My favourite expression at the moment with my kids, who I think live an incredibly privileged life, is ‘that sounds like a first-world problem’. I am sure you know the sort of thing I mean; problems that many people in the world would dream of having. “I can’t believe I can’t sit near the window on my flight to Paris” or “It is so annoying when data speeds drop from LTE to 3G when I get in a lift to my 30th floor motel room” or “It is so inconvenient when I have to use my sprinklers in two segments because my fresh potable water does not have enough pressure to drive all 20 sprinklers at once”. You get the idea; there are people in the world who dream of potable water, mobile phone reception and flying on planes. We get to the stage where we are accustomed to a certain level of lifestyle and amenity, and anything less seems intolerable.
I attended an Aged Care forum recently and I believe part of planning for an aging population is in first considering ourselves lucky to live in an age where we will age. If you were born in 1890, you had a very low life expectancy. You could expect to live to 47.2 years if you were male and 50.8 years if you were female (obviously males spoiled and looked after their wives). You really only had enough time to start having children in your late teens or early 20s, raise them to a similar age, then die. When the Deakin government passed the Invalid and Old-Aged Pensions Act to take effect from 1 July 1909, it was seen as fairly safe to set a pension age of 65. The pension started at £26 per annum and to receive it you had to have resided in Australia for at least 25 years and be of ‘good character’.
Fast forward to today and males born in 2007 have a life expectancy of 79.3 years and women 83.9. On average, as every three-and-a-half-years passes, our life expectancy increases by a year. At that rate, the monarch of England had better start increasing the budget for centurion letters, because by the year 2064 the average female life expectancy would be 100 years of age (for those born in 2064).
Australia is in a wonderful position on the world scale. We are seventh in the world for life expectancy – behind Japan, Hong Kong, France, Switzerland, Italy and Spain. While we might sit back and say how lucky we are to expect to live so long, it presents issues for governments.
In our region we face significant challenges. The median age for a person in NSW is 38. In Warren the median is 45, in Cobar it is 44 and in Brewarrina is it 42. At 35, Dubbo is below the state average, but only eight years ago the average age of a Dubbonian was 33.
The first issue a government has to deal with is economic. The aged pension is now up to $18,575.57 per year (slightly higher than the initial £26) and received by almost 2.5 million people (excluding disability, unemployment, etc.). The sums are at the point where it won’t be long before the total budget hits $50 billion per year – just in the cost of pensions!
The second major issue that needs to be addressed is in how we treat the elderly in our society. A hundred years ago most people were lucky to see the birth of their first grandchild. Many grandparents lived with one of their children until they passed away without any great burden to the family. Now most people can reasonably expect to see the birth of several great-grandchildren. It is now seen by many as too difficult for the family to care for their aged forebears, so as a collective we have asked ‘the government’ to fix the problem for us. And therein lies one of the great challenges of all levels of government – as a society we are very quick to criticise the government of the day, but when there is a problem to be solved we all look to ‘the government’ to solve it.
Although it would seem that much of this lies at the feet of the federal government, councils such as Gilgandra Shire have found they have had to create a new business unit (Cooee Lodge Retirement Village) to meet the essential needs of their residents.
The aged care dilemma we are facing in this nation is a classic example of the flexibility and ingenuity required by all governments to continue to address the changing needs of society. Just as in business, governments need to be dynamic and flexible to ensure they continue to be relevant as time marches forward.
Tell me how old you want to live to at mayor@dubbo.nsw.gov.au
Clr Mathew Dickerson
Mayor of the City of Dubbo