Given that older people tend to be more conservative?
They say its gone over to the older age bracket but they are encouraging older Australians to continue working, currently phasing in a new standard retirement age of 70.
I do wonder if it could be a bulge due to the baby boomer population and not a permanent thing as they are suggesting in the article.
Its very possible its just a boomer thing, but there are similar trends happening in various places. I've heard that the US and Japan have the same phenomenon amongst whites and asians respectively, but don't quote me on that.
My pessimistic side tells me its people reproducing less. Could be economic stress, drug induced, internet changing behavior, or just some quirk of social behavior.
Are you familiar with John Calhoun's mouse experiments? He did some crazy research in a effort to model how civilizations fall, and one of his key findings was that when a population of mice is given everything they need to survive, they will eventually just stop reproducing. If you're interested, this is a great summary of his work: https://hooktube.com/watch?v=NgGLFozNM2o
Yes I have read about the mouse uptopia experiment series.
In a vacuum I'd say yes, but that assumes that a country doesn't become too top-heavy and collapse under its own weight due to the lack of young workers.
Generally the solution to a lack of physical labor is to import it from other countries. Generally immigrants tend to be poor (else why leave?), poor people tend to vote liberal (free stuff, yo), and just like that you've stabilized a country and balanced the political spectrum at the expense of cultural and ethnic identity.
Of course that assumes an extreme imbalance between old and young, which is probably going to be offset by increasing levels of automation.
TLDR: idk.