Retired, Equity a plenty, Living off the pension.

1. Large % of people don't own a house, maybe they should look at their expenditure and take steps to secure a home. It isn't easy but once you get a home the second one is a lot easier.

2. Person with a disability can work - Spent 5 seconds on google and found this (haven't read the site just skimmed) http://disabilityemployment.org.au/for-people-with-a-disability/. Working for the dole still counts as work, surely someone can pick up the rubbish on the side of the road or work in a call centre or something.

3. PTSD & Cancer carer - There is insurance for these instances, plus there is carer payments however as a carer you only contribute to the one person where as a nursing staff will care for multiple.

4. Do they like their condition? I would highly doubt it, I have personally have never asked have you? However what was the point of this question?

I walk past at least once a week for someone looking for a casual staff member to assist them. It has been up for over 6 months, I haven't enquired about the job as I already have one but if I was unemployed guess where I would be going if I couldn't get a job that matched what I wanted. No job is below me...

 

I haven't read the whole thread but why can't the pensioners stay in their property and the government actually does a reverse mortgage against future sale of property.

They owner collects the pension and the government takes a security against their property On passing the Govmint cashes the pension they have paid over time, no interest. Any money left beyond the centrelink payments in the property goes to their estate. Any under-funding of the centrelink payments is bad luck for the Govmint. Unlikely to happen as prices will continue to increase.

Bit like a death tax but at least it's fair to those who have PPOR regardless of value. If value is an issue this could still be means tested and at certain threshold Govnmint centrelink reverse mortgage can kick in.

 

Intersting perspectives on this one! The challenge remains though...how to provide a safety net whilst not dis-incenting those able to work and save.

 

We need to remember that living off the pension is not that great, current rates are


Trying to make ends meet on the pension would not be fun and I always tell friends and family "Do not be reliant on the government in your old age"
I believe most people who are receiving the aged pension, would have voted for the government of the day that promised them if they worked hard and paid their taxes the government would look after them when they are old. Let them receive what was promised.
We are in a lengthy transition period from pension mentality to superannuation retirement mentality. It will take time, however eventually the aged pension will not exist.
There are other benefits of being eligible for the pension, it gives you access to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and Seniors Health care card. These benefits can be worth more to the individual than the pension as most people over 80 are taking a myriad of pills and potions.

This discussion can go on forever, however I believe most people agree the current system (all welfare payments), is not viable and there are many people who genuinely need assistance and there are others who want assistance as there is sense of entitlement in this country.
It seems there are a lot of people who cannot differentiate between rights and entitlements and anyone who has traveled overseas might have seen what we consider a right or entitlement is but a mere pipe dream for many.

I believe there is a better way to balance payments to anyone who needs assistance, the hard part is working out who actually needs assistance!!!
It seems the current system is easy to access and hard to get off, as there no incentive to work for minimum wage and loose the assistance package available on welfare. I am sure there are many people from all sectors of the community that could contribute more and make their own lives better, however with out a WIIFM (Whats in it for me), they may never make the change.

The challenge may be keeping this country the lucky one, rather than the entitled one.
If someone is lucky enough to get old and they have a valuable house, good on them, they most probably have earned it.

Still ranting
Cheers
PP

 

Welcome to the country of the financially illiterate It's true that some struggling pensioners don't know how much their houses are worth and are struggling to put food in their mouths living alone in a 3 or 4 bedroom house. The problem is we create far to many "barriers to entry" for downsizers.
- they have to pay commission on the sale of their house
- the difference in price between the current house and new house could be enough to affect their pension (a terrifying thought for many)
- the new house has stamp duty, which can be a significant chunk of cash for some
- the new house might not be in their preferred area because of a lack of diversity in housing form (state and local government policies and developer choice of built housing)
- they might not find a smaller house they like (small bedrooms, cramped, poor layout, poor build quality, bad choice of materials)

I have been through all this (not personally).

We make it too difficult then criticise them for greedily sitting on million dollar properties

 

Thanks for giving another example to show that the current assets test of the Aged Pension is simply ridiculous. The Aged Pension is unsustainable as it gives welfare to multi-millionaires who live out their years in a huge mansion and leave behind a huge inheritance to descendants tax-free. The government should just bite the bullet and remove this anomaly. People on pension should be assessed and not overly exempted.

 

You picked the wrong person for this topic.

