going to feel as we become increasingly dependent and debilitated. I mean, my grandmother, for example, she was a fiercely independent woman who, in her 80s, developed a lung disease that meant eventually she was house-bound and oxygen dependent. And if someone had've asked her a year prior to that development whether or not she would rather die or be house-bound and oxygen dependent, she definitely would have said she'd rather be dead. But when it came down to it, she was very happy with her life. She still had her family. She said that she would play in her memories. She was very happy to be alive.

LEIGH SALES: So if you see this idea that we are giving elderly people the impression that they're a burden as being a problem, how would you like to see the debate around some of these issues and the discussion reframed?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Well I think that our focus should be on how can we improve the life of our elderly patients, not that we should be so keen to offer them death.

LEIGH SALES: And so, practically, how would you go about doing that?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Um, I think that we - it would be really helpful if we could somehow integrate medical and social services so that we can encourage elderly people to remain independent and in their communities. If we could somehow integrate services and offer preventative treatment before people need to come to hospital, that would be a really great development and there are international examples of care programs like this where there are community-based, what's called medical homes, that are staffed by GPs and specialists and full allied health to enable people to stay in the community longer and to stay well and independent.

LEIGH SALES: How about the interaction between nursing homes and hospitals, how well does that work?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: It works very poorly. Many elderly people come to hospital as a result of medication side-effects, having too many tablets or etc., and they come to hospital, we stop their tablets and they're discharged back to their nursing homes and they have to continue on the tablets that they were on prior to coming to hospital, sometimes the tablets that caused them to come to hospital, until they can get a doctor to come to the nursing home and rechart their medicine.

LEIGH SALES: You are a busy doctor, yet you've taken the time out to write this lengthy piece of work around these issues. What is the core message that you're hoping to get out there based on your experience working in hospitals?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: My core message is that we really need to think about our ageing population as a triumph and really rethink what it means to be old and what it's possible to do when you're elderly. Most elderly people are not sick, most of them are not in nursing homes, but I think we can do a lot more to integrate elderly people back into our communities and try and reimagine what it is that we want our communities to be. I think we need to start from an ethical perspective of what we want our community to be, and then from that, imagine our society and then find ways to create it and fund it, rather than starting from an economic position.

LEIGH SALES: Just before you go, Dr Hitchcock, there's been a lot of discussion around this week about sexism in medicine. A senior surgeon raised some concerns around the issue of sexual harassment and whether or not raising that impacts on female doctors' careers. Just in your experience, do you think that there is a problem in medicine with sexism?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: I've obviously not worked with every doctor in every hospital in Australia and I'm sure there are individuals. However, one thing I do know is that there is certainly not a pervasive culture of sexism in medicine. I've never been discriminated against because I'm a woman in medicine. In fact I've been enormously supported and encouraged.

LEIGH SALES: Dr Hitchcock, thank you very much.

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Thank you.

Age Discrimination Commissioner, Susan Ryan thinks that Treasurer Joe Hockey somehow deserves congratulations for suggesting that people's life expectancy may extend to 150 on the basis of some very speculative 'medical science'. [1] Futhermore, she's using this medical theory to jump on the moving retirement goal bandwagon. [2]
Is Susan Ryan, losing her marbles or simply doing what she has to to keep her job? Who do you know that you think is likely to live until they are 150 years old? And who do you know that wants to work until 70 or beyond? The value of elderly people is being sold out by the likes of Susan Ryan and Joe Hockey

Real trends

Nevermind that people young and old are dying early from poverty associated with unemployment in this country, fancy believing on the basis of past statistical curves, that most people are going to live to 150 even if some amazingly wealthy person like Murdoch might just aim, using cloned organ replacement, diet, blood transfusions and 24 hour slaves in attendance to aim for such longevity. How can Susan Ryan not be aware that the 'developed' nations are faced with actual declines in life-expectancy due to diet-linked diseases, notably diabetes, fatty liver, and the strain of obesity on their systems (which is not necessarily always present in the raised risk of diabetes.) [3]

Susan Ryan and Joe Hockey need to read more widely instead of relying on actuarial information from the past, hitched to a junk-science wagon. In this case past trends do not predict the future. Current trends break from the past. Joe Hockey is either poorly educated in health matters or pragmatically abusing economic stats. Probably both. If he really wanted to save money on medical costs, he would call for high taxes on denatured processed food and its advertising.

The church of the workhouse

Susan Ryan, like Julia Gillard, idealises payed work. To pretend that all work is good for health, rewarding or fulfilling, rather than a depressing and onerous treadmill, or a frighteningly tense battle to please capricious bosses, shows the insensitive submission of the work-privileged to a self-serving economic ideology. Although I supported quite a lot of what ex-labor PM, Julia Gillard, appeared to stand for, I felt sorry in advance for disabled people in the new National Disability Scheme if their only chance at dignity and security could be the 'right' and thereby the duty, to work. It isn't as if the were all guaranteed positions as well-paid neurosurgeons, party bosses, lawyers or chief executives. It isn't as if most of us have jobs like that.

Conditional love

In this Australia of very conditional love and self worth we must constantly struggle against the economic measure of our status. For this reason most women must struggle all the harder, meeting demands to be 'good' and obedient at home as well as at work. The elderly must struggle even harder. We are not taught how in simpler societies simply being a member of the society guarantees you a place, shelter, worth and rights. If we were we would rally to protect traditional societies instead of consigning their masses via 'development' to overpopulation, exhaustion, malnutrition, epidemics new and old as well as the same ones as the poor in the developed world: fatty liver, diabetes and its complications, and the political irrelevance and isolation of the mass consumer.

The value of elderly people is being sold out by the likes of Susan Ryan and Joe Hockey

Not a word in Susan Ryan's celebration of wage-slavery of the fitness of citizens, the rewards of political engagement in real life rather than effective total hours lost to unfair and redundant economic systems. Nothing about the loss of natural increase in status accompanying seniority in most societies before ours.

Evolutionary theory on longevity

The wisdom of older people and their retreat from sexual and warrior competition made sense of longevity in our species. Why do we have life expectancies around 3 score and 10 years? Because the presence of old people is fundamental to knowledge conservation in societies.

On the subject of how long humans lived, Kaplan et al [4] argue that humans had potential to live for about 70 years in hunter-gatherer environments. They theorise that reaching age 65 must have played a part in human evolutionary adaptation for the acquisition of life learning and storage of environmental knowledge over long periods of time and distance in elderly humans.

On the subject of causes of mortality, they assert that the comparatively isolated populations that persisted in localized environments pre-agriculture and large-scale settlement would have become genetically adapted to local pathogens. The effect of this would have kept disease mortality low.

Of course now, in our huge and cumbersome cities, local adaptation is no longer possible, since our diets and frequentations are globally sourced and mostly beyond any individual's control. We now eat industrially produced glop that our livers cannot break down, but can only store in ever increasing fatty deposits. In our global economic culture that may be just as well, since accumulated learning is not conducive to processed food consumption or widget production. Then again, if we did allow elderly people to transmit their accumulated knowledge from a position of authority, we might outwit the consumer-economy monster.

NOTES

[1] "The first drugs that can slow the ageing process are likely to become available within five to 10 years, raising the prospect of people eventually living to 150 or more, researchers say." Source: http://www.theage.com.au/technology/sci-tech/drugs-may-let-us-live-to-150-20111016-1lrm5.html

[2] Source: Susan Ryan, "The economic potential of older people is being ignored," The Age, 22 February 2015, http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-economic-potential-of-older-people-is-being-ignored-20150222-13lfgt.html.

[3] For anyone interested in the theory, I refer to Dr Lustig of the University of California's and associates work on excessive fructose consumption in particular but also on excessive consumption of any simple carbohydrates. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHlEuDHpE2k These epidemic problems are now affecting children within six months of birth. There are many other lectures on you tube around this subject besides this one that explores the evolutionary signficance of fructose.

[4]See Kaplan, H., Gurven, M., Winking, J. 2009, “An Evolutionary Theory of Human Lifespan: Embodied Capital and the Human Adaptive Complex,”. For: Handbook of Theories of Aging. (Editors: Bengtson, V., Silverstein, M., Putney, N., Gans, D). Springer. Pp. 39-66. Also available at http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/kaplanetal_ch3.pdf.

"Allowing more migration from Asia could help Australia cope with the challenges of its ageing population, a leading economist says," quoth Fairfax Digital. Ditto Murdoch's Australian: "More Asian migration would help Aust: HSBC". The 'leading economist' is Paul Bloxham, who is employed by HSBC Australia bank with the title of 'chief economist and spokesperson'. The publishing media are heavily invested in marketing Australian real estate to the world.

This narrowly-based opinion is published and promoted as 'breaking news' by Australia's mass media as if it were a disinterested and unquestionable truth, but it comes from a person paid by a business corporation to spruik their interests and it is reported by media giants who also have massive interests in property development and finance.

Fairfax media and Murdoch media both have huge property dot coms that market Australian real estate. These are Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au. Other media organisations also massage the property market with television lifestyle programs etc. The Australian public is utterly manipulated in this area by the media, yet the media continue to promote their own interests without declaring them in articles like the ones quoting Bloxham.


It could be that HSBC Bank really believes that what is good for their global banking business headquartered in London and which started in Asia [1] is good for Australia, but their chief economist shows extremely poor understanding of Australian demographics.

Misleading demographics

Paul Bloxham is actually quoted as saying that,

"Migrants are typically younger than the extant population." (!) To which he adds, "The ageing population means greater spending on healthcare and less revenue from the income tax system, putting strain on government budgets," Mr Bloxham said.

Such a statement assumes that Asian migrants must have the solution to eternal youth, and don't age one year every year like other people. It doesn't acknowledge that all immigrants to Australia are older on entry than those born here, tend to import elderly family (under family reunion terms) and thus to contribute overwhelmingly to a more rapid aging demographic in Australia. This has been shown by the Federation of Ethnic Communities' Councils of Australia (FECCA), who have been campaigning for special aged care funding geared to the higher rate of aging in immigrants. See, "Immigration speeds up Australia's rate of aging - FECCA" :

"From 2011 to 2026 ethnic people over 80 will increase by 59% compared with 29% in the Australian-born population." FECCA.

