Welfare addiction keeps Australia from reforming its finances - Adam Creighton

Adam Creighton for The Australian 21/03/2015

AUSTRALIAN historian John Hirst recalls that when he met his future father-in-law, Bernard, in the early 1960s, the 50-something boasted he had saved and ­arranged his financial affairs so as not to receive the age pension.


“It used to be a matter of shame for people to claim public benefits,” Hirst tells Inquirer. “Now I read in The (Australian)Financial Review articles laying out in detail how to obtain a part-age pension. It’s shameless.”
When Bernard was born in 1910, only one-third of Australians over 65 received the age pension, then only one year old. Today 80 per cent receive it, despite unprecedented growth in living standards and real average incomes in the intervening years.

This growing army of pensioners is just part of a welfare ­explosion that risks setting Australia’s public finances on the road to fiscal disaster; it also risks ­sapping political parties’ will to resist the journey with any sense of ­commitment.