Australian social policy on ageing has suddenly burst into new life. The final report of the Productivity Commission’s Caring for Older Australians inquiry is about to be tabled in parliament, a new special Human Rights Commissioner on Age Discrimination is about to begin work in July. And, in the last two months, at least two announcements have been made by Treasurer Wayne Swan and others on new provisions to encourage older workers to re-enter the workforce and to remain engaged with the nation’s economy. At the same time, many NGOs are gearing up to support a United Nations Convention on the Rights of Older People.

So why all the excitement? Well, the adult lifecourse is changing rapidly and the ageing of the adult population is right up there with climate change, global terrorism, pandemics, recession and cyber warfare in the international assessment of threats to our existing way of life.

To grasp the complexity of ageing policy, and why your grandparents, parents and possibly you, are now seen as potentially undermining the order of things, a small thought experiment may be called for. It might be helpful to imagine the adult lifecourse as a strip of chewing gum. The gum has sections in different colours, say childhood and youth in sunny yellow, working life in blood red and late life and retirement in, say, pink. Over recent years, the middle bit, the red bit, has been shrinking because we are spending more time in education and, at least until now, most people in the developed world were retiring increasingly early.

Now add to that that we are living longer. So stretch your bit of gum so that all of the coloured areas expand. This is the ‘stretched lifecourse’ – more time for everything. Or you could bite off most of the pink bit so that the red bit stretches almost to the end. This is the ‘productivist’ solution – more work. This leaves a much reduced pink retirement bit. Will the pink bit, if someone hasn’t swallowed it and lost it forever, have the sweet taste of a world cruise or the bitterness of financial uncertainty and disability? The analogy is getting a bit unwieldy at this point, but so are the issues. There will be winners and losers and not everyone will get a fair go.

In almost every nation state as populations are ageing, Governments have become alert to the problem, but few solutions have occurred to them other than expecting more of the same from their ageing citizens. The problem of the shrinking number of people working, many believe, will be fixed by making other people work longer, thus turning a fiscal problem (more people claiming pensions, fewer paying taxes) into a fiscal picnic- with less of the expensive benefit claiming, non-taxable older people and more of the tax-paying, non-claiming older workers. The European Union, the OECD, the US and the Australian Treasury – via its triennial Intergenerational Report – all support this model, and while the possibility of working longer has taken a bit of a hit in regions suffering from recession (a double hit where there are fewer jobs around and youth unemployment is rising, just as many discover they cant afford to retire) the problem of what to do with a long life appears to have been averted. With the possible exception of the International Labor Organisation, a policy consensus appeared to have been reached. And rather than flicking that gum into the waste bin of history, only the end bit has to go, or rather the red bit, the work bit, will be stretched to cover most of what’s left.

The problem with this view is that it fails to take a number of important issues into account. And while it must be said that those considering the economic potential of Senior Australians have been briefed to develop a more holistic, multi faceted perspective on the value of a long life, this appears to be less the case with the Productivity Commission’s Caring for Older Australians inquiry. For them the solution to a growing number older adults with more complex problems is further privatisation, not just of care facilities and workers, but of personal risk. In other words, a reliance on personal and family resources, in the place of state support. Curiously, unpaid ‘informal’ carers have been included as part of the workforce, while the report simultaneously recommends that any inheritance they might have hoped to receive will be sold off to pay for any residential care that is needed. 

A stretched lifecourse is a tremendous opportunity to capitalise on a new phase of global development and our ability as a nation to take advantage of it will be in inverse proportion to our failure to adapt. We need then, a new vision of what sustainability means beyond the economics. We need to see what is special and important in the contribution older adults can make and not simply assume it will be ‘more of the same’- more work or more dependency. For a stretched lifecourse to realise its full potential, we need to discover the unique purpose and contribution that a long life provokes. It gives us an historic opportunity to re-assess our existing way of life and what we, as a society are going to make of it.