Recently the national news told retirees they could go back to work, without loss of their pensions, if they earnt $11,800 a year - but who would hire them?
Whichever major party governs Australia, the message is potentially similar, the spin doctors are happy to instill hope in 67 year olds, that someone will wave a magic wand and the evils of ageism will disappear and shazam an employer will race to their aid and hire them!
This has painted such a lovely glossy picture, I would like to frame it and hang it above the fireplace. What a pity it's wrong!
It is true that when the government allowed retired pensioners to earn more money, their financial advisors may have tweaked their investments to earn an extra $11,800 and this is a great vote-getter, which has the potential to change a government on polling day.
It may be true that some family businesses will hire grandma or grandpa to earn $11,800 in their businesses. It is also true that a school may employ a respectable elderly woman in a local community to work as a school crossing supervisor.
The major problem, however, is ageism. We live in a world where governments, corporations and everyday businesses are too focused on the youth market, when they acquire new staff. It's not just retirees who are the losers in this, the business world has disenfranchised many people aged more than 40, in favour of workers in their late teens and early 20s.
When I went to school I was not told to get my life together by the time I was 40 or I would be in trouble, but that is the the reality for many older workers today, if they did not prepare for lean times when they were younger.
One needs to examine the problem of ageism. In 2017 the Greater Sydney Commission released a plan for how Sydney would look in 2056. It would have many new apartments and dwellings, which would be hard to imagine on Sydney's skyline. One needs to ask who is going to pay the mortgages for these? Surely not the retirees and not the people in their 40s and 50s, because they do not have enough years of work left in them to pay the interest on homes worth $2 million (Australian).
This is in stark comparison with the average house price in 1980, which was approximately $76,000
It is also true that in the 1970s, the Whitlam government gave Australians free tertiary education, but by 1989, the Hawke-Keating government charged students under the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) and since then university fees have become excessive.
Just as a middle-aged person may not take up a new mortgage, likewise an older person may not begin to pay for a tertiary degree and may not be in a position to start a new family, which will need to avail itself of the expensive house and education.
Why then should our society have any interest in employing older people? That's really what one needs to ask.
One must consider that Australia cannot have a system where where older people are forced to live in shanty towns and doss-houses, in favour of younger workers, who will create the new tomorrow.
Planners need to mine the data to find out which jobs in which industries older workers have found success. Our bureaucrats must access Census data and Government employment agency stats to find the answers. When we obtain this data, we can offer older people training in areas where we know historically people in their demographic have found work.
It is not that far-fetched to say that governments should loan older people enough money to trade currencies on the internet to make them self sufficient, or give them something to sell without sales quotas, or perhaps governments should cut down on outsourcing work to contractors and give that work to older people.
The other thing we need to do is train young people to become self-sufficient, via the school education system, so the same problems don't resurface in 30 or 40 years time.
There are always answers and I suggest that those who are designing our futuristic society design a world for everyone and not just those paying the mortgages − Joseph Walz