Australia’s Indigenous People Are Falling Behind in Its Retirement System
The country has a $2.4 trillion savings pot, but many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people won’t have enough.
When Anthony Albanese was voted in as Australia’s prime minister in May, the first words of his victory speech promised a better future for the country’s marginalized Indigenous people. There is plenty of work to do. “Generation after generation of Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their parents and brought up outside of culture, outside of language, and in many ways provided almost a slave workforce,” said Linda Burney, who on June 1 became the first Indigenous woman to be appointed minister for Indigenous affairs, in a Bloomberg TV interview. “Those things impact on today. You cannot divorce the past from the present.”
Two stark examples of this legacy are a yawning wealth gap that sees Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people retire with about half the savings of other Australians, and shorter life expectancies that give them less time to enjoy retirement.