As the great bulge of babies born after World War II has moved through their life course, the world has changed to suit them and their needs.<\/p>\n
But just as the latest generations of Zoomers and Millennials have begun to <\/p>\n
outnumber<\/a> the Baby Boomers, and are taking over as the politically dominant age group, the Boomers have caused one last change: retirement has become more a matter of personal preference, with many choosing to keep working.<\/p>\n In the years before the first of the Boomers began reaching normal retirement age in the early 2010s, the big trend was to early retirement. Many people fancied the idea of stopping work just as soon as it was financially feasible.<\/p>\n Men wouldn\u2019t become eligible for the age pension until they turned 65, but maybe they had enough superannuation or other savings to live on until then. Or perhaps they could downsize, selling the family home and moving to something smaller and cheaper up the coast, leaving them with money to invest and live on the interest.<\/p>\n Employers were often keen to get rid of older workers, giving them redundancy payouts sufficient to let them retire before reaching age-pension age. Early retirement was great if you could wangle it somehow.<\/p>\n This was when worthies started worrying about \u201cpopulation ageing\u201d. The average age of the population was <\/p>\n rising<\/a> because couples were having fewer children, but oldies were living longer.<\/p>\n Early retirement was adding to the problem, reducing the proportion of people still in the workforce, thus worsening the ratio of people needing to be supported relative to workers doing the supporting.<\/p>\n This was the motivation for the Howard Government\u2019s introduction of a five-yearly \u201c<\/p>\n intergenerational report<\/a>\u201d in 2002. Treasury\u2019s job was to assess what population ageing was likely to do to the federal budget over the coming 40 years, assuming policies remained unchanged.<\/p>\n The idea was to produce a report every five years that said: \u201cOh, no. The budget deficit\u2019s just going to get bigger and bigger because we\u2019ve got an ever-growing army of oldies to support with health and aged care, but an ever-smaller proportion of the population working. Something must be done.\u201d<\/p>\n Well, something has been done, partly by the Boomers and partly by the authorities. In five-yearly report after report, Treasury assumed that, with the Boomers retiring \u2014 and many retiring early \u2014 the proportion of the population that was participating in the workforce would just keep falling.<\/p>\n Wrong. Badly wrong. With about 67% of the working-age population either in paid work or seeking it, our rate of participation is near record levels.<\/p>\n And the reason? Too many of the people who could have retired \u2014 and, in earlier times, would have \u2014 haven\u2019t. They\u2019ve just kept steaming on. (And I don\u2019t just mean yours truly.)<\/p>\n According to <\/p>\n research by<\/a> economist Terry Rawnsley of chartered accountants KPMG, the share of 70-year-old men still in paid employment has increased from one in 10 in 2004 to one in four today. And about 10% of men in their late 70s are still working.<\/p>\n Note that anyone still working in their 70s is doing so of their own volition. It\u2019s possible they\u2019re still working because they can\u2019t make ends meet on the age pension, but more likely they\u2019re working just because they want to.<\/p>\n There is no official age at which people must retire. What many of us take to be the retirement age is the age at which people become eligible for the age pension. And it\u2019s true that governments have been encouraging later retirement by increasing the age for eligibility.<\/p>\n For decades, the pension age for men was 65, while for women it was 60. But between 1995 and 2004 the age for women was raised to 65. Then, between 2017 and July 2023, the pension age was raised for both sexes from 65 to 67.<\/p>\n So, for women between 60 and 67, and men between 65 and 67, their decisions about when to retire may have been influenced by government policy. According to <\/p>\n