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The Forum > Article Comments > Australia is growing old > Comments

Australia is growing old : Comments

By Babette Francis, published 3/9/2013

There is no bearded man with a board around his neck walking around proclaiming 'Repent! The End is Nigh', but perhaps there should be.

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If anyone cares to talk with people over the age of sixty they will tell you that the post-WW2 age hump in the population has been actively discussed by advertisers, lobbyists for all manner of interests, and government since the 1960's at least.

So for fifty years and more the 'age hump' has been used to justify increasing record numbers of immigration. Yet it was arguably immigration that has contributed to the 'problem', if any exists. Not that that concerns lobbyists and governments who for the same fifty years and more have shamelessly used the 'hump' and built inter-generational jealousy to justify socially unpalatable changes in policy, such as placing new limits to qualify for the age pension and delays and parsimonious paring of any increases in payment.

At the same time government, Menzies I believe, stole the millions from the taxes paid by all for an age pension from 60 for women and 65 for men, paid it into consolidated revenue and used it for other purposes.

The duplicity of federal governments is also seen in such dubious and callous behaviour as forcing their own middle aged APS staff into redundancy to serve the affirmative action and multicultural imperatives. Doubly nasty when one also remembers that while politicians themselves have their superannuation linked to changes in average male weekly earnings to proof themselves against inflation, the same politicians as bosses are adamant in refusing to allow the same indexation for the superannuation of their employees, public servants and soldiers. That is despite the government's own independent reports recommending a change in the indexation applied to public servants.

Australian governments have form for creating whipping boys out of sectors of the population to justify their own poor planning.
Posted by onthebeach, Tuesday, 3 September 2013 1:50:37 PM
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Explicit in such arguments which are promoted by right-wing religionists and nationalists all over the world is the presumption that the human population can and must keep on increasing for forever and a day.
Unfortunately this is impossible on a finite planet. And no amount of clever technological fixes will alter the fact that crunch time will inevitably come - or the planetary eco-systems (that is Gaia) will bite back with a horrific vengeance.
Remember too that Peter Costello encouraged Australian women to have more babies, which they dutifully did. Never mind that his government failed to even begin to put in place the necessary infrastructure or services to cater for the resultant baby boom.
Posted by Daffy Duck, Tuesday, 3 September 2013 2:11:15 PM
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The issue of fertility must have a strong moral component judging by the hysterical efforts by some commentators to discredit Babette's unassailable arguments by supplying ludicrous, hidden motives for what she writes.
Manufacturing has all but disappeared from Australia and unemployment is on the rise. In Victoria each week, the population of a smallish primary school - around 200 children - is disposed of in abortion businesses each week.
Think of all the adults whio could have been employed to provide for and take care of these children until they began earning themselves.
Teachers, nurses, clothing and footwear manufacturers, builders, electricians, carpenters, publishers, farmers and shopkeepers and on it goes... get the picture?
This is only the economic consequence of low fertility. The social, emotional, medical and psychiatric sequelae are far, far worse.
I have often wondered if the reason houses cost 61/2 times the average salary is because so many double-incomes can compete for the properties. If a wife is forced to work to keep a roof over her head and childcare seems to be a terrible hassle no matter how you look at it, then children will often be viewed either as a luxury or a burden.
Children today deserve our pity. They will inherit a selfish, barbaric, anti-natal society which has destroyed a third of their peers and which will shriek at the way they are cared for in nursing homes - unless they opt for euthanasia.
Posted by Rosarium, Tuesday, 3 September 2013 2:21:20 PM
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If low fertility is a social issue, we should address it by encouraging people to have more children, not by forcing them to raise children they do not want.
Posted by Rhian, Tuesday, 3 September 2013 4:31:19 PM
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Just another doomsayer. Fertility should be a matter of choice, not of coercion. The idea of compelling people to have more children is as authoritarian as is the idea of compelling people to have fewer children, and in both cases the underlying reasoning is poor. The grey catastrophe has much in common with the climate change catastrophe. Both are multi-decade predictions of doom, and both call for economically harmful decisions about a future which is very obscure and unpredictable.

Would it not make more sense to make decisions which have benefits for people living now? Is it not true that a strong economy provides more resources to deal with problems as they arise? Posters like Rosarium might also note that housing is made much more costly by the severe restrictions on landholders to develop their own land: Reduce these restrictions and the price of housing would fall.
Posted by Fester, Tuesday, 3 September 2013 5:34:47 PM
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the birth rate is merely kicking the can of aging population a bit further down the road.
Hasbeen,
My moron boss wouldn't agree with there. He thinks all the boat people will be dutiful taxpayers soon & he'll be able to really enjoy his pension. He is a Labor voter & hopes Rudd will get back in again to continue his "good" work..
Posted by individual, Tuesday, 3 September 2013 6:29:46 PM
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