Veronika Wild

-Image generated by Microsoft Bing AI  [Apologies, too long -as usual, so have split this into two parts. Part (a) looks at countries which have had ageing populations much earlier - notably Germany and Japan, while Part (b) will look at how countries who have more recently entered the realms of negative population growth are preparing for the future when there are more older people than youngsters]. Age Redefined Expressions such as “ Silver   Tsunami” so popular with economists and the press, imply that having a growing number of older people in the population will be a bad thing, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be so. Indeed, many countries are starting to see that as an asset, rather than a liability. Baby Boomers are notorious for defying established norms. Now, thanks to modern medicine   and research into exercise and nutrition they are doing it again with respect to established notions about ageing. For the most part they are living longer, health...

-Image generated by Microsoft Bing AI  Below is the World Population Clock – it shows the number of people being born every minute. Although birth rates are slowing the global population is still growing at the rate of 80 million people per year. We'll come to why this matters in a moment, but let's first take a look at how we got here. How we got here As you can see from the following graph, until the Industrial Revolution in the C18 th populations remained small and static – under 1 billion globally, since the beginning of agriculture and were constantly kept in check by war, famine and disease.  Many children died at birth or in infancy and many mothers died in childbirth which meant not only that fewer children reached reproductive age, but that although many women did indeed have large numbers of children, others did not live long enough to do so.   With improvements in technology, medicine, diet, sanitation and income, people lived longer and popula...

 Continued from previous post...         6. ENSURING SAFETY IN ALL SETTINGS This seeks to ensure that there is high quality Respectful Relationships Education in Schools Building awareness of sexual violence in mainstream services among health professionals   and frontline workers Safety at work   All 55 recommendations of the Respect @Work Report will be implemented including the establishment of Women’s Centres in each State. The Australian Government has ratified the International Labour Organization's Convention 190 (Violence and Harassment Convention). It will come into effect on June 9, 2024.   Ratified by 39 countries to date, it includes the right to safety and dignity at work and places a duty of care on employers to take a pro -active approach to prevention, protecting, enforcement, training and awareness As of March 6, 2023 the Australian Government has also amended the Fair Work Act 2009 to expressly ban sexual har...