By NOEL MURPHY
AUSSIES are living longer and the number of 100-year-olds among us will jump to a thumping 40,000 over the next 40 years.
Indeed, the first person to live to 120 is already among us, but not just 120 yet, according to aged care experts.
Trevor Carr, in Geelong this week for an aged care forum, said life expectancy of a newborn babe today was 91.5 and 93.6 years for males and females respectively. Over the next 40 years, this will rise to 95.1 and 96.6 – a far cry from the mid-70s of just 20 years ago.
But not only does this mean older people, it means lots more older people – over 65s will jump 22 per cent by 2050 in the Barwon region.
“Industry sustainability, with that changing demographic, is a pretty big issue,” said Mr Carr, CEO of Leading Aged Services Australia, key speaker at the forum.
“We’ve got more and more demand because you’ve got a bigger cohort of people looking for services, and its government funded, that sort of change is a big part of it.
“We’ve already seen changes to co-contributions from people who can afford it.
“The Baby Boomers are typified as having a little bit more wealth than the previous generation so they’re going to have more purchasing power — so there’s a lot more happening in the home-care environment than resi-care, that’s the growth part of it.”
Mr Carr said the aged care debate was focussing about what assets should be taken into account “in analysing a person’s capability to pay for some of that” — a “contemporary discussion for the next three years” moving toward the 2017 review of the 20-year-old Aged Care Act.
Workforce was a big issue also, he said. With a shrinking workforce availability over the next 30 years, and therefore shrinking tax base, the industry’s “human interface” would be difficult to sustain.
“That’s a big issue as well, where we get that workforce from, how we develop leadership. Mayber we’ll have to get robotics.”
