The New Social Capital:helping people and communities plan for 100 years of life

The following speech by AWU National Secretary Bill Shorten was delivered to the annual Connections W.J. Craig Lecture in Melbourne on November 28, 2006

Good evening and thank you for inviting me to speak tonight.

Introduction

At the start of the 20th century, a baby girl born in Australia could expect to live to around 58 years of age. A boy could expect to live to around 55.

Just over 100 years later, any girl born today can reasonably expect to last - with all her faculties intact and probably with her mobile phone implanted in her ear - until 2106. A baby boy born today might live to be 94.

We're certainly living a lot longer than our parents and our grandparents. In fact, we're living 40 years longer. And that not only means finding something meaningful and interesting to do with those extra 40 years - it means huge adjustments in our way of life and the way in which we organise and develop our society.

These days, we hear a lot of negativity and doomsaying about the so-called 'ageing population'. And while I don't want to gloss over the challenges that will bring, I think that the prospect of living to be 100 is tremendously exciting - and something that will open up many new opportunities for people, families and communities.

I want to talk to you this evening about some of those implications and opportunities - and about the actions we need to take to build a successful society in which people remain active and valued members of the community for close on a century.

Burden or opportunity?

So how will Australian society cope? Well, I believe we have the potential to cope very well indeed - provided that we start taking action now, that we respond quickly and effectively to the changes taking place in the world around us, and that we approach the future with confidence and optimism.

I find it interesting that we like to measure our progress in advanced economies in terms of life expectancy - and yet, when we arrive at a point where we're living longer than ever before, we start to complain that the population is ageing.

The cry goes up: the sky is falling! It's a crisis! What are we going to do with all these old people? How are we going to afford the increased health costs? How can we run our economy with a shrinking workforce? How will we manage this burden of an ageing population?

Well, I don't see it as a burden. And I don't see it as a crisis.

For many reasons, I think that much of the public debate about our ageing population is ridiculously pessimistic, ill-informed and little more than fear mongering.

I prefer to see it as a great opportunity - and, in this, I've been influenced by some good work done in the United States by a business leader, philanthropist and author called David Mahoney.

David Mahoney has written that "the 21st century will be the age of the centenarian" - and has argued that we all share a responsibility to manage and plan for our increasing longevity.

By 2050, Australia can expect to have around 12,000 centenarians - with that number continuing to double every 7 to 10 years. It's certainly not a trend that is going to go away - and dealing with it will require a lot more than wringing our hands and predicting the end of the world as we know it.

I think there are ways to meet this challenge. I think those ways involve facing up to some hard and often unpalatable facts about our rapidly changing circumstances.

But if we face these truths, adapt to these changes and are open to new ideas and new ways of doing things, we will succeed.

As a relatively small and open nation, Australians have become pretty good at organising and adapting our lives to a changing world - and we are more than capable of leading the world when it comes to extracting the full potential from living longer.

I think there are five areas in which Australia has to face up to the facts - and in which we can immediately take steps to plan for the future.

The changing face of work

The first area requires recognising that the expectation of one job in one organisation for life will no longer be there for any of us - except possibly Jamie Packer.

These days, the world of work is transient and fluid. Where it used to be considered wildly adventurous to head off overseas for a job, it's now pretty commonplace.

The need for particular labour skills and specific expertise is also very fluid. Forms of work will come and go - and like the saddlers of old, and the telephone switch girls, and the boy selling chocolates from a tray in the cinema, and the life insurance agents, and the shorthand typist, and the word processing pool - a great many jobs will disappear almost overnight.

We will all have to retrain for new forms of work - once, twice or three times across our lifetimes: that will be the normal pattern. We'll all have to become students again, apprentices again, interns again, trainees again and job applicants again.

That's how the future of work will be. And the sooner we accept it - without acrimony or blame or fear - the better off we will be.

From the broader national perspective, it means that we have to make a much greater investment in education and training across people's lifetimes.

We have to stop giving mere lipservice to the notion of lifelong learning and turn it into reality.

That means being willing to look at a range of options. Incentives for learning and training later in life. Partnerships with industry to retrain workers in areas of skills shortages. New investment in boosting the skills needed in our workforce to drive innovation - such as business leadership and development skills, teamwork and networking skills, and science, engineering and technology skills.

It means reversing the current Federal Government's shameful record of chronic under-investment in university education and skills - a record that has seen public investment in TAFEs and universities in Australia decline by 7 per cent between 1995 and 2003, while other OECD countries have increased their spending by an average of 48 per cent.

It means rethinking a system that puts young Australians into debt for their education - and that discourages talented people from disadvantaged backgrounds from going to university.

