It took about a decade to construct the cross-party consensus, and the support of trade unions and employers, that made automatic enrolment into private pension schemes a realistic prospect. The achievement…
George Osborne performed his main role at conference: to produce some good news to deflect attention from defection and deviance. Abolishing death taxes while targeting tax avoiders sounds good and the…
Westminster’s Scottish affairs committee has published a report attacking the yes campaign for its approach to pensions and welfare. The yes campaign responded that its proposals were “affordable” and…
Until his recent bizarre comments about people using their pensions to pay for Lamborghinis, Steve Webb was rightly regarded as one of the finest pensions ministers Britain has ever had, and one of the…
Joe Hockey says that this budget shares the pain. But what is the right share for whom? This budget is like all the others – it lacks a compass that tells us the overall effect of government spending and…
Charis Palmer, The Conversation and Emil Jeyaratnam, The Conversation
Since publication this infographic has been amended. The original version stated the NDIS was scaled back. There are no planned cuts to the funding of the NDIS.
The Commission of Audit has recommended including homes above a certain value in the means test that determines who gets the age pension and how much. Under the proposal, homes valued in excess of A$500,000…
After initially celebrating the new-found freedom to spend their pension savings how they want, people are now waking up to what scrapping the annuity really meant. One reason for forcing people to buy…
Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey has confirmed the pension age will rise to 70 by 2035, meaning all Australians currently aged under 50 will be affected. It follows a recommendation from the Commission…
The National Commission of Audit recommends a number of changes to the age pension that boil down to smaller increases over time, older eligibility and tighter means-testing. It’s all based on the claim…
Treasurer Joe Hockey last night stepped up his rhetoric on the the need for heavy government spending cuts, singling out the A$40 billion age pension cost as “much more than we spend on defence, or hospitals…
The recent budget announcement providing freedom for retirees to decide how to allocate their own pension pots was a bold and surprising move. However, a number of issues are clearly opened by this policy…
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, “pulled a rabbit out of the hat” for pensioners and savers with changes to UK pensions that have been hailed as the most significant overhaul to the system…
George Osborne has warned that a further £25bn of spending cuts will be needed after the next election – with about half of those cuts to be made from the social security budget, largely from cuts in benefits…
Firefighters have once again voted to go on strike in England and Wales, their fifth strike since September. This might seem like a high number of walkouts, but the Fire Brigades Union (FBU)‘s reputation…
“Our senior citizens and our disability pensioners are paid less than newly arrived asylum seekers.” - Clive Palmer, founder of the Palmer United Party, National Press Club, 26 August. Clive Palmer’s claim…
Trustees of self-managed superannuation funds (SMSF) may have caught their breath this week when they read that the Australian Taxation Office had its eye on capital gains that were going tax-free once…
Longer and healthier lives mean more married couples in their 60s are spying the possibility of second chances. Office for National Statistics figures released yesterday suggest the trend for “silver separators…
We really should have seen the crisis coming. It isn’t as if older people are a forgotten minority. Most of us, whether or not we are old, interact with people who are on a daily basis. And much of our…