With Fusion's policies offering fundamental shifts in our society, it's interesting to explore how they'll effect different demographics of Australians. Here we explore how older Australians will be able to experience a different nation if they vote Fusion.
The Cost of Living
In regards to relieving the cost of living, Fusion supports extending Medicare to include dental care, mental healthcare, alcholism and other drug dependencies.
But let's clarify, these are not going to be the most impactful measures − Fusion's approach is not like other parties, where they might create some sort of laundry list of expensive things and ban them from being expensive anymore.
Fusion's mission is to deeply explore underlying issues, and to build consensus for long-term solutions.
The main way we plan to address the cost of living for all Australians (not just seniors) is to create a universal basic income − we'd be giving direct payments that would be enough for housing and the basic necessities of life. This would replace all forms of baseline welfare such as JobSeeker and the age pension. People receiving more than this amount (eg thanks to various disability allowances) would continue to receive their higher total.
Although the major parties write off UBI as unrealistic, there have been hundreds of pilots worldwide and they continue to show that UBI works in increasing mental wellbeing; maintaining workforce participation; increasing time for family and volunteering; and increasing entrepreneurial activity.
The next way we'd be improving the cost of living is through our housing policy. It's a wide-reaching policy which includes a reduction in the tax favouritism given to owners over renters. This would cause Australia to become more similar to Germany and Switzerland, in the sense that renters make up 50% there, vs ~30% in Australia.
Our housing policy sees more mobility granted to residents (especially renters) and sees the addition of 13 million extra rooms. Many of these spare rooms would in fact belong to homes currently occupied by older Australians, where the rooms became spare due to their own children moving out. In this situation, the current owners would be able to keep the owner-occupier tax treatment for the rooms in their home which they decided to rent out, giving them extra income and who knows, maybe a new friend too.
With the extra mobility granted to Australians, people will more easily and readily move to places that suit new working arrangements, relationships, and lifestyles. We'd be incentivising the evolution of neighbourhoods with new cultural identities, whether that be tech hubs or retirement communities.
Investments
Once people leave the workforce, they still want to be earning money. Fusion's housing policy opens up new revenue streams by the aforementioned tax treatment for spare rooms, as well as the introduction of exams for Australians to become "sophisticated investors". This would mean they could invest in startups and various derivatives.
Our housing policy also calls for the creation of the Livret A, a government bond where everyday Australians can invest in public housing projects, climate R&D, city-building and high-speed rail. These alternatives would offer appealing alternatives to managed super funds and even if people don't take up the chance to invest in the Livret A, the extra competition could cause lower fees amongst the super funds.
Tackling Ageism
One in three older Australians reports to have experienced age discrimination. It's an issue we see all across the policy space, the fact that Australia just isn't as harmonious as it could be. If we return to the policy of universal basic income, we see that it creates happier people, stronger local economies, and in turn, a greater sense of belonging. I was recently discussing in our plan for better streets that Fusion's federal policies would create the foundations for people to thrive and would fill in what's often missing from our streets: harmony.
By relying on policies like UBI which target the root causes of the problems in our society, we can have changes that are far more significant than what could be hoped for when creating eg a national plan to tackle ageism.
Tech Literacy and Scams
The rise of AI is a significant threat for scam victims and in our submission on Adopting Artificial Intelligence, we recommended urgent funding for the creation of an AI that's aligned to the needs of Australians, not optimised for the interests of foreign tech giants.
We also called for releasing government software open-source and for funding further open-source projects that are aligned to serving our actual needs, even if these projects don't generate profits. Communities could evolve to implement projects around ecological restoration, social planning, or tools for avoiding scams and misinformation.
The ability for AIs to scam people is immense; we cannot focus on measures for mopping up afterwards. It's critical to give Australians the tools and knowledge to defend against scams from succeeding in the first place.
Healthcare
Fusion's most significant health policy is our support of classifying ageing as a disease. This would unlock research funding for the core workings of our physiology and would let physicians proactively prescribe medications that treat conditions which cause age-related suffering. Fusion isn't motivated by merely increasing the number of years of life; our goal is to increase people's healthspan. We don't have specific policies around how to bring hospital care to people's homes or how many days they should wait − our ambitious approach is to keep people out of needing hospital care in the first place.
This plan of increasing healthspan has a lot of overlap with our plans around creating better streets with active transport, keeping our population fit and healthy, surrounded by lush nature and clean air.
Conclusion
Fusion's policies are relevant to anyone who wants to enjoy a healthy and harmonious life in Australia, whether you're young or young at heart. If you'd like to help these policies get some traction at the next election, that's where they have the best ability to shape the government's plans for the next 3 years. Even if Fusion doesn't win, you can bet that Liberal and Labor will be closely analysing every electorate and seeing what are the issues that caused voters to defect.
If you'd like to volunteer at a booth and hand out flyers, we saw in the last by-election that such volunteers could boost results by 3%. A few hours of your time could really have a tremendous impact in changing the future.