Current developments in aged care in Australia

Speech given at the University of Western Australia, Professional Education Program, Perth, 21st October 1988, by Adam Graycar, Commissioner for the Ageing, Adelaide, South Australia. This speech is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/In June 1987 there were in Western Australia 130,365 people in their fifties, 104,562 in their sixties, 66,362 in their seventies and 26,816 aged eighty or over. Almost one in four Western Australians is aged 50 or over. By the year 2021 one in 3 Western Australians will be 50 or over. Ageing can.be seen as an issue requiring policy attention because a situation of dependency can"be identified. The dependencies of ageing are chronic not transitional and may be social, economic, physical and political