Changing With The Times

National Secretary Bill Shorten gave this address at the official AWU Biennial National Conference Dinner.

Believe it or not, 42 years have gone by since Bob Dylan wrote that great anthem of the 1960s: The Times They Are A-Changing.

Those of you who are baby boomers might indeed find that hard to believe - 1964 probably doesn't seem like that long ago. On the other hand, if you're from Generation X or Y, it probably seems more like ancient history.

But wherever you sit on that generational spectrum, I think it's fair to say that we are entering a period of social, political and personal upheaval that will match and surpass that of the 1960s. Bob Dylan might be about to turn 66, and the youngest of the baby boomers might well be turning 50, but becomes more and more certain each day - just as the song says - that we all had "better start swimming or ... sink like a stone" if we want to survive in these times that are changing so rapidly, comprehensively and irreversibly.

Changing times demand new ideas and new energy. They demand new ways of thinking and doing things. And they demand new responses and directions from governments, businesses and unions.

I want to talk tonight about the need for a new public policy framework to prepare Australia for the wide-ranging transformation we face as a result of one of the greatest social changes of all: our ever-increasing life expectancy.
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.

A girl born today has a pretty good chance of living until around 84, while a baby boy born today can reasonably expect to last until 78.

In other words, the technological and other advances of the last century have gifted an extra 23 to 24 years of life to the average Australian.

And it's only going to get better.

By 2050, Australia can expect to have around 12,000 people who are 100 years old - with that number continuing to double every 7 to 10 years. The American business leader and philanthropist David Mahoney has written that "the 21st century will be the age of the centenarian" - and that not only brings exciting possibilities at a personal level, it also means huge adjustments in the way in which we organise our society and economy.

In simple terms, our increasing life expectancy means that we are doing things at different stages of our lives than our parents and grandparents.

In the early years of adulthood, we are now marrying and having children much later in life - preferring to postpone making these big commitments until our 30s.
We're also spending more time in education and training - and entering the paid workforce later in life.

That's a very different lifestyle to how people in their 20s lived 30 or 50 years ago.

The demographer Bernard Salt, who has been looking at some of these changes for the AWU, refers to this as 'Generation Y's stretched adolescence'. Where previous generations were married with children, holding down steady jobs and acquiring a mortgage before they were 25, Bernard Salt reckons we can now be pretty much defined as teenagers until we're around 30.

That's a pretty ghastly thought for the parents among us - and it also has some significant repercussions for public policy.

But it's at the other end of adulthood that some of the most significant changes are taking place.

Here again, it's a big change from previous generations. In the 1920s, people were considered old in their mid-60s - now, we don't really see people as elderly until they're in their 80s.

With our extra 20 or so years of life, we no longer want to work flat-out until we're 65 and then drop dead on the golf course the day after we retire.

We want to pace ourselves a lot better than our parents and grandparents did - to get the most out of those extra years and to make sure that we can continue to live healthy, energetic and active lives well into our 70s and 80s.

Those extra years of life also mean that we need an income stream that lasts well past 65 - leading many of us to extend our working lives beyond traditional retirement ages.

It's why we need to increase compulsory superannuation contributions from 9% to 15%.

Perhaps most significantly of all, many of us are looking for greater lifestyle options from our mid-50s onwards - as we enter a relatively new and extended pre-retirement phase in life.

Increasingly, Australians in their 50s and 60s are seeking out new opportunities - whether that is travel, volunteering, part-time work, retraining or downshifting. It's a very substantial recasting of what it means to be 'middle-aged' in Australia - and, again, it has very significant implications for public policy and for the way we organise our economy and our workforce.

Make no mistake about it: these changes mean that the structure of our workforce - and the nature of our working lives - is going to alter quite dramatically over the next 50 years.

For example, we're already seeing a very strong shift to part-time work. Thirty years ago, around 16 per cent of the Australian workforce was employed part-time. Last year, that had risen to 29 per cent - nearly one-third of the workforce.

Women's participation in the workforce has increased dramatically - as has the age of the workforce.

In the late 1970s, for example, around 28 per cent of the Australian workforce was aged between 15 and 24. In 2006, less than 20 per cent of the workforce fell into that young age group - a very substantial drop.

Thirty years ago, around 18 per cent of the workforce was aged 50 to 69. By last year, that had risen to 23 per cent.

These are pretty significant shifts - and they will change the way in which we organise both our personal working lives and the wider Australian workforce.

These - and many other - changes are being driven by our increasing life expectancy. I see them as positive changes - and I find it annoying and misleading that what should be a cause for celebration is so often turned into negativity and doomsaying about the so-called 'ageing population crisis'.

I don't see it as a 'crisis'. I don't want to gloss over the challenges that lie ahead, but I see living to be 100 as something to be excited and optimistic about - and as opening up many new opportunities for people, families and communities.

