A warm welcome to the many new readers who joined following the CHSP Workforce Symposium last Thursday. I'm glad you're here.

For those just arriving: each week I pull together developments in ageing and aged care — research, international examples, AI tools, and sector news — and try to make them worth your time. The best place to start is probably with one of the longer pieces I've written recently.

Three articles you may be interested in:

A few weeks ago, Axios published a piece about what it called the "grey-shaped" US economy. The argument was that older Americans are now the primary engine of consumer spending and job growth, and most economic analysis hasn't caught up with that reality. Nearly 30% of Americans are aged 55 or older. They hold more than 70% of all wealth in the country. Over 45% of consumer spending now comes from that group — up from under 40% in 2020.

I wanted to crunch the numbers for Australia.

The population reality is known. There are currently 4.5 million Australians aged 65 and over — 17% of the population. The ABS projects that by 2050, the figure will be closer to one in four. We're not at peak yet, but the trajectory is set.

The wealth picture is similarly concentrated. According to ACOSS and UNSW data from 2024, the average over-65 household holds $1.58 million in net worth — 25% more than the average middle-aged household and almost four times the average under-35 household. Of the total increase in Australian household wealth since 2003, 45% went to the wealthiest 10% of households — and of that share, roughly half went to wealthy older Australians over 64. Australia's housing market and the superannuation system have made older homeowners substantially wealthier over the past two decades, and that wealth hasn't transferred down the age distribution.

The spending story is where it gets more nuanced. Unlike in the US, where older cohorts are being cited as driving discretionary spending growth, CBA's Household Spending Insights data from mid-2025 shows that Australians aged 65 and over are currently more cautious than younger cohorts. The spending recovery playing out across the economy is being led by 20 to 34-year-olds, while older Australians are sitting on their wealth rather than deploying it. That's a meaningful difference from the US picture. Whether it reflects structural caution, a different relationship with superannuation drawdowns, or something else is worth examining.

Where the grey-shaped story holds most clearly for Australia is in employment. Health Care and Social Assistance has been the dominant driver of labour market growth for the better part of a decade. Between 2014 and 2024, the number of people employed in residential aged care alone grew 39% — from around 216,000 to 301,000. Since the start of the pandemic, Health Care and Social Assistance has accounted for 69.4% of all growth in non-market hours worked in this country, and 17.4% of total labour income growth.

The sector currently employs around 456,000 aged care workers. Projections put the required workforce at over 850,000 by 2050. The gap between those numbers is the labour market story of the next thirty years.

The grey economy is real in Australia — it just looks different from the American version. Older Australians are holding wealth at a scale this country has never seen, and what they are not doing, at least not yet, is spending it. When that changes — through superannuation drawdown or the rising cost of care as people live longer and need more of it — the question is whether the funding model can convert that private wealth into the wages and conditions the workforce needs, and whether any government is willing to have that conversation.

Tuesday 10 March, 12–1pm AEDT | Online | Free

Board members, CEOs, and managers have been asking the questions: How do we actually use ChatGPT for documentation? What happens if staff upload resident data? How do we implement AI without triggering compliance issues?

The panel includes:

If you're responsible for AI decisions at your organisation and want practical answers instead of speculation, this session is for you.

Wednesday 11 March, 12–1:30pm AEDT | Online | Free

As Australia's aged care sector continues to evolve, this session will explore how CHSP providers can prepare for technological and demographic shifts while strengthening inclusion and support for culturally diverse communities. This webinar will unpack best practices in planning for cultural diversity, workforce engagement, and technology adoption.

Last month in Geneva, governments formally began drafting a legally binding UN convention on the human rights of older people — the first dedicated international instrument of its kind, following more than sixty years of advocacy.

Older people currently have no standalone international human rights framework. A convention would establish clear legal obligations around discrimination, dignity, and healthcare access. Whether it produces enforceable outcomes depends on political will that isn't guaranteed. But the process has started, and older people were in the room.

A study following 5,000+ Chinese adults aged 80 and over found that those who avoided meat were less likely to become centenarians — but only if they were already underweight. This isn’t an anti-plant story. It's a reminder that nutritional priorities shift fundamentally in very old age. Preventing long-term disease matters less; maintaining muscle mass and adequate protein matters more. Dietary frameworks designed for middle-aged adults don't automatically transfer to people in their eighties.

Kathleen Donohoe's essay in Psyche uses a ghostly encounter at 25 to explore what midlife reveals about mortality. Returning to the memory at 52, she realises it was never really her story. Midlife doesn't bring decline, she argues — it brings a shift in perspective. You move from protagonist to understanding you'll eventually be the ghost in someone else's. Worth fifteen minutes.

Last issue I shared a way to use Claude Artifacts to turn any document into an interactive page — useful for training, onboarding, or making complex material accessible to your team. Several of you tried it, and a few wrote back to let me know the link I included wasn't the right one. I'm sorry about that — here's the correct one.

A bit more detail on what this actually produces. At the CHSP Workforce Symposium last week, I briefly demonstrated the example I built — the full Aged Care Act turned into an interactive page with plain-language explanations designed for frontline workers, and a quiz at the end. It prompted more follow-up conversations than anything else I showed that day, with several people asking how long it took to build and whether they could do it without technical knowledge.

The answer is yes, and it took me less than ten minutes. Here's how:

The output is a functional web page you can share directly. If you give it a try and have any positive or negative feedback, please reply to this email and let me know.

QUT researcher Zina Sciacca is looking for one Brisbane residential aged care provider with a strong CALD cohort to partner on a four-week pilot testing real-time AI translation earbuds during routine interactions — meals, personal care, everyday moments where formal interpretation isn't practical. The project is shortlisted for ARIIA support and stems from Zina's own experience with her Nonna's stroke-related language loss.

You can apply via the ARIIA Partnership Opportunities (select Opportunity 2). More details in this PDF and on The Listening Link website.

Each week, I review developments in ageing and aged care and what they mean in practice. If this was useful, forward it to someone in the sector who'd appreciate it.

George Gouzounis