Even the mysterious Multicultural Foundation of Australia, founded by Bob Hawke in 1986, of which every recent Prime Minister and Opposition leader are members, funds research to deliver education on dementia for the rising proportion of aging immigrants.

"Culturally and linguistically diverse communities and dementia: Currently one in eight Australians with dementia do not speak English at home (Access Economics 2006).”
Source: http://amf.net.au/library/uploads/files/National_Dementia_Campaign_health_promotion_model.pdf

And Access Economics, in an August 2009 Report that the AMC and FECCA both rely on, states:

"Of people with dementia in 2009, the majority speak English at home (211,000) compared to a non-English (CALD) language (35,000). The prevalence of people with dementia speaking English at home increases 4.8 times to 1.01 million in 2050, with those speaking a CALD language at home increasing 3.4 times to around 120 ,000 in 2050. The tripling in the absolute number of people with dementia who speak a CALD language at home represents a very significant increase in the future demand for CALD trained dementia care providers and culturally appropriate services. "

Why don't HSBC suggest importing these immigrants to Australia, and sending them home when they retire?

A violation of self-determinism and human rights

Adding more people won't solve an imbalance of ageing people. Migration means ultimately that each generation will have an even bigger ageing population to cater for!

In a comment made todayBandicoot wrote, "HSBC finance mortgages and investment property loans. Migrants will want property loans, and bring in investors. This is propaganda thinly disguised as demographic advice to promote their interests, and expect the public to swallow it, and pay for it!

Surely the people of Australia have had enough of corporate control, and our population growth has been controlled for too long by vested interest groups? Population control, through tweaking of demographic trends for constant growth, is a violation of self-determinism and human rights."

Bandicoot is right and, what's more, Australia needs more bandicoots.

NOTES

[1] From HSBC's site at: http://www.hsbc.com.au/1/2/about/world

"Headquartered in London, the HSBC Group serves customers worldwide from around 6,300 offices in over 75 countries and territories in Europe, Hong Kong, Rest of Asia-Pacific, North and Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa. With assets of US$2,671bn at 31 December 2013, the HSBC Group is one of the world's largest banking and financial services organisations. [...]

HSBC's strategic direction reflects its position as 'The world's leading international bank', combining the largest global emerging markets banking business and a uniquely cosmopolitan customer base with an extensive international network and substantial financial strength.

The Group's strategy is aligned with the key trends which are shaping the global economy. In particular, HSBC recognises that, over the long term, developing markets are growing faster than the mature economies, world trade is expanding at a greater rate than gross domestic product and life expectancy is lengthening virtually everywhere.

HSBC's strategy is focused on delivering superior growth and earnings over time by building on the Group's heritage and skills. Its origins in trade in Asia have had a considerable influence over the development of the Group and, as a consequence, HSBC has an established and longstanding presence in many countries. [...]"

Article by Sheila Newman and James Sinnamon.

Absence of choice hallmark of Big Population

The tone is dictatorial: You will have a Big Australia. It will be perhaps 48.3m in 45 years. Nowhere in the article is anyone saying who decided to allow such high immigration or questioning the events leading up to this - certainly not the current Australians or those of 20 to 40 years ago. It is as if the author, who is the Melbourne Bureau Chief for the Australian Financial Review knows about some change afoot that the rest of us don't suspect; perhaps something violent that will stop dead any revolt as more and more Australians realise what they are being herded towards.

Aztec-like traditions

Aztec-like, the article harbingers the elites' desired crammed Australia with a symbolic child sacrifice, Alexander Marshall of Malvern East. As with the best traditional victims, Alexander, who looks about 5 years old, has no say in his fate. Innocence is what the gods and the elites require. Alex's appearance as a star on the elite-media altar that is the Australian Financial Review will be all too brief. Soon, through the aging process, he will look different from his photograph here. If the elites who drive the big financial markets and Australia's distant governments have their way, Alexander will gradually fade into an ever growing crowd of Australians suffering shortages of vital resources and competing with a stream of foreign born students and workers who will, by that time, have completely overwhelmed Alex's contemporaries. With immigration 60 per cent of Australia's population growth now and if the anticipated population of 48.3 (or more) actually happens, most of those people will be a foreign born selection-weighted for their ability to out-compete the natives in housing, income, position and status.

The infill process

Alex's suburb, Malvern East, will be unrecognisable, well before he reaches fifty, for Malvern East is doomed by planners to 'high densification', part of the plan to cram in that 48.3m and the next 48.3m and the ones after those. This old suburb, with its spacious and ornate wooden houses (all that is left of once vast forests nearby), its broad-leafed plane trees on every street, is already pocked with moonscaped sites and notices announcing twelve new units for a single block.

Scapegoating the elderly

The article pretends, "That people can expect to live longer than any other period in history is a main driver of this population increase." In reality it is out-of-proportion mass immigration that is clearly driving Australia's overpopulation. Ironically, that immigration, far from keeping the population youthful, is actually increasing the rate of aging. The article uses the old fallacy that we need many migrants to care for our hugely aging population, without ever admitting - does the writer even realise? that past immigration contributes more aged to our population than the native-born? See "Immigration speeds up Australia's rate of aging - FECCA" and High post-war immigration blamed for today's economic problems.

For a completely different way to manage the needs of our population and economy, see: "Discussing Australia's Dependency ratio 2009 with graph by Dr Katharine Betts".

Scapegoating outer-suburbanites and the disabled

Another hallmark of this typically growthist article is its scapegoating of certain classes. Scapegoats include those who live at a distance from the CBD away from major transport routes. They are portrayed as costing the rest of us for infrastructure, however elsewhere, the article acknowledges that population growth is driving housing unaffordability and thus pushing people outwards to cheaper lots. (High density inner suburbs also need lots of infrastructure - consider the proposed and already hated East-West Link. High-rise use more fuel to run than houses.) The aged, of course, are accused of being the reason that we must all submit to our 'demographic destiny'.

The AFR beats the ageist drum, beginning the article by evoking how a tram has to wait while a 70 year old man with a prosthetic leg slowly mounts it. "Getting drivers to wait for passengers to reach their seats is just one example of the changes we will have to make in the way we live and work if we are to cope with the massive population changes experts predict." The problems with this image and its conclusion are multiple. Firstly, people have long lived to 70 plus and had prosthetic limbs. (Remember Long John Silver?). Secondly, we are in a society that promotes independence for the disabled. Thirdly, and much more relevantly, has the author not noticed that women with prams and toddlers usually also cannot mount moving trams at a run. This is an example of the absurd lengths to which journalists, high and low, are expected to go to market the growthist message in Australia. They might as well be writing for real-estate agencies, but in fact they are. Both the Fairfax and Murdoch press are heavily invested in global marketing of Australian real-estate among their many other corporate interests. More and more of the pages of the Australian Financial Review these days are taken up with real-estate, property development, land-marketing, land-use planning arguments, and industries associated with immigration. This article by Dunckley is just one more example, a double-pager one, signifying that someone there thinks they have to step up the pace of propaganda.

Live AFR videos: Rebecca Thistleston tells of measures the Building Industry advocates the government adopt for a sufficient number of houses to cope with population growth to be built; Matt Starkey describes our future with more than double (48 million) our current population (23 million) by 2061 and 70 million by 2100.

Demographic mythology of the Growth Lobby

I have been reading articles like this one in the Australian press since the early 1990s, when I began to understand what was driving Australia's population growth in the face of manifest democratic disquiet. See The Growth Lobby in Australia and its Absence in France, which first identified what it is about our system and other Anglophone systems that makes it so hard to stop population growth when elites are driving it. For a short explanation of what the "Growth Lobby" is, see "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future". I recently wrote a book, the result of ten years of independent work on population and economic theories, (S.M. Newman, Demography Territory and Law: The Rules of Animal and Human populations, Countershock Press, 2013.) I honestly know quite a lot about population and I can tell you that this article is a compendium of demographic mythology, thrown together to prop up a failing economy in the short-term, and throwing the rest of us to the wolves. The scale of population growth that this article is advocating is nothing short of an invasion.

Why it all makes sense

My attention was first drawn to Mathew Dunckley's article in the Financial Review by a number of people who are concerned about the consequences of overpopulation in Australia. A frequent remark was that it did not make economic sense to advocate a situation where democracy would be frankly reduced by crowding of electorates and an increasing number of people would face malnutrition, homelessness and disease. Why would anyone advocate such a situation? The answer seems to be that this situation benefits a few corporations and their investors. The banks want it, the property developers want it, the miners and building materials producers want it, and the newspapers want it. They want it because there is global economic decline and they have important investments in resources and commodities that benefit from increased demand. They know that increasing demand by driving up population growth will cause poverty and social dysfunction. But they don't care. Unlike the Australian, the Age, the Herald Sun, the Sydney Morning Herald or the Courier Mail etc., which all have the same agenda , the Australian Financial Review does not even pretend to care about 'democracy' or the 'people'.

Tourism vs Big Business - an example of the paradigm

Many people in Australia are worried about the effect of human population growth and infrastructure expansion on Australian wildlife and habitat. They often seek economic arguments to defend other creatures and the beauty of nature against people and forces that appear completely uninterested in anything but money. So these conservationists wonder why, for instance, koalas are being driven extinct through the rapid removal of their remaining patchy habitat. Why, they wonder, would the government damage local tourist industries by removing the very things that attract so many people to this country? This conundrum arises repeatedly. Indeed the native animal and wild spaces tourism is a huge and valuable source of income for many people in Australia, and particularly for those in rural areas. So, why would government policy be so much more inclined to destroy than to protect it? The answer is obvious to anyone except those who still believe that Australia's governments try to promote what is best for most Australians. Our governments are only interested in what is good for banks, property developers, and allied corporations. Our elites and their parliamentary servants have become quite distant from nature and reality. They have no feeling for their compatriots, only for their financial and political peers. They are not interested in local economies; they are probably against local self-sufficiency, cooperation and self-government. So, the senseless makes sense, in a way, if you are blinded by greed.

