Compton's Comment

Four Crises

^{Everald Compton | DECEMBER 2008 / JANUARY 2009}

When 2008 began, most of us believed that the greatest issue facing our world was climate change and we had little idea that our lives would be challenged by a monumental crisis in the world’s financial markets. This has made us feel that, no matter how important it is, the cost of climate change may be more than we can afford right now.

Around the same time as financial markets were coming apart, National Seniors made a public issue of the rapid ageing of our population, the cost of which could bankrupt Australia within a decade, along with most of the world, if we don’t make immediate plans to handle its impact.

When we add to this the very considerable inadequacy of hospitals throughout the world and calculate the huge cost of getting that right, we can understand why governments are in trouble everywhere in facing all four of these crises at the one time. Together, they have created a very daunting mountain for humanity to climb, the conquering of which will change our way of life.

A closer look at each crisis will help us to determine how we can best handle them.

We will start with money. It impacts us more personally and ominously day by day than the others.

My reading of this crisis is that we can live comfortably with the conviction that the world is not about to come to an end. Nevertheless, we will have a very tough 2009 before we start to come out of the trough in 2010. Hopefully, by then, we will have learned to stop living beyond our means.

We could easily blame the greedy and incompetent leaders of financial markets and the politicians who are supposed to manage them, but the real truth is that every nation has spent more than it earned and it will take a lot of pain to get the ship of life back on an even keel.

The other really personal one is hospitals. All over the world, they are shockingly substandard, highly politicised and grossly inefficient, having too many poorly equipped staff.

Clearly, hospitals need a massive injection of money, skill and leadership, but the situation calls for you and me to exercise a lot more restraint. We visit doctors and hospitals far too often, complaining of illnesses that they have never heard of and there are too many lawyers suing doctors and hospitals over matters of absolute trivia.

Climate change has been overpublicised and is very contentious. Many people are trying to make money out of it, while others are in a state of denial, mainly to protect their own polluting industries and life styles. But, it is an issue that will not go away.

We must calm down and take steady, purposeful, well planned steps to implement meaningful environmental projects that will make a difference without adding panic driven costs to the excessive economic burdens that we already carry.

Ageing is the costly one. By 2030, all of us oldies will be a big problem. We will represent a majority of voters and we will cause younger generations to carry a huge tax burden to meet our needs unless we delay retirement and become healthier, as pensioners and self-funded retirees won’t be able to live on current levels of pensions and dividends. Governments must act now to have us contribute more heavily to our superannuation funds and provide us with incentives to work longer and spend more hours volunteering.

I don’t believe that any era of history has faced more intensive crises than we now do in this first decade of the twenty first century. These four are big ones and have the potential to grow much bigger if they are ignored.

Our generation has the experience to handle them, but we all have to step up to the mark and play a more activist role than we do now because seniors are the future, even though the world doesn’t realise it.