Anne Else

All over the world, women can now expect to live longer than their mothers did. Life expectancy is higher than it has ever been before. In New Zealand, women who reach 65 can expect to live for another 19 years. Men can expect to live for another 15 years.

The reasons for this male/female gap are complex. However, it is getting smaller. The other marked difference in New Zealand is between Maori and non-Maori. Unlike the difference between men and women, most of this gap is due to deaths before the age of 65. Maori death rates for the year after birth, for men aged 40 and over, and for cardiovascular disease and lung cancer are still high compared with non-Maori rates. But the overall difference is much smaller than it was even 20 years ago. For those who reach 65, it is now narrow.

Life expectancy is still growing. By the third decade of next century, it's likely that men of 65 will live another 19 years, on average, and women just over 22 years. This is probably the first time in human history that there has been such a marked lengthening of life expectancy for people who reach 65.

The increase in average length of life this century has been greater than the increase throughout the whole of human history since pre-Roman times. It is so large, says a US demographer, that we have almost become a different species. "Retirement used to be rare, because most people died during their work life. At least one parent had usually died before the last child left home. Orphans were common and old people were scarce. Now the opposite is true...No society of the past has had to cope with these issues." [James E. Barren, "The Process of Aging" in A. Pifer and L. Bronte (eds), Our Aging Society, Paradox and Promise, W.W. Norton and Co (NY) 1986, p.267.]

But living longer is only half the story. The other half is about the changing shape of the population as a whole. Not only are we living longer; we are also having fewer children. The inevitable result will be more older people, a majority of them women, and fewer younger people.

In fact, New Zealand is moving much more slowly along this path than similar countries overseas. European and Japanese birth rates are already well below replacement level. Ours are not nearly as low. In this country, births will go on outnumbering deaths for the next 40 years. So why are we being told to panic?

Longer life is an ancient human goal. Yet there has been remarkably little celebration of reaching it among Pakeha in New Zealand, or most other developed countries. Instead, the old are being painted as some kind of looming "grey peril".

In my research I read a very interesting book put out by the World Bank called Averting the Old Age Crisis (OUP for World Bank, 1994). It has a typical outline of The Problem:

Translated, and applied to New Zealand, what does this mean? Older people don't usually do full-time paid work. They get their income solely or mainly from a tax-funded pension of some kind. In market terms, they produce nothing. They consume too little of what the market sells and too much of what the state provides. And they rely on others to pay for it all. What's more, they need younger people to look after them. Taxes and caring interfere with paid work. Now the growing weight of numbers of old people threatens to sink the whole economy.

The fact that more of the old are women seems to make it all much worse. Here is one of the National Business Review's gentlemen columnists waxing apoplectic about the future cost of health care: "an old-old female costs the government 10 times as much as a 20-year-old". You can almost hear him thinking "and she's 100 times less use to us chaps". The headline for this piece was, "Elderly's welfare appetite gives everyone a pain." (N.Bennett, NBR, 4 July 1998)

Such claims appear to be deliberately aiming to set the young against the old. That means they are trying to set children and grandchildren against their parents and grandparents. Even more absurd, they are trying to set today's baby boomers against their own future selves.

Why is this being done? The idea seems to be to make us fear the bogey of ageing so much that we will all stop expecting any kind of liveable income from the state. Then more and more of us will start demanding tax cuts, so we can save enough to do without a pension and buy our own health care. If taxes are cut enough, then of course the state won't be able to pay. So the prophecy will become self-fulfilling.

As we all know, women earn less than men and enter old age with lower assets than men, mainly because they do more unpaid work - including caring for the old. Thanks to the failed campaign for compulsory private saving, we know that at least 85 percent of all women, and 40 percent of all men, do not earn enough over their whole working-age lives to save what they would need to provide an income in old age, even at the most basic level.

Whatever arrangements we make for income in old age, they must meet the needs of women. If they do, we can be sure they will meet men's needs too. New Zealand's unique pension system does this more successfully than almost any other.

It also avoids many of the problems facing systems elsewhere. This is largely because, first, it does not try to link the amount you get to the amount you previously earned from paid work. People who earned little or nothing - and who are much more likely to be women - get the same pension as others. High earners do not get a higher pension. Secondly, it treats women and men exactly the same, so that women get a pension in their own right, not as their husband's dependents.

Even the World Bank admits that tax funded, egalitarian, pay as you go schemes like ours are by far the best at alleviating poverty, particularly among women. And yet the World Bank has strongly advocated a move to privately run, compulsory savings schemes. Why? Because these schemes can "increase long term savings beyond the voluntary point and require the money to flow through financial institutions". This "stimulates a demand for (and eventually supply of) long-term financial instruments", which are said to be "a boon to development"(p.13). (Of course, this was all written before chaos hit global financial markets.)

So the argument has very little to do with demographic changes and financial pressures, let alone the welfare of the old. Instead it has everything to do with channelling money away from the state and into private business - particularly large multinational corporations.

Imagine that a nasty kind of pollution kills off 5 out of every 10 people aged 65 and over. Or suppose genetically modified soy beans stop contraception working, so that women have twice as many children. Either way, the so-called old age dependency problem would quickly disappear.

But would any of this make any difference to new right arguments? No, it would not. The new right would go on calling just as loudly for lower taxes, and for a shift away from state provision to private saving and insurance. This would leave most women and many men far worse off.

It would also have a huge impact on the whole economy. Tax revenue transferred to older people does not disappear. Most of it is immediately spent on goods and services. This sustains and creates paid work.

Finally, and most important of all, older people are not a useless burden. Thanks to New Zealand Super, they can and do continue to contribute to families, communities and society in hundreds of different ways. Our society could not function without them.

Our book explains how the New Zealand system works, why it is so important to keep it broadly in place, and how this can be done. We hope it will give you the information you need to make sure this happens.

But we need to go much further. We urgently need to start thinking sensibly about what it means to grow older as a society. It makes no sense at all to go on seeing what is now a third of our lives as nothing but a kind of postscript. Women are far better placed than men to lead this shift, and the time to start is now. At stake are all our futures.

Ó 1998 Anne Else

[ Anne Else ]  | |  [ Women's Policy Forum ]