Ageing research in Australia: reflecting on Graeme Hugo’s four decades of contribution

ABSTRACT

Globally, population ageing is one of the most pressing social and policy issues faced today. Over the next two decades, Australian society will face dramatic increases in the proportion of the population aged 65 years and over, as the baby boomers move into older age and fertility levels remain low. Yet population ageing is not a surprising or new trend—demographic changes in the age profile of a population tend to occur incrementally rather than suddenly. As a demographer and geographer, Graeme Hugo drew attention to this trend in Australia’s population more than three decades ago. Throughout Graeme Hugo’s vast breadth of work over the past 40 years, there has been a consistent thread of demographic analysis and academic thought associated with the ageing of Australia’s population. This paper focuses on Hugo’s contributions to academic thought and policy on Australia’s ageing population and the challenges associated with this for both service delivery and health policy as Australian society moves into an unprecedented era of population ageing.

KEYWORDS:

• Ageing
• Australia
• population
• Graeme Hugo

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Janet Wall for all her help in assisting with locating copies of Graeme’s work and for her insight into his academic career. Thanks also to Dr Cecile Cutler for her comments on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The term ‘baby boomers’ is used to describe a generation of people born after the Second World War. The definition of the baby boomer period varies between countries, and over time the definition has been revised in Australia. In Hugo’s early work (Hugo 1986c, 158) and the ABS (1986) it referred to people born between 1946–47 and 1960–61. The ABS now defines the baby boom generation as people born 1946–47 to 1965–66 (ABS 2003, 2015).

2. It continues as a major area of ongoing research in Hugo’s research centre—the Australian Population and Migration Research Centre—under the direction of Helen Barrie Feist.

3. In this working paper the authors covered the changing age composition of the population, the spatial distribution of the aged (65+) population, migration, ageing in place, ageing and the family, housing and living arrangements, socio-economic differentiation (workforce participation, income, education), ethnicity, and health of the older population.

4. In a review of Australian demography at the millennium this book was seen as one of the major benchmarks in demographic analysis (Lucas 1994). This book and the working papers associated with it set the standard for all of Hugo’s demographic analysis of processes, trends and characteristics of populations—highly in-depth but in a language that was easy to understand. This ability plus the applied nature or relevance of his work was why he was constantly sought as a conference speaker, by policy advisers and the media.

5. GISCA was established in July 1995, funded by the Australian Research Council as a joint Key Centre venture. When the ARC Key Centre funding ended in 2001, GISCA continued as an independent unit within the University of Adelaide. The work of GISCA continues under the Australian Population and Migration Research Centre, established by Graeme Hugo in 2012.

6. For reviews of the 2015 Intergenerational Report, see Duckett (2015); Kendig and Woods (2015).