Underinvestment in education is not the way to a better future for Australia. It's not the way to ensure that Australians contribute across the full span of their working lives. And it's not the way to build the social capital necessary to help us all to live productive lives for as long as possible.

Pacing ourselves

The second area in which I think Australians can better organise our lives is the need to pace ourselves, which basically means making sure that you don't slave away furiously for 40-plus years and then drop down dead on the bowling green a year after you retire - the way shift-workers classically do.

Needless to say, dropping dead early has no upside to it. It certainly has no upside for you or your family. But it also has no upside from the broader perspective of the contribution you could still be making to the community.

Pacing ourselves means making sure that our bodies stay in reasonable shape - not hobbled by stroke or heart disease or one of the thousands of workplace injuries that occur each year in Victoria alone.

And while we all have to take some personal responsibility for those things, we also have to be willing as a community to address these issues.

For example, we have to start making a much greater investment in tackling the so-called lifestyle diseases.

We know that around 90 per cent of Type 2 diabetes, more than 50 per cent of cardiovascular disease and around 50 per cent of cancers are preventable. And yet - governments in Australia spend around 40 times more on treating diseases and illnesses than they do on preventing them.

These are the diseases that affect our quality of life. These are the diseases that have an enormous impact on our workforce participation and productivity.
And they are the diseases that will prevent us pacing ourselves across 100 years of life.

Pacing ourselves is also a quality of life issue - and that's something we need to start thinking about much more seriously, from both a personal and public perspective, as we face pressure to work longer hours and to cram our recreation and family time into ever shrinking parcels of time.

There's been a lot of talk in Australia recently about 'values' - and for most of my union members those values are pretty straightforward: they value family life, community connections, friendship and the time to enjoy those things. Nothing terribly sophisticated - just the day-to-day things that make our lives enjoyable and meaningful.

And yet those values are under threat - not only from the Federal Government's new industrial relations regime, but from a corporate culture of overwork that is having a damaging effect on the quality of family and community life.

Here again, we give lipservice to work and family balance - and yet, more so than ever before, that balance is seriously out of whack.

When 'more flexible work practices' is simply an excuse to give Australian workers less job security, lower pay, longer hours and no capacity to take leave to care for a sick child, then we are not on the right path to achieving that balance.

These days, all of us probably know someone who has 'downshifted' (taken a pay cut, moved to the country or given up full-time work) to get a better quality of life or to spend more time with their kids.

I think that's a phenomenon that is only going to grow - and it's one that should be encouraged by governments and industry as one way of sustaining workforce participation and productivity across our longer lifetimes.

Preparing for disaster

The third area where I think we need to face some facts is that we all have to be prepared, at least once in our lives, for a catastrophic, traumatising change.

It doesn't have to be a bushfire in the Blue Mountains or an earthquake in Newcastle, or a cyclone in Innisfail, or a mine collapse in Beaconsfield that brings it on. It can be a death in the family, a divorce, a debilitating disease, an accident or financial hardship.

It might be an ailing parent who comes to live with you. It might be a disaffected adolescent child on drugs. It could be diabetes, or multiple sclerosis, or arthritis.

It can be the death of a daughter and the need, as grandparents, to raise her children, in the years you had hoped would be characterised by peace and quiet.

The odds are against us: these things are the common fate of humanity and they will happen. It is our resilience and capacity to deal with such events that gives us strength and purpose in life.

And here again, we have to look very carefully at the public investments we need to make to ensure that people are supported through these events.

There is not much point in living longer if we are constantly fearful - as many working families certainly are in the United States - of being just one personal catastrophe away from falling into poverty and unemployment.

That's why things like Medicare and our public hospital system are so important. That's why a decent social security system is so important. That's why a strong and fair workers' compensation system is so important.

They are the foundations that enable us to deal with the crisises in our personal lives that we sometimes cannot avoid.

These things are absolutely critical elements of this country's social capital - and we should fight tooth and nail to ensure that they remain in the public domain and stay part and parcel of the responsibility of governments.

Looking beyond work
The fourth area where I think we have to make changes as we live longer is a pretty obvious one: we all need to have another dimension outside work.

Shakespeare called it 'a world elsewhere' - and it could be a sporting pursuit, or a reading group, or piano lessons, or studying a foreign language. It could be something as simple as a regular Scrabble game with friends. It could be doing volunteer work with disabled children, taking your Labrador to visit the local nursing home or running errands for your elderly neighbour.

The worth of this 'world elsewhere' is obvious. At the personal level, it's much better for our mental, physical and emotional health. It gives us those connections that make for a happier life.

