Lucinda Holdforth

Actually, funnily enough, I encountered a young Chinese woman and she was very happy.

She was telling me that she was getting married to her partner and she was describing to me the wedding, the huge wedding with the four parents and their only children.

And she said, we're going to be responsible for these four.

And then if you think of people living longer, it might be the grandparents and the parents and the smaller cohort of children to care for them.

I'm not saying that this phase is necessarily permanent, by the way, because I think there's a lot of health developments that might mean that the generation that smoked, drank, lived unwisely and too well

passes and there's a very health conscious generation that doesn't need that care or where there's a longer health span relative to lifespan.

But there's a good 30 years of this that we will have to face.

Well, to my own great alarm, I looked at the intergenerational report by the government.

It's from 2023.

And in that report, you know, it lists population ageing as the first of the big intergenerational issues we face as a country, above climate change and other things.

And in that report, they said 40% of future additional spending is

by the Australian government, will need to go on ageing.

So that's pensions, health care, aged care.

They even put in that list end-of-life care because there's long palliative care that's required.

40%.

40%, yeah, Sarah.

And so I looked at that and I thought, well, what's that money not going to be spent on?

Child care, education, defence, science?

Yep, absolutely.

So we're not alone in this problem.