Taking on a government isn’t for the faint hearted — let alone fighting for financial equality on behalf of almost one million people.
(Bloomberg) — Taking on a government isn’t for the faint hearted — let alone fighting for financial equality on behalf of almost one million people.
A 65 year-old Australian Aboriginal man is about to do both.
Dennis — who prefers to use his first name only — is heading to the Federal Court with a team of lawyers to argue that Indigenous Australians should get earlier access to the government pension, because they die on average about eight years before the rest of the population. The case will be heard in Melbourne from Monday.
For Dennis, a Wakka Wakka man, the case is about standing up against racism and inequality. He sees the lasting impacts of colonization, which included Aboriginal children regularly taken from their parents up until the 1970s, as the defining reason why his people suffer poorer life outcomes than non-Indigenous Australians.
“We’ve got to face the truth,” he said in an interview. “For thousands of years, there was nothing wrong,” he said, referring to the health of his people. “In a couple of hundred years, everything changed.”
A spokesperson for the Social Services minister said it wouldn’t be appropriate to comment while the proceeding is actively being considered by the court.
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The case lands at a pivotal time for Indigenous relations in Australia, as the country engages in a national debate about a so-called Voice to Parliament, a proposal for a body of elected First Nations people to advise the seat of power on policies impacting their community. The government plans a referendum on the proposal this year.
Dennis’ fight also raises a challenging question: does lowering the pension age essentially give up on the gradual, albeit glacial, improvement of First Nations life expectancy and prospects? The dilemma is not isolated to Australia, with the Maori population of New Zealand facing a similar gap in life expectancy and Native Americans a slightly smaller one.
“The legacy of settler colonialism is a shared Indigenous experience around the globe,” said Blythe K. George, a member of the Yurok tribe of California and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California.
“I logically could see the reasoning where if the life expectancy is shorter, it would make sense to release benefits sooner. But on a very real level, given that I’m a member of an Indigenous community, I was more kind of struck with the chilling kind of line of logic that it seemed almost to be resigning oneself to the fact that Aboriginal peoples were destined to have a shorter life expectancy.”
Safety Net
While Australia has a private savings system to complement the public pension, it largely benefits those in higher paying and secure jobs. Employers contribute 10.5% of workers’ salaries to their so-called superannuation, which they can access when they retire. It reduces the reliance on a government pension, which in turn is designed to act as a safety net and is means-tested.
Non-Indigenous Australians on average earned about 65% more than First Nations peoples in 2018-19, according to a 2021 government report. About two-thirds of the country’s Indigenous people have retirement incomes below a modest standard of living, a 2020 survey found. A single Australian on the state pension is entitled to just over A$1000 ($685) a fortnight.
Beth Gaze, who teaches Equality and Discrimination Law at the Melbourne University Law School, said Dennis’ case was worth bringing to court to draw attention to the inequality issue, but she had “some pessimism about the likelihood of success.”
“The argument that’s being made here is quite a difficult one, which is to say that because on a statistical basis, people in a particular group have a shorter lifespan, therefore they should get access to a benefit earlier,” she said “So a couple of years earlier? Three years earlier? We don’t quite know.”
A different pension age wouldn’t be a world first. Mexico announced a lower pension age in 2019 for its Indigenous population, but that was short lived. It wasn’t long before the retirement age for the entire population was brought down, in contrast to many other countries which are raising the age.
The idea of a different retirement age for Indigenous Australians was first floated about two decades ago, according to Eddie Cubillo, Associate Dean and Senior Research Fellow of Indigenous Programs at the University of Melbourne. Cubillo is a descendant of the Larrakia, Wadjigan and Central Arrernte peoples.
“Why does it need to go to a court decision?” he said in an interview. “I don’t think the wider Australian population would see this as an issue if statistically Indigenous people die a decade or so earlier and it’s something that they’re entitled to.”
A different age for one demographic was “problematic,” said Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Pensions Analyst Andrew Reilly, adding that retirement ages hadn’t been adjusted by gender despite women typically living longer than men.
“It’s not as simple as being Indigenous or non-Indigenous,” he said. “There are other factors which contribute toward the lower levels of life expectancy on an average, and it’s getting into the core of that.”
Dennis said his day in court is an opportunity to address everything Australia’s colonial history has come to represent to him: unfairness, racism and inequality.
“A lot of us want to achieve things,” he said. “And if we don’t achieve it before we get old, we’ll say ‘I should have done this, I should have done that’.
“Why not do it and leave something there?”
–With assistance from Maya Averbuch.
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