OK, millennials, we need to talk about the care crisis

Things are bad, and they’re about to get worse. 

Last month, Treasury published the 2023 intergenerational report, a kind of crystal ball exercise that looks 40 years into the future and highlights some defining issues of our time. Of course, the report only ever suggests a possible future that assumes Australia remains on its current trajectory. 

Still, the conversations that flow from the report are important in focusing our collective minds. The report helped elevate the impending disaster of climate change, as Greg Jericho wrote for Guardian Australia: “The only thing the current generation absolutely needs to do for the next generation is stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Everything else is secondary.”

Fair, given we’ve just experienced the hottest June and July on record and time is running out to reduce emissions and keep temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees. 

Without wishing to deflect from the importance of climate change, there are other existential issues also highlighted by the report that require our immediate attention. Care — the value we as a society place on it, as well as its availability and quality — is one. The report could have included a chapter entitled: “OK, millennial, we need to talk about the care crisis”. 

Millennials are grappling with the care crisis prompted by staff shortages in the early education and care sector — there are 25,000 vacancies, and parents across the country are struggling to find a place for their children despite the recent increase in subsidies that make it more affordable — and it is more than a little ironic that they are being told they will need to find tens of thousands more aged care workers to look after them in 40 years. 

According to the intergenerational report, the number of people over 65 will more than double, while the number of people over 85 will more than triple. As a result, the number of care workers, which has more than doubled over the past 20 years, is estimated to double again over the next 40 years. And the “care economy” will increase from 8% of GDP to about 15%. 

But here’s why care is an existential issue for millennials: unless something changes, those care workers won’t be there. We are already in the midst of a caring crisis. Just last year, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) updated figures on the scale of aged care worker shortages — figures it had released less than a year before. The annual shortage of aged care workers doubled in less than a year, from 17,000 to 35,000.

Roughly a decade ago, I was working at the UK’s Human Rights Commission when an earnest policy officer came to me with a paper on the “undervaluing of women’s work”. She knew it was a bit of a beige-sounding but vitally important issue, and was desperate for me to get it some media traction. The paper warned that this was contributing to a “caring time bomb”, a stark warning. Fast-forward 10 years, and that warning took on new meaning during the pandemic: we had reached the end of that bomb’s fuse.

The undervaluing of women’s work is essentially the poor pay and conditions in highly feminised (mostly care) industries, and it accounts for about one-fifth of the gender pay gap in Australia. It is primarily due to the fact that when it comes to care, we expect women to do it for free or little pay out of “love”, and because it aligns with our expectations of women as “natural” carers. 

A 2021 report warned that poor pay had pushed Australia to the precipice of an aged care staffing crisis, with a “mass exodus” on the cards in the next five years. At the same time, we had a shortage of around 6500 early-years educators, and one in eight childcare centres had waivers from the sector’s quality regulator to allow them to operate for at least 12 months without meeting legal staffing requirements.

We stand at a crossroads, one marked by some key events in the broader policy landscape where we might — at long last — value care. They include the Albanese government’s commitment to develop a national care and support strategy and a parliamentary inquiry into the recognition of unpaid carers.  

The pandemic opened our eyes to the consequences of not placing a higher value on care. Now the intergenerational report is telling us we must confront that crisis or we won’t be able to meet our growing demands for care in the future. 

Let’s not ignore this warning from the future or the solutions within our reach. The era of care has arrived.