While conducting some research independent of my thesis on the attitudes towards retirement of Australian baby boomers, I discovered that in fact the baby boomers shed some light on a major theme of my thesis.

Retirement incomes policy is at the forefront of policymakers’ minds all over the industrialized world. Australia’s and Britain’s welfare states, and their retirement incomes systems, are built on fundamentally different principles and institutional frameworks. Today, the two systems have developed to include a complex mix of public and private provision in retirement. Australia has a social–assistance style welfare state in which retirement is funded primarily by a means tested age pension supplemented by compulsory occupational superannuation. Britain has a social insurance scheme in which retirement benefits accrued are related to labour market participation, supplemented by a low means tested pension. My thesis is a comparative study of pensions policy in the two countries.

In Australia, we are seeing a transition from the age pension as a legitimate method of funding retirement towards an increasing emphasis on self-funding through superannuation. This is resulting in a shift in emphasis from the obligations of the state to the responsibilities of the individual.

Perhaps t he most significant contributor to the shift to self provision has been the introduction of the compulsory Superannuation Guarantee in 1992, whereby employers are now compelled to contribute 9% of most of their employees’ income to an approved superannuation savings scheme. This has been exacerbated by the relentless promotion of the ideal of self-reliance as a marker of good citizenship by the Howard Coalition Government since its election into office in 1996. The increasing emphasis on self-provision has contributed to a widespread shift in attitudes towards retirement incomes and a change in the way we perceive the age pension, from being a right of citizenship, to a payment reserved for the economically disadvantaged. This represents a significant re-organisation of the Australian retirement incomes system.

Recent research I conducted independently of my thesis sought to explore the attitudes of Australian baby boomers towards their own retirement and retirement and pensions policy more generally. What I found was that, in fact, baby boomers, usually defined in Australia as those born between 1946 and 1961, sit at the centre of the transition in our normative assumptions about the most fair and acceptable method of funding retirement.

When baby boomers entered the workforce, the age pension was the predominant form of funding retirement and most of their parent’s generation rely on the pension. But in 1992, halfway through their working lives, compulsory super was introduced and increasingly, the responsibility has shifted towards the individual to self-fund their retirement. Baby boomers are therefore the generation at the centre of this shift in ideology and expectations.

The attitudes of baby boomers towards the funding of retirement are significantly different from those of their parent’s generation. However, their historical position and the way that they fit into the policy trajectory, results in a complex mix of attitudes reflecting both more traditional ideas about the age pension as a right of citizenship, and more contemporary ideas about self-sufficiency in retirement. For example, they are very supportive of the virtues of self-reliance but still believe the age pension should be maintained. They think of the age pension as a safety net, to be claimed as a last resort rather than an automatic right of citizenship, but do not pass moral judgement on recipients. Their attitudes towards retirement provision can help us to see the progress of the transition so far, and help to shed light on the possible development of such a shift in the future. Moreover, the baby boomers are highly useful as an exploratory tool in understanding the more widespread impact of policy change on our normative assumptions about pension provision.