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Are older Australians gaming the system?
Wednesday, 04 September 2013 22:23 | Written by Graham Young

Research by Alan Tapper et al suggests that as Australia ages, older Australians are grabbing more of the bounty.

Alan contacted me and sent me a copy of his research. The abstract says:

This paper uses Australian Bureau of Statistics fiscal incidence figures to track trends across the period 1984 to 2010 in one key aspect of the Australian welfare state — whether welfare policies have favoured the elderly at the expense of the young. Our three main findings are: that there has been a substantial shift over this period in favour of the elderly; that this trend has accelerated rapidly in recent years; and that as a result of this accelerated trend, elderly households today are on average well off by comparison with younger households. We see little influence of party politics or ideology on the processes we are describing.

Seems the baby boomers really are the most favoured generation ever in Australia's history, and may keep that record for a while.

It's not something that we can neglect, and perhaps to class wars and culture wars we may soon have to add generational wars.

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Comments   

 
0 #1 Mr — Paul Brogan 2013-09-09 12:38
It's good that the elderly are getting something other than cat food to eat. It's articles like these that start the so called wars. These "wars" are what is tearing our society apart. By have a divided society we make it easier for radical groups to gain a foothold. Most of the social wars have been started by media companies to sell articles on slow news days. We need a government which will stand up for morality and society.
 
 
+1 #2 RE: Are older Australians gaming the system? — rose 2013-09-09 17:14
I was born in the so-called baby-boom period and can't get a job because of entrenched negative attitudes and over-generalisa tions as in your blog. We're just people like everyone else - there's a huge variation in our fortunes. Stop trying to segregate people into arbitrary factions based on spurious criteria. People in power have always needed scapegoats - witches in medieval times, Jews, Reds under the beds, Muslims, baddie baby-boomers and so on - to divide and conquer.
 
 
+1 #3 RE: Are older Australians gaming the system? — Kipling 2013-09-12 15:28
Is a war really the only option available? 8)

It would seem that the best result would be to improve things for the young without diminishing conditions for elderly through cuts. Clearly the "trick" is how to fund that. It seems to me that this is where the war actually is, it is the economic war. While ever welfare is presented, accepted and therefore counted as a cost full funding will be difficult to achieve.
 
 
0 #4 RE: Are older Australians gaming the system? — Dion Giles 2013-10-01 20:04
We could fund quite a lot by junking the F35 boondoggle and giving up on integrating with America's colonial adventure programme. It's not our job to rescue America's military industrial complex.