Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I suggest the member for Ryan check out the items that can be talked about in the grievance debate. In the grievance debate you do not necessarily have to attack the other side. The grievance debate can be used for putting forward positive and creative ideas. Maybe the member for Ryan does not have a positive or creative idea in his head.

I am also going to concentrate on issues that are confronting frail aged people. As I have already mentioned, one of the biggest issues confronting Australia is our ageing population. We have a declining birth rate while at the same time people are living longer. Former Treasurer Peter Costello took a first step towards looking at our ageing population through the Intergenerational report. Unfortunately, I feel that he looked at it only from the point of view of the economic cost to Australia. There are many other dimensions to ageing than just the cost. When people, governments and organisations look at ageing it is from a very negative perspective. Ageing equals aged care and ageing equals a cost to the community: ageing is a very negative thing.

I remember when I was younger being with a very active and fit person who had grey hair. A friend walked up behind her when she had dropped something, put her hand on her and said, ‘Dear, can I help you?’ The friend then saw that the person I was with was younger than she was. Quite often you find in hospitals that older people are talked to in a way similar to how children are talked to. That older person is still an intelligent, vibrant person but because they are older they are thought of as being a lesser person and not having the same level of understanding as someone who is younger. By adopting this approach to ageing, we as a society are losing a lot. We are losing the wisdom that older people can provide us with and we are losing a very important resource in our community.

From the perspective of ensuring that we have a society that embraces a positive lifestyle in ageing, we need to make sure that older people are connected to the rest of our society. We need to ensure that they are included in activities. If a person is a little older and has not been as active and as involved, one of the best things that we can do is put in place the support that is needed to help that person connect again with their community. Active ageing is about being involved in exercise and ensuring that the right sort of environment is created to prevent falls. Active aging is the recognition of the fact that just about every volunteer organisation in Australia manages to continue operating only because of the older people that are involved.

One of the areas where I think our nation is really being deprived is that of employment. In that area older workers are severely discriminated against. If a person is older they are thought of as being out of touch and not as au fait with the latest technologies. They are thought of as not having knowledge about the latest computers and the latest workplace practices. They are even thought of as being an occupational health and safety risk. That is not true—not true at all.

Older workers are a resource that exists within our community. They are a resource that is being ignored, but not every employer has ignored that resource. Westpac bank is one of the employers that have embraced older workers and made a point of employing older workers. Westpac has found that as customer service officers older workers are quite often much more effective than other employees. I think its oldest employee 75 years of age and operating very effectively.

If, as a society, we are to move from the cost approach to an ageing population to a positive approach, we need to develop some innovative approaches. We need to put in place the right sorts of programs that are going to encourage employers to offer jobs to older people. We need to put in place programs and advertisements that send out positive messages into the community that people, as they get older, are still valuable members of our society. Older people are members of our society and they provide so much support. They provide support to children through grandparenting and to volunteer organisations, as I have already mentioned. It is only by recognising this that we can calculate the true advantage of having an older society.

I think there are numerous missed opportunities because of the fact that we do not recognise that older people are a particular market. If businesses look at, cater for and embrace the needs of the ageing population, those businesses will find enormous opportunities. As a nation we need to move from where we are now—of seeing an ageing population only as a cost to our nation. We need to embrace the opportunities that exist. We need to embrace the older citizens of this country and develop their special attributes and use those special attributes for the benefit of our nation. (Time expired)

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