Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Macdonald! I want to quote you the demographics. My daughter, Mia, is nine years old. She was born in the year 2000. You hate to talk about your family in the context of people who work in retirement incomes, but I talked to an actuary about life expectancy. He said, ‘Well, if your daughter lives to five’, which fortunately she has, ‘her average life expectancy will be 93.’ So my daughter, having been born in the year 2000, on average will now live to the year 2093. And the odds are she will probably live to see the year 2101. It is simply unsustainable, sadly and unfortunately, for my daughter not to work either in retirement or in education for 45 years of her 100-year life, if she lives 100 years. It is simply not sustainable for any society to have individuals either studying up to, say, their early twenties and then going into retirement at the age of 65. It is simply not possible to have individuals not participating in society in some form of economic involvement.

The longer you leave these reforms, the worse it gets. Frankly, some of the European countries have got themselves into a mess. Some have tackled the issue of the pension access age; some have not. But if you look at the long-term debt projections—and I will give some credit to the Liberal-National coalition, because they, like us, are supporting this legislation and they, like us, have at a range of times closed the unsustainable defined benefit funds that exist in this country.