At the broader level, it saves our community a lot of money. In 1997, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated the value of total unpaid work in Australia to be around $261 billion - or 48 per cent of GDP. We need government policies and corporate practices that value and support that contribution to a much greater extent than is presently the case.

We cannot continue to define ourselves solely in terms of paid work. Someone once said that a map is not the territory. A curriculum vitae is not a life. We have to have a vision of ourselves that's much more than our job description.

I see a lot of blue-collar middle-aged men who lose their jobs. They often feel it more than women. Men tend to invest much more of their identity and status in their paid jobs, whereas women are more likely to value the roles they play outside work.

A man who defines himself by what he does, and so many men do, is not the best candidate for living happily to 100 - and changing that often deeply entrenched sense of self is one of the greatest challenges we face in building our capacity to be flexible and adaptable across our lifetimes.

So we have to future-proof our lives. This is the great theme of the next hundred years. You must be able to look in the mirror and see the grey-haired person that will be you looking back, and learn to like him or her.

We want a society where older people feel valued and fulfilled. Perhaps we need more community radio stations in abundance where old people can play music they love and do talkback at 3 a.m. with equally sleepless contemporaries.

And perhaps we need a childcare support payment - not just a baby bonus but a means tested child care subsidy - for genuine cases where grandparents in whose house grandchildren spend a significant amount of time because both parents have to work 80 hours a week to keep their heads above water.

Managing prosperity

The final area where I believe we need to better organise ourselves is in managing prosperity.

Thanks to a combination of the economic reforms of the 1980s - and the global resources boom - Australia has been enjoying an unprecedented run of prosperity for the last few decades.

The average Australian is wealthier now than he or she was a generation ago - and that is not just a quaint way of saying Jamie Packer is really, really rich and your wage has stayed the same. The fact is that while we still like the idea of the 'Aussie battler', the vast majority of Australians are well-off by historical and international standards.

This is not to deny the still considerable - and unacceptable - proportion of Australians who suffer real deprivation, entrenched poverty and hardship.

But - on the whole - this wider national prosperity is likely, although not certain, to continue.

As individuals, we have to manage our money and circumstances to give ourselves financial security across a much longer timeframe.

As a nation, we have to manage this period of prosperity sustainably, responsibly and fairly.

We need to manage it sustainably - by investing in the infrastructure and services that we will need to secure long term, environmentally sustainable growth.

We need to manage it responsibly - by putting in place the right mix of taxation, superannuation, employment and retirement policies to maintain people's quality of life as they move in and out of the workforce over a much longer period of time.

We need to manage it fairly - by sharing the proceeds of prosperity to ensure that we do not leave people behind, that we tackle entrenched disadvantage and that we give everyone the opportunity to realise their potential and make their contribution.

And that's not just about being true to the Australian tradition of a fair-go for everyone. It's about using this time of prosperity to build for the future - and the best way of doing that is to make sure that as many of us as possible have the skills, the education, the good health and the opportunities to succeed.

Conclusion

So as we look ahead, I think we have to future-proof our lives - and I believe this will be the great theme of this century in developed countries.

In a personal sense, we have to take responsibility for educating ourselves to our best abilities, pacing ourselves across our lives, being prepared to retrain and change jobs, fulfilling ourselves beyond work, and shoring up our own financial security.

But we can't do this on our own. We need governments and corporations to support these goals and to think about how they can help to build a better national future by extracting the maximum social and economic value from our changing demographics and longer lives.

We need a centenarian sensibility. We need government and corporate commitment to lifelong learning, to more flexibility for men and women who shouldn't have to choose between family and work, to less discrimination against older workers, to much greater investment in training and skills, and to funding community and voluntary activities.

I see the future challenge for governments as being to give people the power and opportunity to manage 100 years of life. It's about governments being in partnership with people, rather than simply telling them they have to fend for themselves.

I also see a centenarian sensibility as being about aspiration - but a very different aspiration to that often talked about in public debate.
I don't see it so much as an aspiration for material wealth. I see it as aspiring to 100 years of being healthy, of having the education and skills to get quality, interesting work; of living in decent and supportive communities; and of leading a rewarding and meaningful life.

I think that is both a strong personal and national vision for the future.
And I think it is an optimistic vision.

The American Senator and former Presidential candidate John Kerry said that: "Politics has always been the art of the possible. Today it's too often the art of the probable - tinkering around the edges without any greater vision, without a sense of optimism and imagination."

I think that's true - and it's a limited and backward-looking political mindset that will not serve us well as we try to come to terms with the challenges ahead of us.

I can think of few more things to be optimistic about than living to be an active, engaged and happy centenarian - and I believe we have the capacity, the willingness and the resources to translate that into something of benefit for all Australians.

Thank you.