Hi Will, you recall a couple of nights ago we were discussing NGOs in WIlcannia and how they rip off govt funds and generally fail to deliver services to their clients? Well let me tell you a thing or two about the rorts in the Disability Services Industry. Shall I, or will you take my word for it? This girl is quite accustomed to banging her head against the brick walls of beauracratic incompetency in the Disability Sector. If we don't want to discuss rorts again tonight, can I give you just a couple of examples of how these useless, incompetent govt funded DESs operate?.....

(get back to me if you want this thread derailed or not)

 

While you guys are fixing the system you'll need to look at the carer's allowances, there are lots of people out there USING their parents to claim full time carers allowances yet don't lift a finger and/or leave them in squalor on their own not receiving any decent care.
Plus you'll need to look at the number of nursing homes and aged care facilities for these people to down size to, as currently there isn't enough. That's why the gub wants them to stay home, they have no where to go! This is especially common in regional areas, hospitals are make shift nursing homes

 

I think you mean carers payment.. Carers allowance is only $123.50


Also, please not that the age pension asset thresholds are REDUCING in 2017, pretty substantially. It doesn't address the large equity in PPOR, but still a start.

With regards to payment rates... With a paid of home, concessions on most bills (energy, water, rates) $873.90 a f/t for a single person is a lot of money for most people when they have limited expenses,plus in my experience old people don't eat much food.

 

The pension concessions come to diddly squat these days. They are usually for state-by-state expenses too, so one state might offer generous concessions for something, say car registration or electricity, but the concession for the same product in other states might be negligible.

 

The main pension concession is the health care card which can be worth a considerable amount.
Marg

 

If you're sitting on $xxx,xxx+ worth of assets, you shouldn't be getting a welfare payment. Healthcare is a different story.
PPOR's shouldn't be exempt from pension or payment asset testing & its just further propping up the housing market by allowing older generations to occupy inner family homes when they no longer need the space or the proximity to the city.

I get it from a lifestyle "this is my family home" point of view, but that's a luxury that that government shouldn't be paying for. If you want to stay in that home, figure out a way to pay for it with your own dime.

I suspect this is going to become an increasingly large issue over the next few years. The agent pension is already the single largest welfare payment the government makes & the cost of keeping older folk alive is rising dramatically.

I think we've probably got a fairly reasonable mix at the moment between utilitarian and caring attitudes toward healthcare, I'm not sure how sustainable it is expense wise though.

 

Needs to happen but wont any time soon. Turfing old people out of their homes even though its an entirely rational thing to do (frees up family housing stock / stops subsidising their lifestyle decisions) and jacking up the aged pension back to what it should be (it was originally introduced for people who lived BEYOND the estimated life expectancy, not so that everyone would get it), would both generate really bad media headlines. Plus baby boomers and the elderly are the largest voter bloc.

Healthcare is also a major factor to consider. We've got all these wonderful and $$$$$$ medicines and treatments that we can use to keep people alive typically into their late 70's & for some increasingly large numbers into their 80's, 90's & 100's.... But for most their economic utility runs out around their 60's at the latest. That's a very long time for someone to be collecting a pension and or receiving costly ongoing medical treatment while not being viable human capital.

Superannuation needs to go up because otherwise people don't seem capable of budgeting themselves (which I get, $$ is a finite resource and its much easier to rationalise "I need / want X now" vs "I should put $Y aside for my retirement in 50 years"... But its going to be a disaster for future generations if we don't do something about it soon.
Proposed policies like letting young people dip into their super to fund buying a home also terrify me. That's money that is needed to pay for their retirement so the government doesn't have to spend as much on them & its already not going to be enough for most people.

 

I agree we are at a transition but the aged pension will always exist.

What if someone has no super how will they live? There will always be a safety net so I cannot see them scraping away the aged pension ever.

 

I agree with you that being a human capital resource after the age of 60 is very limited and into 70 is basically non existent.

However what sort of species would we be if we just culled the elderly who couldn't pay their way. There is more to life than money and cost/benefit, somethings cannot be measured e.g. the bond between grandparents and grandchild. I am a different person because of mine and I would want my child to grow from my parents (her grandparents). Now my parents are self funded so they wouldn't need to be 'culled' however I would prefer everyone to have the same access as they teach children the value of family.

 

I think this is going to be an increasingly large moral dilemma for people and governments to battle with. I mean from a purely utilitarian point of view, once people no longer have human capital value we should be seizing their assets, grinding them up into soylent and eating them.. But that's not a world I'm keen to live in.

I mean at what stage does a government go, "okay you've had a good run"? If we can keep people consistently alive to 100, 150? At what point do they go "yeah.. this is costing tens of thousands of dollars a month, we can't sustain this." Or are we as a species morally obligated to always do anything possible to prolong the lives of the people around us if within our power to do so?

