Let’s talk about the demographics of trade, ‘the great arc of China’ and why Australia (and its resoruces) will be in hot demand for decades to come. It all comes down to resources, to skills, to quality of life and to Australia’s undeniable strength our collective ioptimism: we think the future will be, on balance, better than the past. And the reason why we think like this is because this been the story of Australia for 30+ years.

In 2024 we’re still (sort of) amid the peak of the post-Covid immigration surge, but later there will come the great 2020s tapering… although, the real question is will we slow down quickly enough? Make no mistake the greatest resource of the 21st Century isn’t gold or oil or lithium it’s young skilled workers prepared to relocate and to pay tax in another country… like Australia!

How Covid changed the flows that drive the demand for and supply of housing. The reason of course is that the supply chain was (temporarily) broken by the pandemic. But also, all this occurred at a time when the 1950’s baby boom reverberated into a full-on baby bust. Not enough workers to build an insufficient number of houses.

This is the story of how the baby bust and automation created shallower labour pools in the 2020s. It’s not that workers ‘went home’ from Australia (although some did). It’s that older workers are now leaving (retiring from) the workforce at a greater rate than young workers are entering the workforce. The solution is automation, AI, robots and the great ‘appification of Australia.’’

In some cases the customer of the future will be younger. In other cases the cusotmer of the future will be savvier. In all cases this late-2020s customer will be flexxier. That is the story of the customer of the future. But perhaps the greatest difference between now and then is the customer’s heightened use of apps, of click & collect, of doing research. The customer of the future is informed, educated and in search of value.

This is the story of how the next generation of retirees is reimagining the years 65-79 which were once solely associated with, well, retirement. But these years are no longer defined as ‘the great retirement’ rather they are now ‘the great contentment.’ New data released from the 2021 Census shows that depression and anxiety evaporate the minute Australians leave work at age 65. This isn’t retirement… this is the great contentment… this is the best years of the baby boomer’s lives! (Psst… don’t call boomers retirees… call them lifestylers!)