Ageing-in-place? Intergenerational and intra-familial housing transfers and shifts in later life

Ageing populations create demands for higher expenditure on pensions and other government provided welfare and social benefits, leading to higher taxes falling on fewer workers. Yet in a world of global markets and capital flows, governments cannot increase taxes significantly without damaging national competitiveness. In Australia, this has led to concern that there will be pressures upon the current levels of government provision of the age pension and other services, and an increasing requirement for a user-pays policy environment for health and aged care and other government-provided services. Two decades of economic reforms have produced Government policies and community expectations that older people will increasingly be responsible to self-fund their retirement needs and pay ‘user-pays’ charges for health, community care and aged care facilities. This will produce strains as there is extraordinary diversity in the ownership of financial resources among the elderly as a result of previous labour market experiences and lifetime income differences, regional differences, gender and ethnic differences, and an increasing economic polarisation within Australian society. Increasing longevity will stretch the capacity of older people to adequately provide for their retirement requirements. This will particularly affect older women. For many older Australians, their only possibility of adequately self-funding their retirement needs will be to have financial support from family members, or to finance their needs out of the equity in their family home. Never before has the destiny of the family home been of such crucial moment for the economic, social and political future of Australia. And never before has the family home been such a potential force in a new intergenerational contract within families and between generations. These issues raise important challenges for individuals and their families, and for Commonwealth and State Governments, for community organizations and for decision-makers throughout the public and private sectors. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute has contracted the University of New South Wales to examine these issues in a two year national empirical research project. The following Positioning Paper provides the conceptual framework for the empirical fieldwork