Ausfis is one of many private immigration agencies in Australia promoting a problematic political message that sounds like they are representing all Australians and the Australian government and which many Australians would disagree with. Should migration agencies aggressively promote immigration? It's another case of advertising taking over democracy.

https://www.ausfis.org/Home.aspx

Ausfis's talk about 'a new land of opportunity' belies the biogeophysical reality of Australia - the oldest, driest continent.

This is a link that was sent to an immigrant from Peru from someone living in Peru - about inviting migrants to come to Australia because we have opportunities and skills shortages!

It not only refers to skill shortages, but it suggests that its lawyers will get applicants citizenship after four years and encourages immigrants to bring their dependent family members to live here as well, receive health care and use the public education system.

"What are the benefits of receiving a visa via the General Skilled Worker Visa program?

The grass is greener in Australia. If you are planning to make a move outside your home country, Australia should be on the top of your list as a place to make your dreams a reality. Besides legally living and working in Australia, a Australian General Skilled Visa has other benefits,
such as:

Bringing all dependent family members with you
Receiving healthcare
Using the public education system
Applying for citizenship after 4 years!"

Immigration greatly accelerates ageing of Australia's population: FECCA

Note that FECCA has only recently published a paper "Immigration speeds up Australia's rate of aging - FECCA"calling for special funding for aged immigrants because of the way immigration ages the Australian population. Every immigrant comes here older than anyone born here, but this fact is grossly magnified by the effect of bringing dependent adults as extended family here. Between 2011 to 2026 ethnic people over 80 will increase by 59% compared with 29% in the Australian-born population. Continuing high immigration threatens to make this problem unmanagable, with stress on housing, employment, water, food and power supplies undermining democracy, health and life-expectancy.

Ausfis looks very official and could easily be mistaken for an Australian Government website and message, but it isn't. It is a private business composed of people who make money out of processing migration applications. In fact, it does clearly state what it is at the bottom of the page and the agency promotion style seems responsible. It is not doing or saying anything illegal or misleading; it is, indeed, apparently promoting government policy.

Currently immigration to Australia outweighs births over deaths. It is the main source of population growth here.

"Increased migration and fertility (2007–2011)

Source: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/2071.0main+features952012-2013
Despite the economic impacts of the global financial crisis which started in 2007 and the ongoing repercussions within global financial markets, Australia experienced strong and sustained population growth throughout the period 2007–2011 (see the graph of Annual population growth above). In 2009, the addition of 394,000 people was the highest single annual increase to Australia's population, and the annual growth rate of 1.8% was unmatched since 1972. Migration was a significant factor in the population growth during this period. For the first time since federation, migration consistently contributed more to population growth than the contribution from natural increase. However, much of this recent increase has come from increased numbers of long-term temporary migrants; those with student, holiday and business visas (for more information see Migration, Australia (cat. no. 3412.0). The effect of this high level of migration can be seen in the 25–29 years age group in 2011, where there were an additional 385,000 people compared with the numbers in this cohort when they were aged 5–9 years in 1991. "

We applaud the initiatives of the Gillard Federal Government today in refunding Aged Care. PM unveils $3.7bn overhaul of aged care, Friday April 20, 2012. We are particularly impressed to read that: "The [Gillard] government rejected a Productivity Commission recommendation that proposed allowing the use of reverse mortgage facilities to help fund care costs." Good on the Gillard government! Reverse mortgages steal inheritances, impoverish youth and render them homeless, and amount to double charges for old age care provision (on top of taxes). We republish a relevant and well-researched article on this matter. See also "Ageism" and ABC article on reverse mortgages.

Article by Sheila Newman with Jill Quirk. First published June 16, 2011. Republished for news relevance on April 20, 2012. Title changed at this time to include 'Reverse mortgage and other'.

Original 'teaser' for 2011 publication

This article applies to all Australians, including men. Women live longer, however, so age discrimination is actually also a feminist issue. The Australian system builds in a bias of financial vulnerability for women. Any property women may have accumulated despite this bias is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care. If you have assets worth more than $39,000 you may be levied up to $30.55 per day. Unless the people who live in the house you occupied are your partner or relatives who qualify for some kind of income supplement, which is similarly assessed. There is a “financial hardship” provision but it is assessed on a case by case basis, which amounts to secretly, and, given the income criteria above, one would expect it to be Dickensian. And population pressure makes it all worse.

Main points

Women live longer so age discrimination is also a feminist issue

Any property ordinary people may have accumulated is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care

• If you have assets worth more than $39,000 you may be levied up to $30.55 per day
• Unless the people who live in the house you occupied are your partner or qualify for income support, but then only if they qualify for some kind of income supplement, which is similarly assessed.
• There is a “financial hardship” provision but it is assessed on a case by case basis and, given the income criteria above, one would expect it to be Dickensian.

Aged Care robs the poor of their Land and Inheritance

• This algorithm obviously doesn’t take property inflation into account, either as a cost or as a so-called “asset” and it doesn’t ensure that your children and grandchildren will be protected and sheltered after you have gone. It makes it even easier for the banks to own everything and for everything you have worked for to go into the hands of private business interests.

How the government is making the elderly pay again for their health care

Nursing home care: The residential care facility becomes the chronically ill person's home. It counts as medical care for income tax purposes, but is not counted as medical care for other purposes. Arguably this is a breach of citizens' rights to free public medical care in Australia, denied them on the basis of age.

High land costs erode affordability of nursing homes and shrink profit margins

What else is really wrong with the health care system: why so many elderly people occupy ?80% of beds

• Ambulances misused
• Lack of visiting nurses
• Lack of visiting GPs
• Lack of trained Personal Care Assistants
• Rental and Land costs erode funds for wages, so we cannot pay these people properly
• Many of the 80% elderly in hospital beds could be dealt with better and more cheaply at home

Some fixes for the Oz Health Care system within the limitations of the current [insufficient] paradigm

Recommendation: Close beds and divert the funds to community-based care.

Conclusion: Why the costs of aged health care are not the taxpayer or the elderly person’s responsibility, but the government’s. (Land costs and failure to provide services in the community)

Women live longer so Age-Discrimination is a Feminist issue:

Although this article definitely concerns elderly men, age discrimination affects more women than it does men and they are materially more vulnerable to its effects. Why does age-discrimination affect more women? Simply because more women live longer, by a substantial margin.

We choose here to attract the attention of elderly women to this matter because it tends to take them unawares. We want men to read this article as well though because it directly concerns them as well. It also concerns peoples' children because it affects their inheritance rights to shelter in a country where most people can no longer guarantee indefinitely against homelessness.

The Australian System builds in a bias of financial vulnerability for women

Why are women more materially vulnerable to the effects of age-discrimination?

By materially vulnerable, we are referring to the average earnings, savings, shares, superannuation and property held by women. It is well-known that women earn less overall than men because women’s work is less well-paid. For elderly women this was actually true in legislation until 1972 when women were awarded equal pay for equal work, however 40% of women did not do work which was considered equal to men’s work, and this situation is still not entirely remedied. Many women also work fewer hours due to caring for children. Women are also less likely to be promoted into high management with higher pay in any workforce situation due to positive discrimination towards men in the work-force.

Any property Women accumulate is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care

Some of the positive discrimination in the work force towards men is partly rectified by the tendency for wives to inherit from their deceased husbands. This however works against women whose husbands remarry, for it is likely to be the last wife who inherits what the husband has accumulated. Divorce also tends to leave women worse off than it leaves men if they have children, particularly if the married couple’s income relied on the man as the sole wage-earner. Although divorced couples are obliged to split up their property, they are not obliged to split up the wage ongoing. The man (or the woman’s wage) is their own. Courts will award payments to the children, but these tend to be rather inadequate. That means that if the woman is caring for the children and cannot work, she must rely on subsistence allowances from Social Security. If she is a mother then her chances of having a history of equal wages, education and training are less than a man’s, as are her future chances of getting these.

Historically British territories and colonies have tended to have inheritance laws favouring males, notably in Britain where, until 1922, only the first born male could inherit land. Although parents may now leave their estates to whomever they please, the tendency is still to leave more to boys than to girls. This situation puts women at an immediate disadvantage in life and is one of the reasons that women are intrinsically more dependent on marriage to raise children in our society than in France, for instance, where equal inheritance by children is the law.

Where a person marries more than once, the tendency of the law is to award all the estate to the latest spouse. This usually leaves any earlier wives, including de facto wives, in the cold, along with their children, who are very poorly protected under Australian law. These situations increase the bias against female property accumulation and mean that when women are old they have lesser means to enjoy their retirement and to pay for health care.

[There are exceptions which you can read about in a good 2010 transcript and interview on the ABC Law Report http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2010/3016770.htm] Note however, that few ordinary women can afford to pay a lawyer, let alone go to court.

Women and Age Discrimination in our Medical Care System

There is a lot, a lot wrong with the way that our medical system treats the elderly - male and female. Women however bear the brunt of this medical system age discrimination.

We are born in a women'’s hospital, a general hospital or at home. At this point in our lives all efforts are made to give us the best start in life. New babies are screened for medical and sensory defects and early intervention is commenced where any needs are detected. Whilst maternal care is probably not as luxurious as it was a few decades ago when mothers were relieved of normal responsibilities and full care of their babies for about 10 days after the birth, they are still at least cared for in hospital for a day or two, funded through the medical system.

During childhood, serious illnesses and accidents are dealt with through the medical system and children’s' hospitals. Of course where long term care is needed for a disability, the system is seriously inadequate. Institutions and processes caring for the seriously disabled are universally underfunded and under-resourced.

Treatment of other accidents or injuries are paid for through Medicare national medical insurance –(up to a point) in the public hospital system or the private hospital system where, ironically, if you carry private insurance, you end up paying far more in out of pocket expense than you would if you carried no insurance and were treated in the public system. Still - one has a choice – if one has the money!

