Retire at 70?
Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott have both been talking about the need to increase the age of retirement to 67 and 70 years respectively. It is a reasonable proposition that the normal retirement age should be 70 years. The retirement age of 65 years was decided in 1910 when the average age of death for working people was twenty years lower than it is today.
The cost of living has increased so that aged pensions cannot possibly keep pace with the cost of living, and those dependent upon Government pensions without supplement from private sources means that retired people will fall further below the poverty line.
Each year more Australians enter the ranks of the elderly. The oldest baby boomers turned sixty in 2006, and when the trend peaks in 2030, the number of people over age 65 will soar. We are living longer, are suffering more expensive health care claims, and are facing the growing differential between the cost of living and our incomes from pensions and superannuation.
The future impact will be enormous and the resources needed to meet the needs of this generation will be inadequate. This phenomenon – work less, need more – has ripped a hole in the senior citizen safety net. We urgently need more young people paying taxes and, as Australians are not reproducing at the required rate, we must take in more immigrants and refugees – for they have more children and an urgent need to work to buy houses, furniture, cars and other consumables. Hence, they pay tax on earnings and GST on every item they buy.
To have any policy that restricts immigration at this time in our history is to indicate that person does not understand Australia’s economic future. Such a policy as the CDP anti Muslim Immigration policy is economic stupidity when our older citizens are facing a financially difficult future.
The other alternatives are for workers to put more into their superannuation (say 15% of average weekly earnings) and to live on less now, even though their retirement savings are likely to be worth much less in the future. Another possibility is for seniors to continue to earn higher income rather than retire on a pension or superannuation. To still earn a full salary at age 70 will greatly help to ensure the years of retirement without financial deprivation.
Currently, there are 1.9 million Australians aged 70 and over, comprising 9.3 per cent of the population. But within 40 years the number of people aged over 65 will almost triple, from 2.8 million today to around 7.2 million in 2047, or from around 13 per cent of the population today to over 25 per cent.
Australia is facing a demographic shift with one of the world’s longest life expectancy rates. We are outliving the Swedes, Norwegians and Finns. An Australian born today can expect to live to reach an average of 80.9 years of age; 78.5 years for a man and 83.3 for a woman. Taxes paid over 40 years of working are insufficient for twenty years of retirement, especially as most women of this age were not earning and paying taxes over those forty years due to breaks for childbirth and child rearing.
To be aged and not to own a home is to dramatically impoverish elderly people, especially if the later years are marked by frailty and ill health. There are currently 170,000 elderly Australians living in nursing homes around the country with up to 70% of them in the frail, ‘high care’ category. Most residents are female because they live longer than males. The average age of a person entering residential care is 82. Those aged 80 or over make up 3% of the Australian population and this is expected to climb to 6% of the population in 2031 (Australian Bureau of Statistics). The need for high care residential places outstrips supply but there is nowhere else for them to go.
An independent survey of 700 not for profit and private operators released by a leading accounting firm showed that those who’d built new facilities with single bed rooms and ensuites were averaging annual returns of only 1.1 per cent on their investment, and some were operating at a loss. Charities and churches do not have enough additional income from other sources to continue to provide residential care as in the past even with Government financial support.
Currently nursing homes get $138 subsidy per day from the Government for every high care resident in a single ensuite room, added to the resident’s contribution of $33.41 per day. (Non-pensioners pay up to $41.61 daily.) There is no minimum nurse to patient ratio requirement. That leads to situations with 120 residents and one registered nurse supported by Enrolled Nurse Aides responsible for them.
The Medicare levy will rise about $1000 per year, per worker, to pay for the new hospitals and health reforms being made by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Every person older than 65 is estimated to cost about four times as much in healthcare as everyone younger than 65. Under the reforms, those who want to secure a high-care bed could face accommodation bonds of about $150,000. The Department of Health and Ageing oversees more than 2870 accredited nursing homes with 167,070 aged care beds across Australia. Compare this with Baghdad, a city of 5 million, which has only one nursing home.
I believe churches could do much more in aged care. Since the age of twenty I have been actively involved in the administration and the provision of aged care services and buildings for the elderly. In my life time until my retirement from ministry, I was responsible for raising and spending over $500 million to support aged people from the four churches of which I was senior minister. This is more money than any other person in Australia over this time. But more can be done.
In an effort to answer the demand for practical steps by which the church can demonstrate its essential witness-bearing love for one another, there is perhaps no greater opportunity emerging than that of caring for the aging saints.
As Tertullian wrote roughly 1,800 years ago, “it is our care of the helpless, our practice of loving kindness, that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents.” Such loving kindness expresses a distinct characteristic of Christ’s kingdom come into the world. What better opportunity to demonstrate how this new life in Christ has transformed us—reorienting our priorities away from self to others—than by how we care for the aging within the community of God’s people?
In Paul’s letter to Timothy, he stresses this responsibility toward the elderly and widows in particular. Paul goes so far as to say that anyone who does not provide accordingly for his own family is guilty of denying the faith and worse than an unbeliever (cf. 1 Timothy 5:8). So such care is not merely a nice option if it’s convenient or affordable but a serious and universal command.
