Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety

• The Australian government has just released the latest iteration of its Intergenerational Report, the sixth since the first was published in 2002.
• Each provides a snapshot of the sort of Australia in which future generations will find themselves in 40 years’ time, should current government policies continue.

1. Increasing optimism about ageing

• The chart below shows the projections in each of the six reports for the proportion of the population aged 65 and over.
• And ageing will slow further if net migration climbs higher than the 235,000 per year assumed in the latest report.
• A more reasonable migration assumption might be that it will in fact increase alongside increases in the total population.

2. Increased optimism about willing workers

• While participation is still expected to drop, the latest projection is for more of a glide than a dive, leaving participation higher in 2063 than it was in 2002.
• As the report puts it, participation is projected to decline from a record high of 66.6% in 2023 to 63.8% by 2063.
• More of us will be older and less able to work, but within most age groups, more of us will be in work.

3. Increased optimism about the cost of the pension

• Spending on pensions is projected to fall rather than climb as a share of the economy, falling from 2.3% to 2% of GDP.
• While in other countries pensions are more generous and increase with earnings, in Australia the age pension is more modest and reduces with means.
• By pairing the age pension with superannuation, which increases people’s means in retirement, pension spending falls.

4. Increased optimism about spending on health

• Government spending on health as a proportion of GDP is still projected to increase, from 4.6% now to 6.2% in 2063, but is expected to remain well short of the first intergenerational report’s projection of more than 8% by 2042.
• Only 40% of this projected increase in health spending is due to ageing, which ought not to be the least bit surprising.

5. Increased pessimism about the cost of aged care

Spending on aged care is set to grow more than many other types of spending, albeit from a low base. The Intergenerational Report has it doubling from 1.1% of GDP in to 2.5% in 2063. The projection may well be an underestimate. Governments are yet to fully respond to demands for greater quality of care set out in the report of the royal commission into aged care quality and safety.

6. Increased pessimism about living standards

• Productivity growth, and assumptions about future productivity growth, have continued to decline with almost every intergenerational report.
• The assumption for long-term productivity growth in this report is 1.2%, down from 1.75% in the 2002 intergenerational report.
• The 2002 intergenerational report had living standards (GDP per person) climbing 90% in 40 years.

7. A deteriorating Commonwealth budget

• While slower ageing means this report predicts the government’s future budget deficits will be lower than those projected in all previous reports bar one, the budget is expected to be in a deepening deficit for much of the next 40 years.
• Read more:
  The intergenerational report sets the scene for 2063 – but what is it?

• Padgett will succeed Kelly in the senior medical role on September 5, when Kelly succeeds Louis A. Shapiro as CEO.
• "I am honored to be joining the medical leadership team at HSS, which is committed to delivering best-in-class healthcare experiences," said Dr. Allen.
• Dr. Bostrom currently practices at the HSS main campus in New York City and sees patients at HSS Westchester.
• Allen and Bostrom will assume their new roles in the HSS Office of Medical Leadership on September 5, 2023.

• Acclaimed poet Sarah Holland-Batt has won the 2023 Stella Prize for her powerful and elegiac collection of poetry, The Jaguar.
• Poetry was excluded from the Stella Prize until 2022.

The full power of poetic language

• The Jaguar brings the full power of poetic language to bear on experiences often pushed to the edges of public life.
• The most stunning poems in the collection focus on the experience of ageing, illness and death – in ways that are both deeply compassionate and fierce.
• Stella Prize chair Alice Pung says of the book:
  In The Jaguar, Sarah Holland-Batt writes about death as tenderly as we’ve ever read about birth.
• Read more:
  First Nations poet Evelyn Araluen wins the 2022 Stella Prize with a 'wild ride' skewering colonial mythologies

The politics of bearing witness

• Holland-Batt has spoken publicly about the neglect of aged care funding and policy in this country.
• She made a submission to the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety about the abuse and neglect her father suffered in aged care.
• “Our cultural denial of death also underwrites many of our failures in aged care.” The politics of this collection reside in the act of bearing witness.
• Read more:
  How to complain about aged care and get the result you want

Imaginative flight

• A good example of these shifts is in the ways the jaguar of the collection’s title emerges throughout the collection.
• I can’t make anything of it.” The jaguar of this poem also demonstrates Holland-Batt’s imaginative and linguistic power: it is at once an object of this world and a link to other understandings of the relationship between the human and the animal, especially at death.
• With a combination of ruthlessness and tenderness, clear-eyed witness and imaginative flight, this is a poet who knows exactly what she is doing.

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