Aged care shakeup signals housing opportunity

Tassie has the oldest population in the country. And there’s about to be major changes to how aged care works. These changes are all about allowing people to get older with dignity and to do it in the comfort of their own homes.

A lot of people dream of retiring in their family home. And I completely get why. After twenty or thirty years in the place where you’ve raised kids or gone through big life changes, there’s a lot of memories. But it means that large family homes might only have one or two people living in them. And they’re often not safe for people in their older stages of life with staircases, steep driveways and large backyards to maintain.

We don’t have enough of the right houses for older members of our community. And we’re in the middle of a housing crisis where every single house counts. We know we need to build more homes to get more people into a home. So let's turn this problem into an opportunity.

We should encourage people of pension age to downsize their home. There’s help to get first-time home buyers into the market, so why not help people in older stages of life too?

The Tasmanian State Government already provides a 50 percent reduction in stamp duty to people over sixty who sell and downsize in Tassie. But that’s like offering someone a raisin cookie over a chocolate chip cookie. It’s enough of an incentive to think about it, but not good enough to get people on board.

So for pensioners who buy a brand new home, let’s get rid of stamp duty tax altogether. Downsizing to a new build means existing homes are put on the market and frees up properties for families. The money for this kind of scheme could come from scrapping infrastructure projects the state doesn’t need.

By 2040, one third of the current Tasmanian workforce will have retired. With the aged care system set to get a shakeup, there’s no time like the present to think about what retiring at home looks like. Offering incentives for pensioners to downsize is a way the state government can help our ageing population and the housing crisis at the same time.

Originally published in The Burnie Advocate, 16th September 2024.