Who will be able to Retire after 65 !

‘A Look at Australia in the future’

BABY boomers will have to work longer to help fill emerging gaps

 in the workforce and reduce the need for skilled migration, a population summit in Sydney has heard.

About 170,000 people were expected to retire from the manufacturing industry in the next five years, but only 40,000 were being trained to replace them, said Brian Wexham, head of the Institute of Trade Skills Excellence.

Mr Wexham said baby boomers such as himself already expected to have a more engaged retirement than their parents.

''We are a different breed … We see retirement almost like a career change,'' he said.

''If you let baby boomers get bored, trust me, we will cause problems. Our kids have left, we're going to the meetings.

He pondered the example of Jimi Hendrix, who would have turned 68 this year. ''Makes you think, doesn't it?''

Older people were largely responsible for Australia clocking up 836 million hours in voluntary work each year, he said.

While this was valuable, translating it into paid work would be crucial to meeting future needs of the workforce.

The Minister for Sustainable Population, Tony Burke, who addressed day two of the summit, was keen to move the debate on from purely immigration issues.

''The spread of population throughout the nation is the critical part of these discussions and that is not only an immigration issue,'' he said.

While some parts of western Sydney were rightly concerned about too-rapid population growth, ''If you go to the opposite side of the country, from Penrith to the Pilbara, you'll find very different concerns about employers not being able to find the workers they need. At the local level, pretty much everyone is telling a story that for their part of the country is true.

''There are areas where you would not, at the moment, suggest that you should have any more people living. There are other parts of Australia that are desperate for extra workers.''

But Professor Garry Glazebrook, an urban planner from the University of Technology Sydney, said it was inevitable Australian cities would get bigger. Bureau of Statistics projections showed there would be an extra 10 million people living in the capital cities by 2056.

''Of course, that scares us, but in China they wouldn't really worry; they'd do that before breakfast,'' he said. If Hong Kong had the population density of Australia, it would be home to just 1280 people, he said.

Even by 2050, Sydney and Melbourne would still have fewer people than Hong Kong had now, and one-third that of Tokyo, Seoul and Los Angeles. ''We're going to have to increase our population. The rate is the debate … That means we're going to get denser. It's all a matter of how you build your cities.''