Grumpy but more than capable of making choices

My father, a grumpy (his description not mine) retired former farmer is almost 80 years old.

He regularly goes out bush accompanied only by his dog and his drone to pursue his passion of landscape photography.

This is something he took up in retirement.

As adults we all make choices about how we want to live. We readily accept that with choice comes risk and, perhaps, the disapproval or concern of others.

If I told my father he needed to slow down or live life a little more conservatively given his age, he would be, well, grumpy … and make his views to the contrary very, very clear to me.

Yet something happens when a person reaches a certain age.

The ‘infantilisation’ starts and we cloak them in vulnerability and assume we need to protect them from themselves and from others.

What we often fail to recognise is that growing old takes a long time. Most seniors continue to live busy and productive lives and can make choices about how they want to live (and what risks they are willing to accept) even in complex situations.

This plays out at a macro level where the lens of vulnerability is widely applied to older people resulting in paternalistic policy decisions and systems.

Take retirement villages as an example. They are a very different proposition to residential aged care and yet the two are regularly conflated.

Retirement villages are for those who can live independently for the most part. Conversely, residential aged care is for a very different bunch, the most frail of seniors, being those who cannot stay home because they need a high level of care and support with their basic daily and clinical needs.

With other seniors’ living solutions, retirement villages make enormous sense at a systems level for older Australians because they provide purpose-built homes and communities, preventative health care and community services.

This means they ensure we can keep people living independently in their own homes with high levels of safety, health and wellbeing.

In turn we lower the burden on the state public health system (in terms of reduced health care costs and hospital admissions) and the burden on the federal health system (in terms of delaying or avoiding admission into residential aged care). Even better, none of this occurs on the taxpayers’ dime because retirement villages are a user-pays solution.

They also provide a cost effective and scalable opportunity for government to invest in social and affordable housing for seniors.

However, as we gallop towards a future where one in every six Western Australians will be over 65 by 2026, growth and the ability for the retirement village sector to innovate has been stifled by paternalistic reform and regulation.

This focuses solely on consumer protection and poses older Australians as hapless victims ripe for exploitation.

The cripplingly complex retirement village legislation requires specialised lawyers to interpret it while drowning consumers in disclosure requirements running into hundreds of pages.

The legislation effectively sterilises valuable vacant land within villages, usually creating ghettos at the expense of mixed-use integrated communities (a story for another time).

Proposed reforms requiring mandatory buy-backs of units threaten to send many operators to the wall.

In the meantime, except for some much welcomed social and affordable housing planning by the state’s Department of Communities, I can see no strategy for formulating a living solution for seniors in WA.

We need a holistic, human-centred response to the opportunities presented by our rapidly ageing population that looks well beyond notions of vulnerability and consumer protection.

All this starts with an understanding that people don’t lose their marbles just because they’re old and that they are quite capable of continuing to make their own choices and decisions, even if they do start calling themselves grumpy.

• Amber Crosthwaite is a commercial lawyer specialising in seniors living, aged care and disability