Here are some programs and services your church can undertake to support the elderly in your community. I have personally developed each of these suggestions and know they can work. More than one-third of communities do not have fitness programs for older adults. Your church can start a walking club, an aerobics group, a fitness group, a line-dancing group, or a hydrotherapy class at no cost at all.
Only 56 percent reported having “dial a ride” or door-to-door transportation services and it only takes one volunteer to organize a transportation team, and one volunteer to be the contact person. This worked so well our church purchased a bus for shopping trips, outings and drives to national parks.
Only half of the communities reported having home modification programs helping older adults adapt existing homes for physical limitations. One of the elders in my church established a “care group” which enlisted over a hundred volunteers who once a month spent a Saturday morning mowing lawns, digging gardens, clearing, spouting, replacing tap washers, fixing jammed cupboard doors, fixing grab rails in baths, showers and toilets and a hundred other small items; any replacement parts were purchased by the owner but the labour was free.
Immediately, churches could begin organizing teams dedicated to retrofitting homes of the aging who are still able to live independently but whose homes may need modification or general household maintenance. The need was so great that in one of my churches I established fulltime staff and retired volunteers to form Wesley Home Maintenance and Modification Service. Wouldn’t it be a great blessing to be enabled to remain in your own home as long as possible?
A group of men, including some older teenagers, developed a motor vehicle repair and monitoring service, using their talents much to the delight of many elderly who worried about their cars. We also provided programs to help older adults remain in the workforce. This meant running computer courses so the elderly person could keep ahead of the game, aiding others to get a licence for a forklift and for another to drive a bus.
I led a local Melbourne Church in building five major buildings to provide accommodation and nursing care for frail aged in our church. Before long millions of dollars had been raised and over 300 aged persons were in care. In my subsequent church even more people were supplied with accommodation at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars for buildings and staff.
Local churches can build and manage assisted living facilities, retirement centres, and nursing homes for their members. Consider the benefit of having such facilities on the grounds of the church, or as we did, on adjacent property where we purchased thirteen houses and demolished them at one church and other land at another church.
This means elderly members can remain actively involved in their Christian community. Additional activities could engage youth in the church in order to foster the transmission of intergenerational wisdom and teaching compassion. Aging brothers and sisters could live out their final years with their church family—in a loving, Christ-centered community—with whom they have longtime relationships.
They in their turn provided a wonderful resource of volunteers to undertake the hundred jobs an active church needs doing, from babysitting young families to supporting Sunday school teachers, washing communion glasses, to supporting young brides. Smaller independent churches could partner with others in their community to accomplish the same ends, pooling their resources to build and maintain such facilities and services.
Loneliness, depression, and isolation are enormous problems among the elderly. The church could organize additional teams within the church to insure that their homebound seniors are visited, invited into other homes for dinner, and participate in other family activities—adopted, as it were, into other families within the church.
In one of my churches young members visited hundreds of elderly people every month, and records were kept for sharing at a pastoral care meeting each month. Desperately lonely adults over the age of 65 commit suicide—the highest suicide rate of any demographic group. Many could be prevented with a minimum of attention from their church families. These same families could also see to many of the daily needs of these seniors, as they would their own parents. Some of our volunteers would regularly take an aged member shopping.
My wife, even with our four children in the car, would visit every night at 5pm a number of hot bread and cake shops to pick up all of the day’s unsold goods and bring them to the homes of our elderly, to five retirement villages, and an Anglican convent. The eldest children would even deliver them to the door. How they were welcomed with their free gifts!
Many seniors struggle financially, a condition that should never exist within the body of Christ. Might we, like the early church, see to it that there is not a need among us (see Acts 4:34). One of my friends established “The Fellowship of the Right Handers” (Matthew 6:3) to provide secret gifts of money for people doing it tough. I established a secret group of wealthy men who paid for the funeral on behalf of widows in the church when their husband died. The Funeral Director would just send her the account marked, “Paid in Full”.
One of my churches restocked every week the Minister’s Secret Kitchen, from which I would take boxes of groceries, as I would visit my people in pastoral care. Churches could provide educational seminars to help the elderly manage the labyrinth of health care, drug prescriptions, financial management, and a host of other essential issues. Neighborhood pharmacists, bank managers, optometrists and other professionals are willing to freely give their time to address such seminars.
It is important to realize that the elderly still like to learn and to share their knowledge. Arts, crafts, dancing, videos, history, philosophy, religion and languages, exercise and music were all popular.
In one church I established a continuing education program of daily lectures and classes, and in the year I left it had enrollments of 39,000 people. In the subsequent church we established 120 classes a week with over 2000 people a day involved. Think of the diverse talent and expertise within the church that could be brought to bear on all the issues confronting the elderly. Could the body of Christ so care for its aging members that even those opposed to the gospel might say, “Look how they love one another…”?
It is true that the larger developments in which I have been involved have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but most of the programs cost only thinking the idea and having the enthusiasm to enlist others to help implement them. For further details read chapters on “Builder” , “Pastor” in “Leaving a Legacy”.
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.
