If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last few years Millennials love retro stuff like old-school brewing methods, bicycles, beards, unprotected workplaces that deny staff basic things like standard working hours, and beards.
So they’re likely to also adore the old-skool concept dropped by the first PM they can probably remember, Paul Keating, who has proposed a hott new idea: a commonwealth-backed national insurance scheme to support our longer-lived population, which looks remarkably like the long discarded universal pensions of old.
“Back when we’d say things like ‘an economy is not a society’ and stuff!”
The reasons for the drop in superannuation’s power to pay for people’s dotage is partially due to changes in work, especially the gig-economy-heavy present, but also because the superannuation system was locked in 32 years ago when people tended to cark it more rapidly after retirement.
“This is where I think in a real national family, the government puts their arm around them, the community puts their arm around them, and carries them through the rest of their life,” he said at a forum on superannuation on Tuesday, after reflecting on the fact that the current rates of super aren’t going to come close to covering the expenses of people through the long twilight of their nine-years-longer-on-average lives.
“Suck it, kids!”
“We have no policy here in Australia for the 80 to 100 cohort,” he explained, which is terribly unfair. They can ride for one of the food services, surely? Get a bit of exercise, earn some coin, meet interesting new abusive motorists in city traffic – it’s win-win!
Anyway, Millennials: you’re not merely insufficiently protected for the future, but if Keating’s suggestion is acted upon you might also have to fund the possibly-immortal cohort of retired baby boomers.