New Zealand baby boomers are not retiring - Implications for social policy planning

Implications for social policy planning

New Zealand baby boomers are not retiring. They are fizzing with renewed vigour, working hard to fund their lifestyle choices, keeping themselves fit and planning for an active later life, rather than an infirm, sedentary one. They universally do not want the retirement their parents had and they see no reason why they should accept it. Nor do they intend to.

They are planning to start or run businesses, keep working where they are, keep up with technology and use it to work smarter; and they are in large numbers going to move to get more out of life and make the world a better place to live, for all New Zealanders. Public policy needs to be flexible and open-minded in order to foster this vital ingenuity and harness the resulting productivity benefit (which can be used to fund the social safety net baby boomers see as their right and responsibility). Maintaining rule-driven bureaucracies will only foster rule-avoidance.

Unlike their American counterparts, who worry about health but are not actively planning a solution, New Zealand baby boomers are taking control of their health prospects and are less likely to become the health burden projected by traditional economic models and that are currently being tracked in the Health, Work and Retirement Study (Allpass, 2008). New Zealand baby boomers see maintaining their health and fitness as an essential driver enabling them to fulfill all of their plans for a vibrant and affluent future. There is an opportunity to develop health policy that empowers and incentivises them to keep themselves fit so they can stay productive and pursue their dreams.

The voluntary sector is significant and likely to rise in significance over the next 40 years. Baby boomers are prepared to do their part in this sector with both time and money, but a large influx of support may overwhelm the sector at the beginning and it may require some structural assistance to assimilate baby boomer contributors.

There is no point in making public policy rules about how members of this generation should behave once they turn 65, or of continuing to fiddle with economic indicators within the constraints of the traditional economic model. This is akin to placing a ladder against the wrong wall –energy can be expended on scaling the wall, but achieve nothing because the real change is going on elsewhere.

The inflexibility of the elderly dependency ratio to cope with new definitions of work for those over 65 makes it defunct. Changing the age of entitlement to 67 or another number is likewise not going to make a difference.

New Zealand baby boomers are notorious for shrugging off rules – because they view rules as simply not applying to them – and finding an ingenious way around to get what they want. Economists and social planners can calculate projected retirement rates, social burden ratios and rest home bed requirements as much as they like, but it would be a mistake to start building rest homes just yet, because New Zealand baby boomers have no intention of filling them.

They will tell policy planners what they want, if they are asked, provided the contextual framework for seeking their feedback is based on them and not the generation before them. After all, all baby boomers see themselves as special, and New Zealand baby boomers see themselves as more special than most.

Not only do New Zealand baby boomers have no intention of becoming a drain on the workforce, but they will continue to add their prodigious productivity to the nation’s coffers. Not only will they not leave a hole in the workforce, they will focus on enhancing their skills to fills the gaps created by changes of work style. Baby boomers are a highly productive generation, well educated, experienced and ingenious; harnessing and channelling their productivity and thirst for intellectual, emotional and physical adventure presents a far greater challenge for social policy planners than counting the pension pennies they may not need.

The challenge for public policy development is how best to structure a framework that will allow New Zealand baby boomers to be self-sufficient and self-responsible, while remembering that, as with all attitudinal research that talks about majorities, there will still be people who want a traditional retirement lifestyle, even if not as many as feared.