How the situation changes when you are elderly

When you are classified as elderly, the situation changes. You go into hospital as a normal adult, with, for example, a leg break from a fall at home. When hospital treatment has gone as far as it can you are then assessed by a team of medical and social work professionals in conjunction with your family (if you have one). If, following this, you are unable to go home again you will need to go into long term care.

At this point your whole accumulated wealth over a lifetime and income will be assessed in determining how much you now pay for essential medical care.

If you have no wealth apart from your house, this may need to be sold or remortgaged to pay a deposit on a place in an aged care facility. Medicare does not care for your next hospitalization - the nursing home. The Act that provides for this is The Aged Care Act 1997. The exceptions for low-income earners are truly Dickensian:

According to Elderly Rights Advocacy (www.era.asn.au):

“The following people are not required to pay an accommodation charge:
• residents whose assets are worth less than 2.25 times the annual single age pension ($39,000 as at 20/3/11);
• users of respite care;
• anyone who is suffering financial hardship (this is decided by the Department of Health and Ageing);
• residents entering low level care or an extra service facility to receive either low or high level care (these residents may be asked to pay an accommodation bond instead): and
• “concessional” residents.”

Aged Care robs the poor of their Land and Inheritance

Whatever the thresholds and grab-back clauses, an important consideration that is never canvassed is the effect on peoples’ inheritance. Land and housing go out of the family and into private business. In a context of rising housing prices family homes and other assets which might have compensated children for the harsh economic conditions they have been born into, are not available to them.

What do people pay taxes for? Most people pay somewhere around one third of their income in income tax. On top of this there are rates and charges for services, and on top of these, the Goods and Service Tax (GST).

What do we get in return?

Before the second world war the rate of income tax was a great deal less – perhaps around 10%. Income tax was introduced to Australian states between 1880 and 1907. In 1849 in NSW income tax was introduced at the rate of 6 pence in the pound. (A pound contained 240 pence]

Overall we work harder for many less basics and we need more costly items, such as cars for travel. The major cost which has risen is the cost of land, which underpins all other costs and cuts profits.

The care of elderly people and of disabled people used to be provided mainly by the state, using crown land, for which no rent was charged. The state did not need to make a profit and costs were paid for by income tax. The state has since sold off most of the land where buildings with suitable services were provided to private developers. Most of those developers have turned this land over to private housing. So the services it once provided have disappeared. As population has increased in this country (due to government policies to increase it through immigration) the price of land for any building or business, including agriculture, has greatly increased – to levels among the highest in the world.

Nursing care and special accommodation is now provided by private business, which needs to make a profit.

Now old age care providers complain that they not only cannot make sufficient profits, but they cannot even make ends meet. All sorts of adjustments have been made to the supply and remuneration of labour in order to mitigate this problem. For instance doctors and nurses have been imported from other countries and these people are taxed at a much higher rate than Australian nationals. In this way the government actually cuts the cost of wages in some government facilities. Another instance is where registered nurses and state enrolled nurses have been replaced by Personal Service Attendants, with no professional health delivery training, who are placed in charge of frail and elderly persons with medical problems and who need their medication supervised.

The one adjustment that needs to be made is the reduction in the cost of land and rent.

This discriminatory treatment of a whole class of citizens has far-reaching undesirable consequences for most of our population, but it advantages the property development and conveyancing industry. Probably due to their enormous influence over Australian governments, this economically and socially unsustainable situation continues to consolidate.

Ageist growth-spruikers normalise dispossession and unfair imposts

For instance Bernard Salt, of KPMG, and Andrew MacLeod, of The Committee for Melbourne, with the help of Murdoch's Herald Sun, recently tried to market the idea of older people selling their low density properties to make way for higher density ones for younger people.

"If they are an empty-nester living near a school they are actually taking a role that from a society's perspective would be better taken by a family." (Andrew MacLeod)

See the article, "Should Jeannie Pratt and Elisabeth Murdoch downsize to high rises in Activity Centers to give young people more room?" There was no acknowledgement that, in the normal course of life, old peoples' properties go to their children or other relatives who survive them. For the property industry, this traditional legacy is undesirable because it cuts down on their potential opportunities to make money on property transactions. It does this by avoiding a commercial transaction in the transmission of property. The state still makes a quid, through death duties, but the State and the property development hanger-ons (conveyancers/lawyers, subdividers, builders, agents etc) get few or no bites at the property of the deceased.

“Now Australia's "Productivity Commission," is advocating so-called "reforms" for the $10.1 billion sector, which would force people to pay between 5% and 25% of their incomes towards old-age care, and which would include their actual homes as part of their incomes. This proposal has been called "HECS for the elderly."” (April 22, 2011, Herald Sun

In fact this proposal does not seem much different from what is already happening. Basically no person with any assets above $39,000 can keep ownership of their home and get aged care unless those who live in their house are pensioners of some kind with similarly small asset bases.

Such measures entail mortgages being taken on the family home, to be paid after the death of the home-owner. This makes the bank the owner of the home and capable of dispossessing any future inheritors or that they simply inherit colossal debts.

Serfdom for Australians

This is a form of serfdom.

It is all part of a trend toward dispossession of a larger and larger class of people. Ask yourself what will happen when - as in feudal times - only a very few people in society own all the property, all the assets and all the means of production. Everyone else will have only their labour and skills to sell in an employers' market.

Why would any free people allow such a thing to happen? If Australia were really a democracy, how could any government auspiced commission dare to propose such abrogation of basic rights through enslavement and theft? The excuse is always 'economic efficiency', but this is really only an excuse. It does not stand up to examination because economic efficiency in Australia is constantly undermined by huge land and housing prices which erode profit margins. The only give in the system involves legislating for undemocratic wealth transfer - robbing the poor to give to the rich. Since the property moguls are constantly making laws and policies to push property prices up, that only leaves wages that can be pushed down and privately owned homes that can be acquired through debt induced by such government policies as mortgaging elderly peoples' homes by threatening to leave them with no services as they near death.

Under European law, the State not only has the duty of providing health care for people of all ages, but it also has the duty to provide shelter. And, when a person dies, if their property does not go to their nearest kin, taxes penalise those who acquire it. We need such laws in Australia.

What happens to elderly peoples' property when they go into homes? What happens to their children's inheritance? How much does it contribute to homelessness?
What can we do about it?

Can we demand back our rights to property?

Some fixes for the Oz Health Care system within the limitations of the current [insufficient] paradigm

80% of public hospital beds are taken up with people over 65 years old, of which a good proportion are over 75 years old. Private hospitals are different because people are admitted for elective surgery and discretionary treatments. Private hospitals can also pick and choose who they take.

Most hospitalisation for any person is in the last two years of life. Medically the most expensive time of anyone's life is in the last two years, regardless of age.

The aim of the nursing home care is to keep the person as independent as possible. Often the services they are paying for would cost less if they were delivered in their real homes.

Unfortunately, health cover - public and private - doesn't cover home care, except where it is provided by medical practitioners. Some private insurers do cover some post-hospitalisation care, such as rehabilitation.

Most chronic conditions could be treated preventatively and conservatively in the community. Take, for instance, the need of many diabetics for frequent continuing podiatry. With medicare you can get five visits per year, but this is often insufficient. Because podiatry access is insufficient, complications become more serious and require expensive and extensive hospitalisations for problems like ulcers, resistive infections and amputations. Those complications affect blood sugar and increase the risks of blindness, cardiac complications and muscle wastage.

People with chronic or end of life illnesses, like respiratory problems and heart failure, can live in the community for years with occasional medical crises and readjustments. When they have these crises in the community, their options boil down to General Practitioners, ambulances, hospitals and nursing homes. GPs are flat out and almost never make home visits any more. In many cases outside of big Australian cities, you just cannot get a G.P. if you don't already have one. You also cannot change to another if you don't like the first.

Ambulance services spend a lot of their very expensive time and taxpayer funds attending to crises caused by simple handicaps of age or disability - such as falls which interrupt the person's capacity to care for themselves only because the person is unable to get up unaided, even though they are not injured. These do not require specialist attention, but simple mechanical help. Just imagine if you could call 000 or another number and ask for prompt and necessary assistance from a non-specialist person employed by the council for residents. This could solve a lot of problems.

Respiratory problems and heart failure need good oversight in partnership with the patient in the home, as well as crisis plans. The person with such a slowly deteriorating condition should be able to ring their GPs if necessary. Because GPs are so busy, however, they ring 000, end up in a public emergency department, in an acute system, and the hospital goes into overdrive with admission, treatment, and tests.

Allied health professionals, such as physiotherapists, can be very useful for keeping people mobile. There are not enough allied health providers working in the community. For example, one large regional center might have only one physiotherapist for 10,000 people which is not sufficient, compared to three physiotherapists for six thousand, in an inner Melbourne suburb.

Personal Carers are skilled to help in all kinds of non-medical situations that can cause problems for people with medical conditions like frailty or poor balance. They can help with gardening, cooking, cleaning, tidying, posting letters, etc. Local government provides Personal Carers, but they are in high demand, badly distributed, and low-paid (of course). Wealthy people have greater access to them through private agencies, but it is very hard for ordinary people to get enough of these services. For this reason many people finish up in hospital with avoidable problems like malnutrition, falls, severe depression from isolation and helplessness.

In most states of Australia Community Care is very fragmented. You might get someone something through one scheme and someone else something through another scheme, but you need to know the ropes intimately. The knowledge and skills to source and find funding for scarce services is not available to everyone, which means that people often don't get access to things that are available and which they need, although often enough those things are not even available.

There is a crisis of insufficiency. It's not just a matter of coordination. Coordinating nothing does not lead to something. There is a catch-cry of "Stop Duplication," but why not have duplication if that is what is needed? Multiply services by four or five and you might begin to provide what is needed

Recommendation: Close beds and divert the funds to community-based care.

20 per cent of the population are admitted to Australian hospitals in any one year. This is much higher than in other countries.

It is obviously very costly to have lots of elderly people with mild problems taking up acute hospital beds. If we diverted the funds from a proportion of those beds to the training and deployment of usefully skilled non-medical staff in the community, so much more could be achieved, saving elderly Australians and their children from losing their homes to pay for unnecessarily expensive residential care.

