A recent paper by the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees, using Melbourne Institute’s Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, concluded that retirees’ spending increases as they age. The implication is clear: if retirees spend more as they age, they need to save more before retirement to fund that higher spending.
Australia should move to a universal dental care scheme over the next 10 years, as we recommended in our recent report Filling the Gap. But even under existing policy, there is a funded dental scheme for children. The tragedy is that it does not deliver the care it could.
Depending on who you ask, carbon emissions in Australia are either rising, or falling. What is undeniable is that recent increases in emissions from Australia’s fossil fuel exports dwarf any domestic reductions.
More regional Australians1 are going to university when they finish school, and they are incre
Australians are pretty healthy overall, but not all Australians are equally healthy. The starkest inequality in Australians’ health outcomes is between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
Today saw Opposition Leader Bill Shorten claim that past increases in compulsory super contributions wouldn’t come out of wages.
The empirical evidence shows that over time, when there’s an increase in compulsory superannuation, it hasn’t affected wages growth.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, press conference, April 17, 2019
Grattan Institute’s 2018 Money in Retirement report projected important changes to homeownership rates in Australia, especially among retirees. These were picked up recently in an article we published in the Conversation.
Here’s how we did it.
The conventional wisdom is that Australia has an especially high rate of poverty among the elderly. Advocates of increasing the Age Pension point to OECD research which shows that in 2014, 26 per cent of Australians aged 65 and over suffered income poverty, compared to 13 per cent across all OECD countries.
To know how Australia is performing, we want to compare ourselves to other countries. But which ones? There are 193 countries in the world, and they vary along numerous dimensions. Even within the club of rich and rich-ish countries – the OECD – there are 36 members, ranging from Mexico to Switzerland.