It seems inevitable that we are going to see the eligibility for the Age Pension raised to 70. Both major parties seem to agree that 65 is no longer a reasonable age. Politics indicate that the actual date for the changes to kick in will be some years in the future.
The pension age of 65 was set early in the 1900s when relatively few retirees lived long enough to spend much time on the pension. In other words, governments of the time didn’t expect to spend a lot of money on pensions.
Today, many people retiring in their 60s can expect to live for another 20 – 30 years and the cost of supporting these retirees are causing governments a great deal of anxiety.
Frankly the idea of retiring at 65 and never working again is very much last century thinking. Today, most people leaving full time work intend to continue doing some work – often on a part time basis. There are significant benefits to this strategy. Obviously the extra income comes in handy, but work also gives people self-esteem, community involvement and mental challenges, all of which are great for the mind.
While it is relatively easy to make a case for encouraging people to work till they’re 70, the big challenge for the government and the economy is to find suitable jobs for these older workers. For at least the last 20 years, older workers have been discriminated against. The idea that people over 50 were “past it” and couldn’t handle new technology, were widespread in the workforce. There are thousands of stories about people over 50 or 60 who lost their jobs and simply couldn’t find a new one because of their age. I would suggest that this form of age discrimination is still widespread in the workforce. Generally speaking, the younger people who are doing the hiring often don’t want older workers around.
So before the politicians introduce legislation that keeps us all working longer until we can collect a pension, they will have to do a lot of work to ensure that those older people who want to/have to work till they’re 70, actually have reasonable jobs that they can stay at.
The other issue that needs more work is the problem that many people involved in hard physical work might not be able to keep it up for another 5 years. There needs to be a fair solution for these workers.