So, why should Australians pay, not just with their taxes, but with their homes and inheritances, for aged care when the high costs of hospital care are ridiculous, avoidable, and not very effective?

Article by Sheila Newman with Jill Quirk, based on their presentation on 3RPP's Freewaves Feminist program, on 16 June 2011.

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light...." Brendan Behan's famous poem evoques wise old men, but we think that widows should rage as much as widowers, of course. Or sit down to a nice relaxing cup of tea with the dog and the cat in the absence of packs of screaming children and demanding husbands.

After our article, "Should Jeannie Pratt and Elisabeth Murdoch downsize to high rises in Activity Centers to give young people more room?" which reported on how the Committee for Melbourne and other growth lobby proponents seemed to discount the rights and value of elderly people in an ageist campaign to get them to vacate their homes to make way for infilling, we felt that we should do more to defend and promote the interests of the silver-headed.

by Brendan Behan

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Or, if you don't care to rage:

be a merry widow.

Committee for Melbourne growthers are scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for new ways to get people to move to the hated high-rises the property development lobby has planned all over Melbourne. Mary Drost says, "Both Andrew McLeod and Bernard Salt are obsessed with growth. It is exactly this growth that is making Melbourne less liveable as everything is overstretched." Jill Quirk asks, "I wonder if Salt and MacLeod think widows Jeannie Pratt or Elisabeth Murdoch should vacate their premises for a flat in an "activity centre" or is just people who inhabit more modest post war triple fronted accommodation who are being asked to move over ?"

Committee for Melbourne

A group with an apparent interest in land speculation, with the dignified sounding name of The Committee for Melbourne, is pushing a crude barrow to get elderly people to give up their homes. It wants them to agree to be rehoused in high-density apartment blocks and thinks that if the State government lets them pay less stamp duty, they just might be tempted. This was the subject today of an article by John Masanauskas in the Herald Sun, "Lobby group calls for older couples to give up family homes," 17 February 2011.

Sardine City

It is probably not coincidence that, at the same time, Boroondara Council is trying to force 48 so-called "activity centres" (i.e. high rise developments) on its protesting residents. In a hangover from the Brumby government's human sardine policy, the council hopes to attract some of an additional 17,600 people that a few business hopefuls have promoted as likely to arrive over the next 16 years, based on shaky statistical projections.

Bernard Salt, the well-known KPMG spruiker for population growth and megacities, and the CEO of the Committee for Melbourne, Andrew McLeod, have managed to leave some unfortunate quotes for posterity.

Weird, no fun world of statistical cohorts

Herald Sun writer, John Masanauskas, gives the impression that Salt believes that middle Melbourne (whatever that is) is fraught with the probability that "dad's going to drop dead and mum's going to be living by herself in a three-bedroom home". Salt predicts that the iconic 'mum' will eventually "find that the three-bedroom home with a garden and lawn becomes too much for her and she will therefore want to downsize."

In Salt's world, like Brumby and Bracks's macho-small-minded worlds, all women are 'mums' if they aren't girls trying to overcome a 'man drought' [catch his latest book], and all men are 'dads'. One senses that they are doomed, like cabbage moths, to fly and mate, lay their eggs, then die. Some, however, live on past their use-by date and become 'empty nesters', as CEO, Andrew McLeod calls them, opining:

"If they are an empty-nester living near a school they are actually taking a role that from a society's perspective would be better taken by a family."

You get the picture. According to this kind of view, societies and their suburbs should be reorganised into age cohorts. None of this bowls club down the end of the street and the little old lady in the corner shop, or the old man sitting on his porch in the sun, surveying his tomato patch, and the children visiting the lady over the road to climb her mulberry tree and use her grown-up daughter's books and toys, while their mother heads down for a game of tennis and their father takes the dog for a long walk up to the top of the hill to watch the sun set over the bay.

Salt and McLeod seem to have an odd and naively statistical view of societies, where people are labelled according to some of their qualities, like cards in packs, and are okay about being moved around in a kind of Lego world on the whim of some boys who never quite got over playing Monopoly.

Jill Quirk, SPA Victoria

Jill Quirk, President of Sustainable Population Victoria, comments:

"I think the rhetoric from Bernard Salt and Andrew Macleod that widows and "empty nesters" should leave their homes" and move into apartments for the convenience of others who would like to buy their houses is opportunistic , sexist, vulture-like, devoid of compassion or understanding, and the language of Grandpa and Grandma and (quote Bernard Salt) "rattling around in their veneers" is belittling to ordinary people.

"I wonder what the adult children of these targets of the hovering developers and real estate agents think of this blackmail? I also wonder if Salt and MacLeod think widows Jeannie Pratt or Elisabeth Murdoch should vacate their premises for a flat in an "activity centre" or is just people who inhabit more modest post war triple fronted accommodation who are being asked to move over ?"

She adds,

"Behind the figure of ridicule, the widow, whose husband has "dropped dead" is a person in shock, in grief and who is making a huge adjustment to a major life-change.

Importantly, she perceives,

"The widow is extremely vulnerable and could well fall prey to the kind of persuasion and pressure that Macleod and Salt seem to want to institutionalise so that everyone these people meet will echo the same refrain. 'Don't rattle around in the veneer, it is your civic duty to move out of your house now and let a young family with children at Lauriston and Camberwell Grammar move in.'"

And then she asks an interesting question:

"I wonder what Barry Humphries might say about this. He ridiculed the Australian suburban lifestyle for decades but I don't think he ever seriously thought of disrupting it and breaking it down."

What next? Will Mr McLeod and Mr Salt be investing in cemeteries and urging everyone to buy vertical plots in order to squeeze more coffins in? With the baby boomer curve on course to crash over the next 20 years, it's a sure thing.

Mary Drost of Planning Backlash

Planning Backlash is the name of an umbrella group under which many different suburban groups gather to protect the rights of citizens whose environments and properties are threatened by intensification of development and the population growth that drives this. Mary Drost is their main spokesperson.

Mary says that all of Melbourne will be affected by this population growth and overdevelopment if the Boroondara Council gets away with it, and that the local people are furious that Booroondara Council is continuing a densification plan dating from when Justin Madden was Planning Minister under the Brumby government, which lost power in the last election. Densification will wreck the area, she says, and Planning Backlash is appealing to their State Member, Ted Baillieu, for help based on promises he made before the election.

Mary is actually pictured in John Masanauskas's article in a photo by Ben Swinnerton (which I have cropped above), leaning, smiling, over a picket fence, with a large sunny garden behind her.

She says,

"Both Andrew McLeod and Bernard Salt are obsessed with growth. It is exactly this growth that is making Melbourne less liveable as everything is overstretched. Their obsession is taking them to new boundaries, now they want the older people to get out of their houses to make way for the next generation. Maybe they want to euthanase us as well. I am not going to be stuck in a dog box to keep McLeod and Salt happy!"

She adds, "They would have done well at the time of the Russian Revolution, move the mobs into the big houses and let the owners live in one room. How would the grandmothers look after their grandchildren in dog boxes? What a nerve!"

As her own lifestyle shows, everyone is not a poor old used up mum or a dad pining away without purpose. For years, in a tradition starting with her mother, young couples have been living rent-free in a little flat that Mary's husband and she had made at the side of the house. In this way they "get a start in life." In return they help where they can.

"People usually stay about three years and then get their own place, after they have saved a deposit," Mary said. "Sometimes our guests have been young couples who were relatives."

At the moment, she is sharing her house with one couple, who "came back for a while." In the flat on the property there is a second couple.

She thinks and I think that this is a good way to use property. But it's not what Salt and McLeod would want, because their objective is to increase property turnover. Their guiding principle is commercial, not social.

Mary says that her brother and his wife, who have grandchildren, could not do without a big house, as they are "forever having children coming to stay and the families come home for dinner sometimes twice a week."

"What nonsense to say that we should all be moving into dog boxes," Mary exclaims. "Some no doubt want to, but I tell you this, it is the quickest way to give up and age and die. If you want to stay young then stay active. Don't forget that the government wants people to age in place and not go into nursing homes. The Dutch do this very well Australia should learn from them."

Mr Salt's residence

Ironically, Bernard Salt, who looks to be over sixty in his photographs, actually lives in a heritage house a couple of blocks from Mary. We googled the address we were given and provide a picture above. We have removed the name of the street from the picture.[1] Candobetter.net doesn't believe in exposing peoples' addresses unnecessarily, but it does seem on the face of it that Mr Salt talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk, and it is of interest to those dealing with the impacts of his marketing to see where he is actually coming from.

Since her photo and some comments appeared in Masanauskas's article, a number of people have looked Mary up in the phone book and have called her, agreeing strongly with her defense of her right to remain in her home.

[1] After an unsolicited comment which complained about this exposure of Mr Salt, we canvassed our editors and writers who all agreed that it was relevant to show how Mr Salt lived. It was felt however that the important thing was to convey how he lived, which should include the suburb (of which it seemed typical, and which was the same suburb as Mary Drost's), but not necessarily the street. Therefore we have reduced the information on the photo. Discussion welcome.

We look at Dr Katharine Betts's latest graph of ABS statistics on the ratio of working to dependent in Australia, noting that it is both untrue and discriminatory to imply that the 'Aged' are by far the biggest group of 'dependents.' In relation to the graph, we also look at the role of land-use planning and the social division of work in industrial society in creating financial dependencies where none previously existed. We note that established financial and institutional investment in the post-war industrial-contractual model makes it inflexible and resistant to changes in economic feedback, but that change it must as fossil fuels deplete. Left to their own devices, Australians would probably return to the human default social organisation around kin and place, which is flexible and low cost. This will only become possible, however, with cheaper land and an economic system which permits increasing relocalisation and more flexible use of land than the current plans for packed appartments and dense dormitory-suburbs anticipate.

Click on above image to see larger full-size graph.

