If you’re a non-Indigenous Australian, when you hit the age of 67, you’ll typically have another 15 years of long, hopefully happy retirement to look forward to.
But as we’ve seen too often with our own family and friends, many Indigenous peoples don’t make it to retirement age. The median age at death for Indigenous people in Australia is still 63 years old.
That, along with average life expectancy, is better than it used to be. But it remains almost two decades short of non-Indigenous Australians’ median age at death, 82 years old.
63 is not old enough to get the age pension. And it’s barely over the age of access to superannuation savings, which is 60.
Yet Indigenous Australians are eligible for aged care support from the age of 50 – precisely because of well-known differences in life expectancy and health outcomes.
So why doesn’t that apply to the age pension and superannuation too?