Last year my husband aged 55 has lost his job and his career as a rigger due to a shoulder injury. At the same time I lost my job due to a contract loss within the same company (20 of us). It began to look as though we would have to retire early. Nothing like a bit of change in the money situation to make you pay attention.
I was fascinated to find out from the section on the age pension on the Centrelink website that in order to receive the full age pension you have to have been resident in Australia for 25 years from age 16. Interestingly, we would only meet that criteria next year after having lived overseas for 6 years. And they have a proposal on the table right now to increase that to 35 years. Just have a think about that.
Plus as hanrahan and rabbitoh have already pointed out, the intellectual professions may go to 70, but the physically taxing ones such as my husbands not only won't go to retirement age but in actual fact may increase the ranks of disability recipients. In the last few years under the previous Government most unemployed women pushing 50 (many of whom had looked after their families and so whom have no super) were shifted to the disability pension by their doctors (rather than put them onto newstart) as it gave them more money.
I think the proposed cost savings can be found elsewhere. The big problem is that everyone wants it to be someone else who suffers.