I have a very strong view that Australia can lead the world in extracting the full potential from living longer - and I think there are five key areas in which we should take steps now to develop the next generation of policies we need to prepare for 100 years of life.

The first area is coming to terms with the constantly changing face of work.

We know that - over the last two decades - job growth in Australia has shifted away from more traditional areas such as manufacturing and agriculture towards the services sector.

And we know that - as the demand for different occupations continues to change over the next decade - many workers will have to re-skill to stay employed.

At a personal level, that means accepting that we will change jobs several times across our working lives and that at various points we will need to become students again, apprentices again, trainees and job applicants again.

That's how the future of work will be - and to succeed in it, we will need support to up-skill and re-skill, re-train and undertake lifelong learning.

From a public policy perspective, that means governments and industry making a much greater investment in education and training across people's lifetimes. It means reversing the current Federal Government's shameful record of chronic under-investment in university education and skills - and it means rethinking a system that puts young Australians into debt for their education.

The second area we need to examine is the idea of pacing ourselves much better across our lives. That basically means accepting that we are going to be in the workforce longer and need a more stable, long-haul approach to work and life.

It means making sure that our bodies and minds stay in reasonable shape - not hobbled by stroke or heart disease or one of the thousands of workplace injuries that occur each year across Australia.

As a community, it means making a much greater investment in tackling the so-called 'lifestyle diseases', such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and obesity.

It also means moving away from our current culture of 'overwork' and finding better, more innovative ways to balance our work, family and recreational lives.
Pretty evidently, that means rejecting approaches that give Australian workers less job security, lower pay, longer hours and no capacity to take leave to care for a sick child or relative.

And when you look at the Howard Government's Work Choices package in the context of the need to sustain productivity across much longer working lifetimes, you can see that it makes very little sense from any long-term perspective: economic, social, personal, family or business.

As we live longer lives, we don't need that sort of outdated approach to industrial relations. We need a new approach that recognises the economic and social value of pacing ourselves to be productive over a much greater period.

The third area where I think we need to face facts is what I call preparing for disaster - the need to be being prepared, at least once in our lives, for a catastrophic, traumatising change.

It could be a death in the family, a divorce, an accident or financial hardship. It could be an ailing parent who requires care. It could be an adolescent child on drugs. It could be a debilitating disease like diabetes or arthritis.

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

Here again, we have to look very carefully at the public investments we must 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.

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.

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

As we pace ourselves for a longer life, we cannot continue to define ourselves solely in terms of paid work. A curriculum vitae is not a life. We have to have a vision of ourselves that's much more than our job description.

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 also be doing volunteer work.

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 the individual and community connections that make for a happier life.

To put it rather brutally, it simply wasn't necessary for our grandparents and great-grandparents to have significant interests outside work because they were only going to live until their 60s - or live on in relatively poor health after retirement.

That has changed. Redefining what it is to be 55 or 65 means that we no longer see these years as some sort of 'waiting room for retirement'. Instead, we are increasingly seeing this time as years of opportunity - where we might adopt a completely different lifestyle, re-train for a new job, take up a new hobby or activity, or direct our energy, skills and experience into volunteering.

In many ways, this pre-retirement lifestyle phase now parallels the pre-employment lifestyle phase of people in their 20s. And that is backed up by evidence that shows Australians now enjoy their greatest personal prosperity in their mid-20s and mid-50s.

In other words, it seems that both the baby boomers and Generation Y are developing an understanding that life is about more than work - and very happily organising their lives to put that understanding into practice.

In short, Australians are already re-enginneering their lives to fit these new circumstances. It is governments and corporations that need to catch up.

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 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.

As individuals, we have to manage this prosperity - and its ebbs and flows - to give ourselves financial security across a much longer timeframe.

From the broader community perspective, that means a public policy framework that encourages saving and investing for the future; that gives access to financial support at our times of greatest need; and that has 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.

In short, as our life expectancy extends, we need to 'future-proof' our lives.

I believe that this will be the great theme of the 21st century in developed countries - and I believe that our institutions will have to rethink the way they do things and come up with new ideas for extracting the maximum social and economic value from our changing demographics and lifestyles.

I think it's pretty clear that one of greatest challenges facing governments over the next 15 to 30 years will be giving Australians the power and opportunity to successfully manage our longer lives.

And I see this challenge as being about aspiration - although 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.

There are surely few things to be more optimistic about than living to be an active, engaged and happy centenarian - and I think that's a pretty positive and exciting way to think about the future.

I think it particularly says to those Australians now in their 40s, 50s and 60s that this is their time to make a difference - that this is their time to seek out a new path and to forge a new personal and national vision for the decades ahead.

Here in Australia in 2007, the times certainly are changing - but our prospects are good. It's time to move confidently and optimistically into the 21st century, stop moaning about the 'ageing crisis' and start working on our capacity to translate these dramatic changes in our life expectancy and lifestyles into something of benefit for all Australians.

Thank you.