The 2015 Intergenerational Report, released on Thursday, had been pre-announced by treasurer Joe Hockey as a piece of political advocacy, designed with the specific aim of making us “fall off our chairs”. Of course, nothing is easier than to make a forecast look scary when you are projecting 40 years into the future and you get to choose the parameters that suit your case.

The point of this exercise, as Hockey openly admits, is not to provide the Australian public with a considered view of our fiscal policy options over the next four decades. The real time frame is closer to the next four weeks: first, to keep Abbott and Hockey in their jobs that long; and second, to set the scene for debate leading up to the budget in May. The release of the Intergenerational Report (IGR) was legally required in early February, well before the budget session, but it has been delayed in the hope of maximising its political impact.

Hockey’s transparent manipulation would, however, be a benefit to Australian public debate if it led to the IGR being abandoned, once and for all. The report was originally proposed as an assessment of the relative distribution of fiscal benefits and costs across generations, but it has never delivered on that promise. Rather, it is yet another example of how the dead hand of the political generations of the 1980s and 1990s continues to dominate Australian politics.

To see why intergenerational issues were of such concern to the political class at that time, it’s necessary to look at retirement incomes policy as it stood in the late 1970s. The age pension was available to women at 60 and men at 65. There was no assets test, only a very generous income test applicable to those under 70. As a result, 77% of the age-eligible population received the pension.

For those in white collar jobs, retirement was even more appealing. The standard mode of defined-benefit superannuation was income based, providing retirees with an indexed benefit based on their final salaries. These benefits, heavily tax-subsidised then as now, were available at 55, which was increasingly seen as the ideal retirement age.

And of course, people were living longer. When the age pension was introduced in 1909, a 60-year-old woman could expect to live another 18 years, and a 65-year-old man another 11. Those numbers have increased to 27 and 19 respectively.

Meanwhile, increased access to education meant that young people, most of whom had previously begun work at the school leaving age of 15, were now staying longer at school and university, often into their 20s. The potential result, it seemed, was a society in which workers aged between 25 and 55 would simultaneously bear the private burden of raising their children, and supporting the previous generation over a retirement that might easily be as long as their working life.

In these circumstances, issues of intergenerational equity were of serious concern. But the direction of public policy and the labour market changed from 1978 onwards. First, income and assets tests were reintroduced. Then, beginning in the early 1990s, defined benefit superannuation schemes were replaced by defined contribution schemes, which put the burden on workers to plan the retirement investments on which they live.

The final step, beginning in the late 1990s, was a progressive increase in the age of eligibility for retirement incomes of all kinds. The pension age for women was increased gradually to 65, a process completed last year. Further changes in 2009, began the process of increasing the pension age to 67 by 2023.

In the 2014 budget, a further increase was foreshadowed, to the age of 70. When this process is complete, it will have cancelled out a century’s worth of increased life expectancy for women, and most of the increase for men. Ages of early access to superannuation benefits are also being raised. Given these changes, there is no longer any serious issue of intergenerational equity facing Australia, except perhaps for the excessive tax subsidies for superannuation.

... by the time the first IGR was released in 2002, the problem had already been largely resolved

In fact, by the time the first IGR was released in 2002, the problem had already been largely resolved, and the remaining measures were generally anticipated. The resolution of the intergenerational fiscal problem was a major public policy achievement of the reform era of the 1980s and 1990s. But a political class still fixated on the most ideological version of the reform agenda, in which cutting public spending is desirable in and out of season has refused to drop the club of intergenerational equity. The idea that (very modest) budget deficits and public debt levels constitute “robbing our children” remains a staple in calls for “reform”.

The idea that public spending today places an unfair burden on the younger generation is belied by even the most cursory examination of the 2014 budget cuts. Some of the biggest proposed cuts were imposed on school (the abandonment of the forward commitments under Gonski) and university students (fee deregulation and funding cuts).

As a community, we need to assess the extent to which we are willing to meet social needs through public expenditure, which must ultimately be financed by taxation. This is an issue which neither side of politics has been willing to address honestly. Scare stories about future fiscal disasters don’t help.