Tag Archives: Jane Timbrell

Retirement Villages Not a Safe Haven?

Posted on by

If we’re lucky, we will all at some stage get to the point of thinking about where to park ourselves in our older age. Do we make the move earlier or later? Downsize, or join a ready-made community of old people?

Our Deputy Convenor Jane Timbrell* has a salutary piece on retirement villages and the hazards they present to the unwary, published online last month in John Menadue’s Pearls & Irritations.

Canberra has 5000 residents in retirement villages, whose oversight is not a federal matter but is carried out in haphazard fashion at state and territory level. More regulation is needed to stop rapacious operators from gaming a very profitable market of sometimes vulnerable people.

Jane’s piece is attached below.

Members of a retirement community (image: Wikimedia Commons)

Retirement Villages: Are they really a safe haven for retirees?

Jane Timbrell

The looming question for me and my partner is “where might we live as we grow older and frailer?”

For us, the ideal place is likely to be a retirement village. But at what cost?

Continue reading →

Maintaining the Rage

Posted on by

Jane has written a new article for the Australian Unions’ Working Life blog. (Originally at http://workinglife.org.au/2014/10/08/maintaining-the-rage-long-into-retirement/)

“I QUICKLY learned that after retirement there is a whole new world for a committed trade unionist and there is much for us to do.

It is not hard to feel concern for our old work colleagues or for the next generation of workers confronted everyday by the outrageous excesses of the Abbott Government.

Retirement has also made me look at all the other hard earned rights and privileges that the union movement has won for our society.

I am thinking of superannuation, the aged pension, Medicare: all of which provide me and other retirees with a comfortable retirement.”

Unionism’s retired ranks dust off their cards

Posted on by

[Source: Noel Towell, canberratimes.com.au/act-news/unionisms-retired-ranks-dust-off-their-cards-20140214-32rog.html, February 15, 2014]

pb-art-unions-20140214212627803985-620x349.jpg

Their days as union firebrands might be long behind them, but a group of Canberra’s retired workplace activists reckons the flames never really go out.

Hundreds of retired union members from around the capital are answering the call to arms from Vintage Reds, a new group set up to try to unleash the untapped grey potential of the Australian union movement. Continue reading →