The other is this ability to get money so long as you've got a home.

Well, in terms of a tighter means test for the pension, I can say there is certainly a substantial part of particularly the retired community that say, I've worked and paid taxes all my life and this is part of my entitlement.

Shouldn't be messed with.

But really, that's a myth because it is already the case that 40% of retired households are totally self-funded and 20% are on the part pension.

40% have the full pension.

So we moved away from the pension being an entitlement a long time ago.

It's just no longer true.

And in a sense, there's not that much difference between free education, which we provide universally, even though some schools, you know, charge fees for books and excursions and so on, and providing free universal childcare.

Would there be a suggestion then that like the childcare rebate, which is also something you point out is an in-kind transfer that does mean that rich households are still getting some form of subsidy off the government to send children to childcare, should education also be scaled at the same level? Should you be therefore seeing slightly higher income, slightly higher wealth paying a bigger share of public, particularly public education?

Well, we didn't we didn't look at we didn't look at some of those big systems in our in this paper.

What we did was we looked at four programs which are already large that already have means testing and ask the question, what does that means testing look like? So that was parental pay leave, the child care subsidy, age pension subsidy.

and aged care.

They are already means tested.

They are large.

They're about 15% of the total transfer programs.

And so where and how do we make the distinction that the family home is or isn't in the age pension support system?

Why do you think we should do this now?

I think we should do this now for a couple of reasons.

One is that we do need to look at...

The equity in the system and I should say the paper that we've produced today, which we've titled home truth looks at means testing across four programs.

Age pension, aged care, child care subsidy, and paid parental leave.

And the reason to look at this is because our social safety net as a whole is becoming less targeted toward the people who need it most, therefore more inequitable, and it's also becoming more expensive.

You said in your intro that the age pension is the largest program, and it still is, except for what we spend on health.

Now really under your system if you were to deny the couple with the $5 million house the pension they would have to sell that house and downsize wouldn't they to fund their retirement?

They're beginning to touch what we had thought was the third rail.

And it's critically important.

You were talking about how this has been pitched as intergenerational equity, that it's about wealth.

I think for me, when I look at it, this is about two things.

People who are able to accumulate wealth in housing, because when we look at that chart in the budget papers, that is primarily about housing.

It's not surprising that people who are older accumulate more wealth.

That is what will generally naturally occur over a lifetime.

How's the government doing on that?

What could it do to speed things up?

Construction industry productivity is woeful.

It is woeful, and, uh, anybody who's really interested in this, I encourage you to have a read of the Queensland Productivity Commission interim report on what's happened with, uh, with labor productivity and construction and the impacts of it.

Um, so they've estimated that in Queensland, labor productivity has risen only five percent since 1995, as against sixty-five percent for the Queensland economy as a whole.

Since 2018, productivity has fallen nine percent, and if productivity had remained flat since 2018, it would meet what is currently viewed as workforce shortages in the construction industry.

So the Queensland Productivity Commission is-- has-- was looking at what are the causes of poor labor productivity, and one of the main ones that they found is, if you like, the crowding out in the construction sector, where residential construction has been crowded out by major project infrastructure construction or what's called civil construction.

The civil construction market has grown hugely because of all of the investment from government and infrastructure.

So I would, I would look at taxing more older Australians and a little less the working-age Australians.