Sources: Disability, Ageing and Carers: Summary of Findings, Australia 2003, Catalogue no. 4430.0, ABS, Canberra, 2004; Labour Force, Australia, Detailed - Electronic Delivery, Catalogue no. 6291.0.55.001; General Social Survey 2006, Confidentialised Unit Record File supplied by the ABS.

Notes: The ABS defines a profound disability as one where the person always needs help with one or more of the activities involved in communication, mobility and self care, and a severe disability as one where the person sometimes needs such help.

The data on labour force participation are for December 2009, but detailed age break downs were only available for June 2009. All of the data have been standardised to the age/sex structure of the population in June 2009.

Graph and "Notes" (above) by Assoc. Prof. Dr Katharine Betts, (Swinburne University, Victoria) author of Immigration Ideology, MUP, 1988 and The Great Divide, Duffy and Snellgrove, 1999. She is also the co-editor, with Bob Birrell, of the Monash demographic quarterly, People and Place.

Introduction: We look here at Dr Katharine Betts's latest graph of ABS statistics on the ratio of working to dependent in Australia, noting that it is both untrue and discriminatory to imply that the 'Aged' are by far the biggest group of 'dependents.' In relation to the graph, we also look at the role of land-use planning and the social division of work in industrial society in creating financial dependencies where none previously existed. We note that established financial and institutional investment in the post-war industrial-contractual model makes it inflexible and resistant to changes in economic feedback. Left to their own devices, Australians would probably return to the human default social organisation around kin and place, which is flexible and low cost. This will only become possible, however, with cheaper land and an economic system which permits increasing relocalisation and more flexible use of land than the current plans for packed appartments and dense dormitory-suburbs anticipate.

Discussion

This is a complicated graph. Rather than start out looking for the greatest number of dependents, it is probably easier to look for the greatest number of full time then of part time workers. What is outside those full-time and part time workers gives you your main 'dependents'. Many of those are defined as dependent simply because they are not working in a paid job or deriving an income from a source in their own name. They may however be receiving support from a partner, such as a husband, while they are rearing children. In addition, many of the students aged 15 and over have paid jobs, some of them full-time.

However the real dependents are those who are literally unable to work.

Dependency is defined economically, by material income and paid work or the ability to participate in getting an income, and it carries a stigma, since it is assumed that 'dependent persons' cost the taxpayer. Although we know that many women do an enormous amount of unpaid work in the home as mothers, partners and grandmothers and as volunteers, if we only count people in paid work as making an economically useful contribution, this unpaid work is overlooked. (The ABS does know about this problem; they don't mean to denigrate domestic work). If dependent means not in paid work, women are the largest 'dependent' category at all ages (even in infancy, because more survive).

How the growth lobby misrepresents the ratio of dependency

Because the growth lobby likes the idea of women having lots of children, there is a tendency to misrepresent dependency as only occurring among the elderly.

We can see, in fact, that the numbers of officially totally dependent people (the red category) remain quite small in all cohorts. These are people who, because of some disability, need help from others in order to cope with tasks of daily living, such as washing and dressing. We can also see that the largest totally dependent category- pink and pale turquoise with border - are not actually classified as such at all. They are classified as infants or students. [Due to possible confusion of similar colours, let us precise here that light blue, as opposed to turquoise with border, represents students who are employed part-time.]

It looks like the government’s and the growth lobby's constant use of 'Aged' as virtually synonymous with 'dependents' is a blatant case of age discrimination, since it implies that elderly people are by far the biggest group of the totally dependent.

There is another group in yellow which isn’t in paid employment. From the age of 60 the yellow category starts to get quite large. That doesn’t mean that it is ‘dependent’. The people in the yellow category are living by some means – probably through superannuation, pension or investments.

Much larger, however, are the pale turquoise and pink categories. These categories extend over the first 15 to 20 years of a person's life. [1]

The non-dependent categories

The green categories – i.e. the ‘employed’ – both part-time and full-time – are considered to be supporting the yellow, the red, the pink and the pale turquoise with border categories. From a purely financial perspective, it doesn't matter if they are generating taxes to support babies, students, homemakers, disabled people or elderly infirm people.

Some people worry that if the number of new babies dwindles, there won't be enough people moving up from the bottom of the pyramid to carry the dependencies that increase at the top. They forget that if a population has a smaller base than middle, that means that by the time the people in the middle stop working and the smaller population base enters the workforce, the competition for land will have reduced, so the cost of living will be much less. This will reduce the cost of funding retirees.

Positive economic impact of decrease in number of young dependents

Also to be considered is the fact that, as the proportions of pink and pale turquoise infants and full-time students decrease, so will the burden on taxpayers. Schools, child-care and health and welfare services for the young are supported by taxpayers, just as are old age pensions. But children also involve heavy private costs for their parents. And often this means that parents have to forgo earned income, as they stay out of the labour force in order to provide care. Of course children bring many intangible benefits to their parents, but from the point of view of time and money, there would be more resources for other needs if we had rather fewer of them.

With regard to the yellow categories, just because they are not in paid employment, it does not mean that they are not doing something useful. Wives or husbands support their working partner by looking after house and garden, growing food, doing accounts, looking after children, and participating in the community. Many grandparents may also look after children so that parents can work, or they provide knowledge, experience and an example to the community. Elderly people are the eyes and ears in a street where everyone else goes to work all day. There are also so many things which need attention in our society and housewives/husbands and elderly people and the unemployed are among the ones free to participate in groups monitoring the environment and political developments at all levels.

Dependency and Variations in the Social division of work and land-use planning systems

Australia's industrial social organisation and its land-use planning system have also come to mean that the extended family, with which the responsibilities of earning a living, raising a family and participating in the politics of one's community were formerly shared, has become disorganised and dysfunctional. This is not, as is often suggested, simply because Australians are 'selfish'. The early and strong continuing urbanisation of Australian society, with drift to big cities in search of work, harsh expectations of relocation along with one's employer, and migration from one country to another or one end of Australia to the other end, splinters clans from their original location, isolates nuclear families and splits up parents and children. This makes most of us ever-more-dependent on the industrial models of salaried employment, bank loans and insurance, new housing, and, notably, contractual nurturing, caring, and nursing arrangements. The industrial state has adapted to try to mitigate this fragmentation and fracture of human social systems, in formal 'social services', which it finances through much higher taxes than in pre-WW2 years. If these professionalised and contractualised services are privately contracted, they need somehow to make a profit, which also raises the costs of dependency, as we see in child-care centers and private nursing homes.

Established financial and institutional investment in this industrial contractual model makes it resistant to change, but change it must, in the face of declining margins of profit associated with declining availability of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. It is not surprising that the state is concerned about its ability to provide for 'dependent' Australians, but it should be able to recognise how the system it relies on has created more dependency and more expensive dependency. Left to their own devices, Australians would probably return to the default social organisation around kin and place, which is flexible and low cost. This will only become possible, however, with cheaper land and an economic system which permits increasing relocalisation and more flexible use of land than the current plans for packed appartments and dense dormitory-suburbs anticipate.

Notes

[1] This span of years of dependency of youth could well expand in the future if the industrial employment model doesn't last as which have tended to last for something like 20 years.

Note that finishing study, around the age of 15 or 20, does not necessarily mean an end to 'dependence'. Dependence, in the form of 'unemployment' could well expand in the future if the industrial employment model doesn't last as depletion of fossil fuel progresses. Partial dependence could expand through categories if median wages are unable to afford unsubsidised accomodation or food, power and water if land-prices continue and push up the cost of everything else.

Mark O'Connor's comments are in italics, in the form of a running commentary through Bernard Salt's article.

In "Inconvenient truth on ageing" (4 Feb 2010, The Australian), Bernard Salt, who markets his version of demography to business for profit, writes,

"WAYNE Swan clearly missed a great opportunity earlier this week with the release of the third Intergenerational Report. He referred to the report by the bureaucratic abbreviation 3IGR4, but if the Treasurer really wanted to appear "with it" he should have christened it the iGen 3.0 Report.

The Intergenerational Report is, of course, the government's key reference document canvassing policy options for managing the ageing of Australia's population."

O'CONNOR: Well at least, that’s Salt’s journalistic slant on it. He wants to see the report as about Gens X and Y and the boomers.

SALT: "-- the problem being that from 2011 onwards more baby boomers exit than Generation Ys enter the workforce."

O'CONNOR: This is a claim he keeps making, but like the basis for his claim to be a "demographer" it comes without explanation. He doesn't say whose projection he is using that shows this will begin to be the case from 2011. (Are we meant to take it on his own authority?) I note that a Google search reveals numerous demographers saying that in the USA Generation Y is bigger than the baby boomer generation, and I can't as yet find any saying the reverse for Australia. But ask Bob Birrell or Katharine Betts.

Since presumably the reverse has been the case up till 2011, I would suspect that the imbalance in 2011 will be, even on his preferred projection, very small. And probably it will not increase very fast either -- otherwise he would have laid stress on that. In short, I suspect this is a weak statistic.

SALT: "The issue is not just the number of baby boomers looking for an aged pension; it's the loss of this cohort's contribution to the tax base."

O'CONNOR: Well, by definition retirees tend to retire from higher salaries than young persons joining the workforce are on, but so what?

SALT: "The favoured solution so far to managing this matter has been to grow the worker base, and in this regard ... "

O'CONNOR: I’d have to check if that (wanting to collect more tax) was in fact Rudd’s stated reason back then. He has since offered other excuses, even defence.

SALT: "Kevin Rudd was emphatic on the ABC's 7.30 Report last October when he stated he believed in a bigger Australia, and further that he made no apology for that view. The Prime Minister's comments have sparked furious debate about the sustainability and advisability of future growth."

O'CONNOR: Yes, perhaps Salt has been feeling the heat on those interactive blogs and online letters that now follow the publication of an article. He used not to have to worry about people raising awkward debates re sustainability, water, food, etc because, at least in the Murdocch Press, there was no counter view.

Mark O'Connor is the author, with Bill Lines, of Overloading Australia, of which a new edition has just been launched. The book is about how Australia is suffering from overpopulation. Mark O'Connor will be one of three people putting the environmental case for a small population in a debate with some die-hard growthists at the next Property Council Conference.