Its going to be further complicated by increased automation and technology. In my life time I suspect we're already going to see a lot less need for humans to perform known repetitive labour tasks, but its not like we're going to stop at automating manufacturing and cars. Human labour is (just my personal prediction), going to continue to be less and less relevant over the next few hundred years.
I've seen "futurists" predict that we will all move into more thought based work, but as computing and AI progresses, I don't see why we wouldn't eventually hit a point say 500 years from now, where a computer can write code, analyse 100 different inputs to diagnose my medical condition, generate poetry, etc better than a human could.

We live in interesting times.

 

I think that $1.2m limit is going to be reduced to somewhere around $800,000 in 2017, so the government is making a start at getting the sustem a bit fairer.

 

@Plutus your spot on and this is a conversation my colleague and I often have.
At some point we will be able to have all the resources we need to not need to work. Food can be grown at incredible rates, housing could be whipped up in a week, electricity generated from multiple sources, no more reliance on resources such as petrol.

He believes it will inspire creativity, people can spend time doing what they love. I worry we as humans need constant stimulation and order which a 9-5 provides. I know we all aim for financial freedom but I think that can truly only every be enjoyed if you work hard for it. If you were born into a world of not needing to work and the first thing you see before your mothers face is an iphone25 taking your picture...then I think automation is a scary thought.

And don't get me started on technology, I work in IT and am already worried about our young generation. It still BAFFLES me when I hear someone say "oh she is so smart, look at her use the iphone..." Really?? That surprises you? Most parents spend more time swiping their phone than walking. We are at a point where a child should probably learn to swipe an iphone before they can walk, that will be a new milestone in a child's development.

I recently went to a conference where the Telstra CEO was saying how every device in the future will be "connected", he talked about the kettle? I mean come on! Do we really need to remove someone asking their wife if they want a cup of tea? Do we really need an app to boil the kettle? At what point do we as humans even need to speak to each other anymore?

Sorry wayyyy of topic! haha

 

There is really no need to be discussing in apocalyptic terms with dictatorial government. Contextually, our concern is with issues confronting a democratic society, not an Orwellian Big Brother. It is dehumanising to talk about human capital or being cannibalistic. There is scope for freedom to live the life we want and make choices.

However, we do need to educate the public about the need for mutual obligation. The government can only help so far. It is budgeted with resources to provide basic infrastructure available to all and not unlimited resources earmarked for the few. Self reliance is the first call on a person's life to define individuality. A person is not free to simultaneously live a wanton life of self harm and expect intervention from society to undo the harm. If a person wants to be suicidal, ultimately he should succeed. It is foolhardy to provide 24/7 resources on a lost cause. It is not up to society to take over a person's life to avert self actualisation as long as it does not harm others.

If we cut out the waste on the foregoing activities there will be no need to ever reach a situation of seizing others' assets. Anyway, the Australian Constitution stipulates for fair compensation if you seize private assets.

 

I was just talking about this yesterday with a mate and I disagree. I studied Commerce with a major in Information Technology in the early 90's. We had to study and complete an assignment on 'the leisure crisis'. Apparently, computers would do all our work in our shiny new paperless offices and humans would be left with little work to do. This would create a "crisis" of excess leisure time and what would we all do with ourselves with all that spare time? Two things happened. As computers made people more efficient, they were given more work to do. A standard office worker 25 years ago would not have been nearly as productive as a standard office worker now. The second thing that happened is that people all around the world simply invented more work. There are things that people do now that didn't exist 25 years ago. I'm thinking regulatory/council/government/legal and even in large organisations. The issue is that if you give people downtime, they invent new BS work to do to keep people busy. A lot of this is bureaucratic nonsense of course, but it keeps people busy.

Think about robots taking over the work of humans. Someone has to teach people how to invent the robots. Then people invent them and people build them. People need to invent the machines to build them and they also need to be taught how to do that. Then people need to write the code to run the robots and the machines to build the robots. Then people need to supervise the construction and testing of the robots and the machines that make the robots. Then people need to invent machines to maintain the robots (*** or other new invention). People need to maintain them, people need to monitor them, they will be regulated and people need to administer the regulation. It goes on and on and on. I don't buy this thing of people being idle in the future. Idle minds will simply invent more work

*** I'm thinking specifically of a solar array in the central desert of Australia. People invented and constructed, installed and maintained the solar array. The problem was the panels kept getting dusty, so someone invented an constructed a machine specifically designed to clean the panels. Small example I know, but you can scale it up.