CHARLES WOOLEY
As a nation, it seems the more we age, the more likely we are to get even older. Sorry to begin with what seems like a tautology but it’s nevertheless widely reported that since 1990 the average life expectancy of Australians has increased by five and a half years. Our life expectancy is now 83.2 years and among the highest in the world. At the birth of our nation back in 1901 we are told the average person hopped off the twig in their early to mid-50s. Now we hang on for dear life and for another 34 years; in the process dashing our kids’ hopes of any kind of inheritance.
It’s starting to seem like anything’s possible and you know what it really means when something seems too good to be true? When Joe Hockey was treasurer back in 2015, he announced it was highly probable a kid born today might make 150 years. No wonder he was passing around cigars.
If you are 65 today, the demographers reckon you can now reasonably expect to be around until 2040 when the population is anticipated to rise from the present 25 million to maybe 35 million. But there might be a lot more of us than that because guessing future population scenarios is always a confounding business. The estimates keep blowing out just like the cost of power-schemes, submarines and home renovations.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics is perhaps the best guide on population growth even if they do dramatically revise their estimations upwards every few years. The best guess, this week, is we will be pushing 40 million people within the lifetime of today’s 50-year-olds. If you are one of them, by then you will be an old fart and while you will certainly not be alone in a demographic sense you might yet experience loneliness. Today one third of Australians live alone and there is no reason to believe this will change in the foreseeable future.
“Loneliness is the killer we don’t recognise,” says Ian Henschke, an old colleague of mine and a former ABC journalist. Now in his early dotage he works as the spokesman for National Seniors. “Old age and loneliness are a lethal combination. Living alone is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. When single people stop getting out and about, they are on track to the nursing home, where no one visits and where, on average, they last about three lonely years,” Henschke cheerfully told me.
Henschke in his late 60s seems in fine fettle. Clearly, he is staying young and alive by concentrating on the old and dying.
This week I had a birthday in numbers high enough to get me thinking about death, a subject we understandably prefer not to dwell on. We would rather discuss obscure demographics (as I did here for the first 300 words) than contemplate our passing, as we so pathetically describe our inevitable DEATH.
Perhaps I had made a mistake ringing my old mate Henschke. Certainly, it wasn’t a happy birthday call. Ian left me feeling I was wasting precious time planting lemons and olives in the sand dunes near Dodge City. “Mate you will be lucky if you’ve got another 10 years left without debilitating illnesses,” my old friend told me. “Most Australians need some care in their 70s and by 84 they are in a nursing home. Three years later they’re dead and the bed isn’t even cold before it has another temporary occupant.”
I asked: “So, what about all these good news longevity stats that are being pedaled all over the place?”
“I don’t think we are really living longer than our grandparents,” Henschke said. “Sure, some people died young, in wars, in childbirth and of diseases we can now cure, and that brought down the average. But check out the graveyards and you will see lot of people got to a ripe old age.”
Henschke admits to being a “conspiracy theorist”. “All this talk about how much longer we are going to live is designed to soften us up for an increase in taxes and other social changes. It’s already been used to push the pension age from 65 to 67.”
I am starting to see things Henschke’s way. We are being conned by our leaders into working until we drop, paying tax and costing the government nothing as we toil well beyond reasonable retirement age. Politicians on the other hand are unaffected by their own evil plans. When they are sick of the job or we are sick of them they go onto a very generous pension.
Government websites suggest we will be mentally and physically healthier if we keep working and many Australians have been persuaded, just as I was. But now I’m not so sure. If I can’t get a reasonable guarantee of making 92 like my father or 100 like my mother I am already running out of time for fishing, sailing and picking lemons in the sand dunes for a martini with a twist. This week I’m feeling shaken, not stirred. See you next week. Maybe.