Ageist ABC baby-boomer bashing - incites blame against older people for housing crisis.

See also: Brisbane's housing unaffordability crisis spun by ABC to promote property lobby interests of 23 Jun 08

The article "Baby Boomers Hog Housing Market" on ABC News and quoted on ABC local radio 15.8.08 runs the serious risk of engendering intergenerational resentment. In the report, "Baby Boomers" (people born between 1945 and 1960) are bagged for using the equity in their first homes to buy subsequent investment properties, thus driving up the cost of housing and depriving later generations of being able to afford a roof over their heads.

The article is sparked by information reported by the Financial Services Institute of Australasia.

It seems the blame for declining housing affordability is being laid on a whole generation (easily identifiable by their appearance as most of them are in their 50s) whereas one would be more justified in laying the blame on those who have successfully lobbied governments for very high population growth - mainly through immigration.

It is well accepted that high immigration and housing construction lagging behind the added demand that comes from immigration, is the main reason for declining housing affordability. Real estate pundits and governments admit this readily. Who would plunge themselves into debt to purchase an investment residential property and deal with the hassle of maintenance and tenants, if one did not think it would be financially worth while? The prices were already rising because there are more people needing them ! Far easier to buy some easily liquidated shares and not have the hassle!

"Working families" in their fifties who have 2 or 3 mortgaged investment properties are, as I would see it, defensively taking the crumbs they can afford in order to fund their retirement and to bequeath something to their children.

It is quite possible that many of those who lobby for population growth are in the "baby boomer" category. To blame, however, all the ordinary people in that age bracket who need to invest wisely for their retirement, not to mention those many baby-boomers without homes or superannuation, is to blame the victims. They are certainly not the main beneficiaries of rising property prices.

Coincidentally there are reported serious concerns that many people of this BB generation will have insufficient means to fund their winter years.

An article also on ABC News 4.8.08 by business editor Peter Ryan and headed "Survey reveals baby-boomers' retirement cash fears," makes one wish that more of them were able to provide adequately for themselves. Seems they are damned if they do and damned if they don't!

The August 15th article is mischievous and its conclusion is spurious. It concludes that one generation is to blame for the fact that declining housing affordability affects those who don't yet own a house and who are generally in a younger age group.

This is simplistic and sensationalist.

If the blame was laid at the feet of a particular religion or ethnic group, rather than an identifyable age group, there would be outrage and complaints to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission.

See also: Brisbane's housing unaffordability crisis spun by ABC to promote property lobby interests of 23 Jun 08

“To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, and the destruction of our most cherished values—there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally—and breed.” (Isaac Asimov)

Environmentalists have been often accused of being prophets of doom. Now there is a new species of Catastrophists: they are political and economic commentators with a pervasive lament that the world faces exponential population decline, with a “Global Aging Crisis” that threatens to “stunt” economic growth.

Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation writes that current population trends also threaten to make military actions increasingly difficult for most nations. Pensions and health care will require increased funding. As the labour force stops growing, it will become more difficult for Washington to sustain current levels of military spending or the number of men and women in uniform.

Many commentators are concerned, more or less openly, with national or international prestige, not just economic, but military. It is not just about pensions; at stake is the decline of national prestige and of capitalism, which as rule have always flourished with population growth.

Governments, media, industries and business in general have switched from their previous 1970s preoccupation with uncontrolled population growth, to focus on the consequences of unplanned Western population decline. They fear the asymmetrical proportions of an ageing population in the developed world against the youthful force of Asian nations of the new coming world. The decline of the West is seen as tantamount to decay and loss of relevance on the international stage. It is the tragedy of Western extinction. Competition about power has got a new name: Fertility.

The Canadian political analyst Mark Steyn asserts that the West is in danger of extinction. “We’re pretty much awash in resources, but we’re running out of people, the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of the others matter.” In the face of his preoccupation with the ‘demise of Western civilization’, Steyn ignores questions about the abundance of every other resource.

Since the United Nations downgraded its assumption of global population projections, from 10 billion to slightly under 9 billion by 2050, the press have reacted as if Earth were on a fatal collision course with a giant asteroid. They have created panic among the Old Cornucopians and anyone else who believes that population growth is ‘No Problem’.

However, they shouldn’t worry, because, according to these predictions, population growth is still on course to add, by 2050, a new population nearly the current size of India, or almost five times the size of sub-Saharan Africa. The trouble is, the growth will be mostly in developing countries, in places where women average six or more children (Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and Somalia) and those where they average five or more (Congo, Ivory Coast, Eritrea, Guinea, Nigeria, the Palestinian territories, Sudan and Togo). India is projected to overtake China’s population by 55%, while Indonesia is expected to increase its population by 30% and Vietnam by 40%. And if Turkey joins the EU, with a projected increase of 30 million, it will count as the Union’s most populous member.

Different projection models, seen by some as pessimistic, and by others as optimistic - conclude that there is an 85 per cent chance that the world’s population will stop growing before the end of the century. There is a 60 per cent probability that it will not exceed 10 billion people before 2100, and around a 15% probability that, at the end of the century, Earth’s population will be lower than it is today. For different regions, the date and size of peak population will vary considerably. At the global level, old age will prevail: the proportion above age 60 is likely to increase from its current level of 10 per cent to around 22 per cent in 2050.

If trends were to be borne out, by 2050 the cohort aged 65 to 84 years old would reach 1.3 billion, while those aged 88 and over would number 175 million.

These projected numbers are feared likely to impose a destructive burden on society. Hence, for some, the prospect of an end to world population growth is welcome news for sustainable development. (Lutz,Sanderson,Scherbov)

The pessimistic view of a population decline depends on absolute faith in the benefits of population growth. The new breed of pessimists is the antithesis of the Old Cornucopians and a new mutation. Their literature is studded with references to the perils of ageing.

“Economists in the West have declared that it will be impossible to sustain the present system of old age pensions.” (Mullan). “The United Nations duly convened in October 2000, a group of experts to examine issues of population aging and decline, the twin most dreaded consequences of humanity’s biological success.”

Such fear is not new. As early as 1937, John Maynard Keynes assured us that the problem of overpopulation is old hat and in its place we have a different threat: lack of demand caused by a declining population. The nationalistic content of such preoccupations was reflected in the thinking of many and endorsed by the Royal Commission which reported in 1949 the danger of a steady fall in birth-rates from 1870 (Mullan).

The European Union (EU) has an ambivalent attitude: while promoting population control policies in the developing world, it would look stupid, not to say racist, in denouncing the danger of falling birth rates in the West.

For some commentators this worry is part of a more generalised alarmism, which touches every aspect of modern society: food scares, water depletion, climate changes, family crisis, terrorism, social fragmentation, immigration, AIDS, bird flu, civil and uncivil wars, football violence, unruly teenagers, destruction of forests, and so on, some of which are suspected to have been promoted by environmentalists in search of a visible platform.

The lack of growth produces a stationary society especially if older people are excluded from the labour market. The trend has become a cause for angst, paradoxically transforming the old image of the demographic “bomb” out of recognition. No more explosions, but implosion. “An older industrial world will inevitably be a slower growing one.” (Hamish McRae)

#economy" id="economy">It’s the economy, stupid

The author offers an interpretation for the existence of the New Catastrophists. Their insistence on gloom mongering is manipulative and follows deliberate ideological ends, the ideology of eternal Growth: The Golden Calf.

The ideology underlying the population growth model is inspired by Adam Smith, mercantilist/imperialist economics, and modern demand and supply theories. (A. David Coleman)

As life expectancy has increased in the entire Western world, it has been associated with longer and healthier life spans in the older population. A 60 year old today is not the same 60 years old of twenty years ago. As a result, people can either work longer or consume less.

Ah! Consuming less! This concept is anathema for the disciples of the New Dogma—the Growth Factor. No society today, rich or poor, of left or right government, will oppose this dogma, which has become a quasi-religious belief system. It follows that economic growth cannot do without population growth.

Among supporters of population growth, the late Julian Simon is the most extreme case. He advocated continued population growth long into the future, deserving Professor Albert Bartlett’s award of membership in “The New Flat Earth Society” because a flat earth is the only earth that has the potential to allow the human population to grow forever.

“We have in our hands now - actually in our libraries - the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years… Even if no new knowledge were ever gained...we would be able to go on increasing our population forever.” (Julian Simon)

How has this self-confidence in progress and everlasting human improvement, founded on growth, given way to gloomy predictions about the future?

Again, the word on which we should concentrate is “growth”. No population growth = no economic growth. It is simple. The faith of the Cornucopians in a radiant future is based on growing growth. To anticipate lower economic expectations, resulting from less people to feed, clothe, house, educate, mobilize, and serve in the army - even if this includes unemployment, crowding, pollution, cementification, and social conflict - goes against the conventional assumption that human inventiveness doesn’t accept biological limits and is the motor of progress.

The over-optimistic view that purports humanity’s capacity to overcome every difficulty, with time, technology and lots of human beings, has turned on its head, when confronted with the awful perspective of a diminishing population.

If humans are so deft in inventing new solutions to ever increasing problems, what then stands in the way of creating new solutions to the economic affliction of demographic decline, publicised by the press and governments as the ultimate tragic event?

Surely, the same race that has sent man to the Moon - an incredibly difficult task previously thought to belong to the realm of science fiction - can manage changes arising from the so-called demographic transition?

We are being instructed to believe that the problem is economic. Ecological concerns are not a priority, nor are related issues of resource depletion, energy availability, loss of biodiversity, plunder of our natural capital. The fact that many species are in danger of extinction is not a major concern, nor that natural beauty is disappearing under tons of concrete. Though it is undeniable that the density of human populations is responsible for environmental devastation, it is also evident that not everybody is concerned. Our governments obey the economist exhortations and rightly recognise that people are mostly interested in what is called “purchasing power”.

If people were better informed about the threat to their lifestyles they would take into consideration other factors: Peak Oil is already upon us and its scarcity is already affecting their purchasing power. And if they were to reflect further, they should recognise that a less populated world would have everything to gain in security, democracy, liberty, employment, resources availability, and so on.

