Future challenges for the Australian Nation: the changing Australian society

We will also encourage the wider spread of employee share ownership which builds on the reduction of capital gains tax and encourages asset acquisition. This will also foster a more balanced approach to retirement planning.

Superannuation is at the heart of the retirement plans of millions of Australians. Governments must always ensure that it operates simply and as far as possible in a fair and efficient manner.

Pursuit of this goal must be balanced against the need to avoid endless changes which have been an often unwelcome feature of the operation of the system over the past 20 years.

The impact of our changing demographics will accelerate in the next few years.

A continuation of the more balanced immigration program fostered by this government, with its much greater emphasis on skills, will be part of our response to the challenge of an ageing population.

The proposition, however, that the impact of an ageing population on our economy can be reversed by a sharply increased migrant intake over the next few years is not supported by critical analysis.

For social as well as economic reasons, our response must include greater use of the skills and experience of the increasing number of Australians over 55 – Australia’s ‘gold collar’ workers. Expert opinion agrees that even if only 10 per cent of people aged between 55 and 70 choose to remain in the workforce, on either a full-time or part-time basis, it would have a significant effect upon our national per capita productivity.

For this to happen, labour markets will need to be sufficiently flexible to suit their needs and respond to the choices they wish to make.

In recent years, we have driven industrial relations reforms to promote this kind of flexibility and choice in the labour market. In coming years, I intend to explore every opportunity to bring about even greater cultural change within the Australian workplace.

In contrast, the ALP’s stated aim to return to a highly prescriptive, regulated labour market would diminish the capacity of older individual Australian workers to choose when they wish to retire, the hours they wish to work and the specific rewards they want to receive. And it would diminish the capacity of Australian business and industry to maintain the level of success and productivity so evident in recent years and that would leave all Australians worse off.

Balance between work and family

Intertwined with this need for a workforce structurally equipped to meet the future is the issue of the quality of working lives.

We all know the importance that individuals place on their family and social relationships and I, for one, do not aspire to an Australia where our growing wealth has been built at the expense of our families and communities.