Succeeding generations confront the cost of aged care.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
It may be modern Australia’s biggest accounting disaster. We’re living longer,but we stop working decades before we die,and successive governments have failed to plan for how we’ll pay for our greying population’s retirement. It’s estimated we’ll need to boost spending on aged care by $10 billion a year to implement the recommendations from theRoyal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety.
And if Hollywood wants inspiration for an epic doomsday movie,Canberra just delivered one after the government warned“the Baby Boomers are coming”. I’m already shuddering. Not because we Millennials don’t (mostly) love our parents’ generation,but because we’ve had the short end of the prosperity stick our whole lives.
The government’s new aged care taskforce is reviewing fee and funding arrangements,and one commissioner is keen to introduce an aged care tax levy of 1 per cent ofeveryone’s taxable income.
Just so I’m clear on the facts (before I share my emotions on TikTok Live because I’m triggered),we might be taxed to fund the dotage of the generation that – with the help of free university degrees – enjoys the highest rate of home ownership while it uses superannuation tax avoidance like a local Cayman Islands?
And how can I forgetfranking credits,John Howard’s tax loophole to snag retirees’ votes? Shareholders who were basically paying no tax got a cheque from the government as a tax credit. You don’t even need to ask who helped themselves to the biggest slice of this magic pudding.
I get it. Boomers were a significant voting bloc and influential in policy considerations,but now Boomers and Millennialseach make up about 20 per cent of the population.
Millennials,also known as Gen Y,continue to be treated like a pesky portion of the population that just needs to mature and become responsible. But guess what? We’ve grown up and have battle scars to prove it.