BEN HARVEY: Sorry, Boomers, the taxpayer-funded rort that allowed you to protect your wealth is over. Sort of
Sorry Boomers but the jig is up.
You’ve been rumbled.
The taxpayer-funded rort that has allowed you to protect your wealth until you draw your last breath is over.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.You’ve been condemned to die in poverty, buried in a cardboard box in a pauper’s grave.
What other conclusion could you reach after reading the rash of headlines that accompanied Anthony Albanese’s plan (codenamed “Project Matlock”) to overhaul the way you spend your twilight years?
The good news is headlines don’t tell the whole story (if they did, we wouldn’t need the whole story) and the whole story is less alarming.
Yes, the privilege of growing old with a semblance of dignity got a little pricier, but not by much.
The Government reckons the changes amount to the biggest shakeup in aged care 30 years.
If that’s the case it’s been a pretty sedentary three decades in policy land because this is more tinkering than wholesale change.
The system has not fundamentally changed.
As is the case now, you will be encouraged to stay in your own house as you grow older because that’s cheaper than having you in residential care (which we used to call “aged care facilities” and before that “nursing homes”).
You will just have to pay a little more for the services provided by the recently arrived Sudanese migrant who has been assigned to you under your Home Care package.
The real financial “pain” comes when you are no longer safe in your home and need to go into a home.
That’s an appreciably more expensive proposition than it used to be but here’s the good news: by the time you go into residential care you will probably have forgotten what money is.
You might remember something about shillings and pence but that’ll be about it.
We’ve got so good at keeping people living in their own houses (because it’s the cheaper option) that for most it’s only at the very end of life, when our marbles are often well-and-truly lost, that we enter God’s waiting room.
By that stage you will judge a day not by if but where you moved your bowels.
You won’t care about what it’s costing you.
