Jenna Price | Peter Dutton, Craig Bellamy have it right about working past retirement age

Why Bellamy? I just can't divorce him from the whole rugby league salary cap fiasco, where Storm won premiership after premiership while not playing within the financial rules of the league. Also, my beloved has been a Parramatta Eels supporter since he wore blue and gold as a boy and who can forget that 2009 final? Definitely not him.

Why Dutton? I have a long memory and no matter how he tries to make nice now, the man who walked out of the Kevin Rudd apology to the Stolen Generation will never be my kind of guy.

But on this one thing, let's give these two blokes a chance. What's the one thing? Life after decades and decades of work.

Craig Bellamy has had an epic run with the Storm, won trophy after trophy and game after game. And rumours around him retiring have done more than swirl. This year was meant to be his last.

As he said this week: "Eight weeks ago I was gone. Finished. But I've been speaking to a lot of blokes about retiring and I came to realise you are a long time retired."

So he's doing another year. He's a whipper-snapper at only 63. He said he decided to stay because "the bond with his players was hard to break". The bloke I do Pilates with is in his 70s. He says he wants to give up his work but doesn't want to lose the social bonds.

International research tells us that men get lonelier after retirement - and that "bridge employment" decreases the chance of being lonely among men. Work is such an important part of our lives that when it disappears, we might have nothing in its place.

I left full-time work at the end of 2020 and imagined a life for myself of lolling about, reading whenever, throwing my grandchildren in the air in the park. Two things stopped that.

One, I wanted to be able to spoil my grandchlidren rotten and even the Paul Keating Commemorative Superannuation Fund does not make it possible to carelessly purchase insanely expensive train sets at the drop of a hat; and two, throwing children in the air requires those Pilates classes and that also costs a throwing arm and a leg. Plus, there is only so much lolling and reading you can do.

Which brings me to Peter Dutton who was on Radio National's Patricia Karvelas expanding on his budget reply. He said - and I 100 per cent agree with him - that we are in a tight labour market and therefore we should allow people who are on an aged pension to work a few extra hours which would supplement their income and help them deal with rising costs in their family budgets.

But he also referred to Craig Bellamy (I mean, not really, but the concept of Craig Bellamy).

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"Many people have had a gutful of work and then they get out and they realise they have probably retired too early and they want to go back and get a little bit of part-time work.

"And if that's what they choose to do then we should provide them with the support to do that before their pension starts to taper off."

It's a good idea. It will mean more people will be happy in their retirement with "bridge employment". It takes pressure off family incomes. It will provide a flexible experienced workforce for a nation which needs all those things.

Council On The Ageing Australia's CEO Patricia Sparrow, says: "Older pensioners who want to continue to work more hours should be able to do so on an equitable basis financially. The current pension settings provide a disincentive for pensioners to work more than a day or two a week.

"Older Australians have a lot to contribute to our workplaces, so removing disincentives to working more hours is beneficial."

It's win-win. Now let's see if Labor is smart enough to say yes. You don't even have to say it was Peter Dutton's idea.