Aussies to live longer despite more ‘unequal’ world, government report claims

Australians will live longer and retire with more super in 2066 despite the world becoming “more unpredictable, more unequal”, Treasurer Jim Chalmers has claimed.

Mr Chalmers will on Monday deliver the government's’ second Intergenerational Report, a wide-reaching forecast of the state of the economy 40 years from now.

In a speech at the Australian National University on Monday, Mr Chalmers is expected to warn the report has, like no other, “contended with global challenges this great, with politics this fraught, or a future less certain”.

“Yet this IGR shows we are better placed than our peers in almost every regard. The global and generational risks are serious, but Australia’s opportunities are endless,” he will say.

The report is expected to show that Australians will “live longer, healthier lives” in 2066, while families will have fewer kids.

“That will make the population grow more slowly, to less than 40 million in forty years,” Mr Chalmers is expected to say.

“Living standards will be higher and people will retire with much more super, meaning much more security.”

The economy will be twice its current size in 2066 and the budget will be strained, though still in a stronger position than in the 2023 report, Mr Chalmers said.

“Our industrial base will be dominated by services, powered by cleaner energy, completely transformed by technology,” he said.

One observation “repeated more than any other” is not just change but that the “pace of change is accelerating”, Mr Chalmers will say.

“This puts plainly the choice before us: Keep up and succeed or lag and languish.

“The world is becoming more dangerous, more unpredictable, more unequal, and more divided.

“These are not just individual threads but part of a bigger fraying of that intergenerational promise, of better times.”

Recalling concern about the collapse of the American Dream in the ‘60s, Mr Chalmers will say that “in every corner of the Commonwealth … If people are unmoored economically, generationally, they feel disconnected from, and disregarded in, our politics”.