When Your Body Becomes Your Enemy: The Complex Case for Early Pensions
I’ve been mulling over this idea that’s been doing the rounds lately - reducing the pension age for people in physically demanding jobs. On the surface, it sounds reasonable enough. After all, we’ve all seen the tradie whose back is absolutely shot by 60, or the labourer who can barely walk without wincing. But the more I dig into it, the more I realise this isn’t just about fairness - it’s about the messy intersection of work, dignity, and how we value different types of labour in this country.
The human stories behind this debate really get to me. There’s something heartbreaking about someone pointing out their 61-year-old father, a tradesman with a “cooked” back who genuinely can’t see himself lasting another six years until pension eligibility. That’s not just about money - that’s about a person’s entire sense of self-worth being tied to their ability to provide, even when their body is screaming at them to stop.
What frustrates me about the current system is how it forces people into these impossible situations. We have the Disability Support Pension, but good luck getting on it. The criteria have been tightened so much over the years that people with genuine disabilities are being told they can work in call centres when they can barely stand. There’s this cruel irony where someone might spend decades building our homes and infrastructure, only to be told at 60 that they should just transition to customer service if their body gives out.
But here’s where it gets complicated - and this is where my pragmatic side kicks in. How on earth would we implement something like this fairly? The discussion I’ve been following online raises all the obvious questions: What qualifies as physically demanding work? How many years do you need to have done it? What stops someone from gaming the system by switching to manual labour at 59?
Some of the suggestions I’ve seen are clever - using ATO data to track years in specific industries, requiring medical assessments, or creating a sliding scale based on time served in physical roles. But each solution creates new problems. The ATO approach misses cash-in-hand workers (which, let’s be honest, is a significant chunk of the construction industry). Medical assessments risk turning into another bureaucratic nightmare like the NDIS has become in parts.
Then there’s the uncomfortable class dimension to all of this. I’ve noticed some comments suggesting that tradies who’ve been dodging tax through cash jobs shouldn’t expect taxpayer-funded early retirement. There’s a grain of truth there - we’ve all heard the stories about the sparkie with the $80k ute claiming they can’t afford super contributions. But painting all manual workers with that brush feels pretty unfair to the majority who do the right thing.
What really gets under my skin is when people suggest that physical workers “knew what they were signing up for” or should have just saved more. That’s the kind of bootstrap mentality that ignores the reality of how careers actually work. Most people don’t plan to destroy their bodies for work - it just happens gradually over decades. And frankly, if we expect people to build our houses, maintain our infrastructure, and keep our cities running, maybe we should acknowledge that this work has real long-term costs.
The environmental aspect bothers me too, though not in the way you might expect. If we incentivise early retirement for experienced tradies right now, during our housing crisis, we’re potentially pulling skilled workers out of the workforce when we desperately need them. That’s environmentally counterproductive if it slows down the construction of sustainable housing and infrastructure.
But there’s a smarter way to think about this. Instead of just offering early retirement, what if we created better pathways for experienced manual workers to transition into supervisory, training, or advisory roles? Keep their knowledge in the industry while reducing the physical demands. It’s not a perfect solution - not everyone wants to or can make that transition - but it addresses both the worker’s needs and the industry’s skills shortage.
The broader issue here is how we value different types of contribution to society. We live in a country where mining executives get golden handshakes while the people who actually extract the resources see their bodies break down before they’re eligible for basic support. That feels fundamentally wrong to me.
Looking forward, I think any solution needs to be part of a bigger conversation about work, dignity, and support in later life. Universal Basic Income gets mentioned in these discussions, and while it sounds utopian, it might actually be more practical than trying to create fair criteria for who deserves early retirement based on their job category.
What we really need is a system that recognises the different ways work affects people over a lifetime, without creating perverse incentives or bureaucratic nightmares. That might mean earlier access to superannuation for certain roles, better disability support that actually works, or even just accepting that some people will need public support earlier than others - and that’s okay as long as we’re funding it properly through progressive taxation.
The reality is that any fair system will have some people taking advantage of it. But I’d rather err on the side of supporting people who’ve spent their lives keeping our society running than worry too much about the occasional person gaming the system. After all, the biggest drain on public resources isn’t the tradie trying to retire at 62 with a stuffed back - it’s the multinational corporations paying almost no tax while profiting from the infrastructure those tradies built.