A Greater Australia: Population, policies and governance - CEDA

IntroductionThe new demographics, health care advances and resulting leisure and work-forceneeds, all call for a new look at the institutions and policy choices that underpin our keysocial and security arrangements. It is fundamentally great news that people are livinglonger, working for longer periods, and able to enjoy leisure and community engagementwell into ages that were once regarded as terminal or unproductive. However,if policies lack the flexibility to make use of extended lives and better health, thenAustralia could suffer a transitory loss of a high proportion of a skilled and productiveworkforce, which could lead to national atrophy. Australia requires education and trainingprograms to sustain, re-skill and invigorate mature working and cultural activities,to encourage fuller and meaningful lifetime participation in work, leisure and communityservice. Good public policies will contribute towards making the Australia populationhealthier and better-educated, enjoying higher levels of life satisfaction.Paul Krugman famously said that: “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run itis almost everything.” In Chapter 3.3, Dehne Taylor explores how education and trainingare linked with increases in productivity. Essential for improvements in productivityare increases in human capital per head: higher workforce competencies, knowledge,adaptability and skills. The dynamic parts of the rest of the world are acquiring thesefast. To accelerate the growth in Australia’s human capital, Dehne Taylor suggestssome innovative extensions of the income-contingent student loan scheme, popularlyknown as HECS. (The Federal Labor Government has recently announced its intentionto extend a HECS-like scheme to VET.)As editors, we thank the contributors for their enthusiasm for this project, the quality oftheir contributions, and their cheerful responses to editorial interventions.A Greater Australia: Population, Policies and Governance13