Older people have done the hard yards in life and deserve to celebrate – and get a Seniors Card discount on the party. Photo: Goodbye Picture Company.
One of my (very) young colleagues on another Region site ruffled a few feathers this week by suggesting the Seniors Card is … well, past its use-by date.
Before you ask, yes, he is Gen Z. We won’t hold that against him just yet.
I’m not quite old enough to be eligible for a Seniors Card, but I’m getting close and I don’t want to bloody miss out – I’ve missed out on enough government benefits purely because of the year I was born.
As someone, though, who does live in a “lifestyle village”, I reckon I’m qualified to throw my two bobs’ worth in and set young Jarryd straight on a few things.
His basic argument is that old people who are eligible for a Seniors Card are sitting pretty while young people (aged 18 to 30-odd) are living on struggle street.
I’m not going to argue with his maths – I do words not numbers – but he has calculated that couples over the age of 67, on average, aren’t paying rent or a mortgage, HECS debts or taxes, and are still earning on average $875 a week (assuming they are receiving the age pension).
“Yet, people between 18 and 25 are earning less than $700 a week, but their taxes go towards seniors’ pensions? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me,” he goes on to say.
At the risk of upsetting my younger team members – and of course No 1 favourite son – it makes a whole lot of bloody sense to me!
We’ve been paying taxes for longer than millennials have been alive, including towards the Seniors Card which was introduced in 1992.
Ironically, that was also the year that compulsory super payments were introduced (thank you Paul Keating), something that has benefitted millennials since the day they started work, as opposed to those who came before them.
When we were busy having you kids there was no such thing as a “baby bonus” for us.
To save you Googling it, the then Liberal treasurer Peter Costello was so anxious about the nation’s dwindling birth rate and ageing population (gee, sounds familiar) that in 2004 he encouraged Aussies to “have one for mum, one for dad and one for the country”. And then for almost a decade he handed out between $3000 and $5000 to everyone who did as he urged.
Although the baby bonus has gone, new parents today are offered a raft of government payments, from the Newborn Upfront Payment and Newborn Supplement, to Dad and Partner Pay. Nope, not in our day.
When we were buying our first homes there was no such gift as the Home Guarantee Scheme, the First Home Guarantee, the Regional First Home Buyers Guarantee, the Family Home Guarantee – the only guarantee we had was soaring interest rates.
While millennials are boo-hooing about six per cent interest rates in 2024, we were paying 17 per cent.
Yes, you’d be quite right to point out that houses were much cheaper then and we were “lucky” we didn’t have to borrow as much as you do today.
But I don’t know of too many first home buyers today who are content to buy an ex-Housing Department, two-bedroom fibro home with no running hot water in the kitchen. And green felt in the cutlery draw. True story.
We managed, saved and slowly updated and extended our home. Most of us lived in those first homes for a decade before we were able to trade up to a better model.
Like you, the majority of our income went on the mortgage but we still managed to enjoy ourselves.
My generation and those before didn’t have the internet, DVDs, mobile phones, pay-TV or subscription services.
We embraced the video recorder (upgrading from Beta to VHS was a huge step forward) and thought CDs were a brilliant invention, even if we could only scrape together enough to afford to buy secondhand albums.
Did I mention that most of us had moved out of home aged about 18 when we finished Year 12 – not when we finished university at the age of 22, 24, 26 …?
We went to university – granted it was free for many of us (thank you Gough Whitlam) or started working, paid rent, managed to feed ourselves and our pets and lived pretty much week to week, with a bit of partying and nightlife thrown in.
And guess what – we paid our taxes and helped support those in our community who needed a hand to get by.
So if our reward is a Seniors Card and 85 cents off a mocca-frappe-chino (I’d prefer a cappuccino personally) then you bet I’ve earned it and I’m going to bloody well take it!
Loading ...
