A research paper, ‘Is retirement history?’ argues that an ageing Australia demands a comprehensive strategy based on ‘active’ social participation rather than on a materialistic ‘productive’ participation. The article responds to
the federal government’s recent (February) announcement of a Productive Ageing Package of policies targeting the employability older workers adds to its own and Howard/Costello government initiatives aimed at pushing out the date of retirement.
The research paper is comprehensive and makes some excellent points. By way of example, the need to understand ageing as a stage of life with its own dignity rather than a time of reduced ‘productive’ contribution and increased economic dependency on society. Therefore:
What is required … is a complete strategy for our ageing society, not a piecemeal approach. In this regard a strategy for “active” ageing should be favoured. This would address a much wider range of issues concerning social participation in later life. “Productive” has as its starting point the notion that too many older people are economically dependent on society, whereas the “active” approach recognises the important contribution older people potentially can and do make in different spheres.
Ageing is an important topic that like euthanasia goes to the heart of human well-being, of what it is to be human. In Christian understanding human beings are of worth and worthy of dignity because each and every person is created in the image of God. Although this research work is not explicitly ‘Christian’, it highlights the danger of reducing human beings, including ageing ones(!), to ‘productive’ units.
Well worth a measured read over a good cuppa’.
‘Is retirement history?’ by Philip Taylor, Elizabeth Brooke, Erin Watson and Tia di Biase, researchers in the Business, Work and Ageing Centre for Research, Swinburne University of Technology.
