A bunch of sincere economists and others have put their collective heads together and given us the latest Intergenerational Report (which looks at where Australia will be in 2063) and surprise, surprise, it’s not good news!

Let me do something I don’t tend to do. I’ll play normal journalist and try to scare the pants off you about what will go wrong. I generally avoid this kind of thing because too many of us have an unhealthy commitment or addiction to being negative, when in fact things generally turn out to be more positive than we initially thought. But that’s a subject for another day.

Here's the bad stuff:

1. The health budget is a ticking time bomb for Canberra’s budget deficit.
2. Aged care outlays will be another budget burden.
3. So will debt repayments.
4. Slower economic growth is expected and the deficit will blow out to $72.3 billion!
5. Making matters worse, tax collections will drop because there’ll be less money from the excise of fuel for petrol-guzzling cars.
6. And we’ll sell less or no coal and gas, which will be another tax loss to the budget’s bottom line.

Kill-joy economists have fed these negative scenarios to Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who has given us his version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of

1. Job-taking Artificial Intelligence
2. the death of demand for our fossil fuel exports;
3. The money-munching drain of exploding aged care outlays; and
4. An incredibly shrinking tax base!

Dr Jim’s worried that our ageing population won’t help the collection of taxes. It’s why our current government (the Albanese team) and any future government will be playing around with our super. The goal will be to limit how much we can get into super, and if we do manage to beat the system, the tax rate is bound to rise.

Interestingly, one good news story for Australia in 2063 (yes, 2063) is that there will be proportionately less pensioners because super will provide the money that once came from Canberra’s coffers to pay for the pension bill.

Dr Jim says he wants financial literacy to increase so more Australians understand what wealth-generating products are out there, so retirees don’t have to live a frugal life in their later years.

He’s right, and the industry super fund sector is obviously happy that the nation’s number one bookkeeper is doing nice advertisements for this group. These funds want to be able to give more advice than the law currently lets them, and we’ll soon see some law changes in that respect.

One area Dr Jim won’t budge on is raising the GST. If you forced economists to consume the truth serum (that they’re talking about using with criminals to see where bodies of murder victims are buried), they’d tell you Australia needs a 15% GST and lower income taxes.

However, since John Howard and Peter Costello had the rocks to sell a GST in the Olympic year of 2000, no national leader would test out their popularity with a GST. This is why I never get too scared about the future and these crystal ball gazing sneak previews of life in the time tunnel.

It's quality guessing, nothing more and nothing less. This guessing helps politicians sell tough policies and excuses. There’s so much left out of these future forecasts, such as technological discoveries, social movements, great men and women in history and even miraculous discoveries! And, of course, you can add curve balls — both positive and negative — such as a pandemic!

This Intergenerational Report isn’t a waste of time and money because it gets us thinking about what might happen and how we should prepare for it. It also stimulates others to be the ‘outside the square’ thinkers, which helps us inevitably turn bad situations into positive learning experiences.

By way of example about how the positive trumps the negative, the stock market is described as always climbing “the wall of worry”.  However, its history has shown that over a 10-year period, it rises at least seven out of 10 years and pays 10% a year over that time period.

While people worry day in day out, over time, a lot of those worries become forgotten as humanity’s genius surprises us — and life goes on.