#solutions" id="solutions">Solutions to the crisis

A report released on Sunday, February 19th by the English Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) the leading New Labour think-tank, claimed that Britain was at a “demographic fork in the road” and needed to increase its fertility to prevent future tax rises.

The answer ? “The IPPR report says, in effect, that we need more babies to pay for our pensioners but this ignores the fact that those babies will eventually become pensioners themselves,” said David Nicholson-Lord, research associate for the Optimum Population Trust. “When that happens, we will need - on the IPPR’s logic, at least - even more babies to support the even greater number of pensioners. Population would thus have to go on increasing ad infinitum - something the planet clearly cannot support.” (David Nicholson Lord)

Behold an Editorial from The Economist of January 7th 2006, the smartest most influential magazine in the world,” according to The Sunday Telegraph

“The new demographics that are causing populations to age and to shrink are something to celebrate. Humanity was once caught in the trap of high fertility and high mortality. Now it has escaped into the freedom of low fertility and low mortality. Women’s control over the number of children they have is an unqualified good, as is the average person’s enjoyment, in rich countries, of ten more years of life than they had in 1960. Politicians may fear the decline of their nations’ economic prowess, but people should celebrate the new demographics as heralding a golden age.”

Notwithstanding the congratulating tone of this article, about the happy consequences of the lengthening of life, due to a limitation of births, the general reaction is of dismay and hand wringing. Some reactions are obsessively concentrating on a narrow issue. It is called: pension funds, or the preoccupation of providing funding to a growing number of older people.

Nobody seems to be able to find a solution, in spite of the proclaimed inventiveness of the human race.

According to certain UN figures “The ‘population bomb’ is now, officially, a dud…. The Population Division of the UN has now published a report titled ‘Replacement Migration: Is it a Solution to Declining and Aging Populations?’ that claims to address a problem population doomsayers did not predict: that within 50 years many countries around the world will be suffering from underpopulation. The report explicitly states, ‘Among the demographic trends revealed by those figures [generated], two are particularly salient: population decline and population aging.’ The report predicts that by 2050, Japan’s population will have dropped by 18 percent, Italy’s by 28 percent, and Europe as a whole by 13 percent,” according to Joseph Klesney a policy analyst at the Acton Institute.

The UN Population Division continues to worry: if the United States hopes to maintain the current ratio of workers to retirees over time, it will have to absorb an average of 10.8 million immigrants annually through 2050. At that point, however, the U.S. population would total 1.1 billion, 73 percent of whom would be immigrants who had arrived in this country since 1995 or their descendants.

Just housing such a massive influx would require the equivalent of building another New York City every 10 months. (Longman)

Europe is also deemed to need mass immigration to fix the support ratio between workers and pensioners. Britain, for example, is recommended to take a million immigrants a year to 2050, just to maintain the balance, which would bring the population to 120 millions…

Some European countries try to ignite more pro-natalist propaganda.

In extremis, some demographers recommend more immigration, in order to pay for our pensions.

But this is a theme for another, more ad hoc article.

Feeding reciprocally these up-down fears of economic decline = population decline, one of the most active and fundamentalist proponents of population growth is Ben J. Wattenberg, Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative institution supported by Big Business. And it is not strange that Big Business should support a rise in population, even through immigration, as businesses depend on a growth of their customer base. Just think how depopulation would play in favour of the construction industry.

Wattenberg “believes in the dire economic and emotional repercussions consequent to the “birth dearth”: shrinking markets, wrenching economic dislocation and great personal costs for millions of young people who decide not to raise families. (Wattenberg)

He then puts his foot in it, by bringing in scenarios of the Black Death, to support his theories. While recommending not investing in Europe, he compares our situation to “that plague demography, losing about a fifth of its population by 2050 ”.

Back in 1348, Europe suffered the Black Death or Plague, the second worst catastrophe in recorded history, which reduced the estimated European population by about a third.

It also brought stability, progress and freedom from want to the people who escaped death. As the distinguished scholar David Herlihy pointed out, the great reduction in population created opportunities for the survivors and those who came after them; there were fewer people, more jobs and a higher standard of living. (David Herlihy and Samuel K., Jr. Cohn)

Another historian agrees that, before the Black Death the continent “was caught in a Malthusian deadlock” in which “the balance between people and resources had become very tight.” After the plague, Europe “emerged from the charnel house of pestilence and epidemic cleansed and renewed, like the sun after rain.”(John Kelly)

Moreover: “Serfdom declined more rapidly. The status of women rose. Wages rose for common people. Talented young people were able to advance faster. The power of the kings declined more rapidly.” (Norman Cantor ) It is an indisputable fact that the sudden population decline stimulated labour-saving technologies that transformed the economy.

It would be nice if future population decline were not the result of tragic circumstances, but rather the consequence of many factors, all signs of progress in medicine, economic progress and cultural deliverance from old customs.

#optimists" id="optimists">Where are the Optimists?

The writer John Seager, currently writing a book on the effects of population trends around the world, asks: “Is this so-called ‘birth dearth,’ as Wattenberg puts it, really a problem? It is not. In fact, smaller families represent a great potential opportunity. The world is beset with social, political, and environmental challenges and crises;many caused by rampant population growth.” (John Seager)

Most invectives against population growth come not from straight environmentalists but from scientists:

“If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery restored.” says the biologist Richard Dawkins,

and:

“It is a simple logical truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death-rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.” Richard Dawkins

Most environmentalists appear less concerned with overpopulation. They concentrate on poverty, global warming, human rights, and many other ecological and sociological fears, but they shy away from overpopulation, which is the underlying reason for these problems. They may fear to lose many of their supporters, who believe that the real problem lies elsewhere, mostly in overconsumption by the rich.

Dr Madsen Pirie, President, Adam Smith Institute, said it: Do not worry: you said it all. We will get over this hump of population decline, go through the difficulties and come out the other side, happier and with better living conditions. The benefits of any given situation depend on good policies. (News night’s David Grossman Aug 2003 BBC)

Exponential growth cannot go on eternally and more so population growth plus economic growth.

As noted by The Economist, higher life expectancy goes hand in hand with better health, and better health may improve worker productivity and savings, and puts pressure to introduce new technologies to boost workers’ efficiency.

Policymakers should focus on the advantages of the median income on a per capita basis, which would make more individuals better off, rather than on the gross national product or national income.

If Governments hate a shrinking population is because it restricts their power status, but what matters is GDP per person.

A slowly shrinking population will bring a more egalitarian society, lower unemployment, elimination of costly and obsolete infrastructures, a stimulus to economic modernization, like the use of robots as substitute for menial labour, and improved living standards.

Although, realistically speaking, we recognize that every economic regime has its problems, population growth seems to have accumulated more than enough: they include increased import dependency for food and raw materials, increases in housing costs, congestion and crowding, marginal population ignored and exploited, balance of payments problems, inhibition of productivity growth and real income, an abundance of young people of working age, which can result in unemployment or underemployment, accompanied by political instability, elevated rates of crime, and the deterioration of social capital as a possible further consequence.

The “greying” of developed nations will provide opportunities as well as challenges. The real crux of the population question is the quality of people’s lives; the ability of people to participate in what it means to be really human; to work, play and die with dignity; to have some sense that one’s life has meaning and is connected with other people’s lives.” (Cohen, J.)

Let’s be optimistic for a change and look forward to our old age, when we will all be wiser, reasonably healthy and still active in contributing to society.

What better challenge for Cornucopians? So why not apply the famously sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg’s cheerfulness as medicine: emphasise the possibilities of technology and human creativity! (“The fact is human ingenuity has conquered every problem so far.”). I didn’t include him in my review because he is an unreconstructed optimist, the True Original Cornucopian. Because he thinks that everything is just a management problem, we shall call on him to fix things whenever they get a bit too difficult.

Dear Cornucopians who have lost their sense of reliance on technological fixes and market forces, consider that even Wattenberg and Co will come up with some extraordinary solution to our new predicament, new technological advances, and man’s creativity will rush to the rescue in a world of sprightly octogenarians, with the added benefit of living in a cleaner, peaceful and greener environment. And with a New Cornucopian suit fitted to their leaner new frame, we can celebrate together the Age of Increasing Opportunities.

References:

1. Phillip Longman, May/June 2004,The Global Baby Bust”, Foreign Affairs. In “The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World prosperity and What to do About it” New York Basic Books, 2004, he urges that policies in the USA and other rich countries encourage more children.

2. Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson &amo; Sergei Scherbov, 2 August 2001” The end of world population growth”, NATURE vol. 412www.nature.com 543 27. Sunderland, Massachusetts.

3. Phil Mullan,2002 “The Imaginary Time Bomb” I.B. Taurus Publishers, theorises that Ageism is a form of discrimination

4. Hamish McRae 1995, OECD Economic Outlook.

5. A.David Coleman 2006, The prospect of population decline, University of Oxford, Round table discussion on the economic financial and environmental implications of over-population, OPT London 15 Feb

6. (Julian Simon L.) 1995, “The State of Humanity” Cato Institute and Blackwell Publishers.

7. David Nicholson Lord, 2006, Optimum Population Trust, News Release: Baby Shortage A Myth

8. Ben J. Wattenberg “The Birth Dearth” New York: Pharos Books.

9. Ben J. Wattenberg, 1997 “The Population Explosion Is Over”

10. The New York Times Magazine

11. David Herlihy and Samuel K., Jr. Cohn , 1997,” The Black Death and the Transformation of the West” (European History Series), Kirkus Associates,Harvard University Press , Cambridge Massachusetts)

12. John Kelly 1002, “The Great Mortality : An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time “ Harper Collins Publishers,10 East 53rd Street , NewYork )

13. Norman Cantor 2001,”In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made “, New York Free Press.

14. John Seager 2004, Why Anxiety Over Low Fertility? Population Connection, (Fact Sheet From The Reporter)

15. Cohen J. ,1998,” How many people can the earth support? “New York Review of Books.