Not every reflection on the Court of Public Opinion is about money or politics. On this Garage edition, Jeremy Cordeaux offered something more personal, a heartfelt case against the modern rush to put parents and grandparents into aged care, drawn from his own childhood under one roof with three generations of his family.
The Algorithm That Troubled Him
The starting point was a Four Corners program Jeremy had watched, about an algorithm used to decide how much care elderly patients receive. The idea of a formula quietly rationing care sat badly with him, one more example of technology being handed a decision that, in his view, belongs to families and to human judgement.
Don’t discard what works, he urged. When something has worked for centuries, he argued, you should think very hard before leaving it behind for a system run by an algorithm.
Three Generations Under One Roof
What worked, in Jeremy’s telling, was the way his own family lived. Some of his most wonderful memories, he said, are of being at the knee of his grandmother and grandfather, who in many ways raised him and his brother. They came down from Queensland and bought a house in which the whole family could live together, three generations under one roof.
His grandparents died in that home, in their eighties. Through it, he and his brother learned about the natural cycle of life, knowledge and wisdom passed directly from one generation to the next. That, he suggested, is something no institution can replicate.
The Way Much Of The World Still Lives
Jeremy pointed out that the multi-generational household is far from unusual. It is the norm, he said, in Italian, Greek and Chinese families, among many others. In Italy, he suggested, you might find a retirement village, but you would be hard pushed to find a nursing home; families very rarely sell the property, passing it instead from generation to generation.
The logic, to Jeremy, makes obvious sense. The generations get on and share the cost of getting on. It is efficient, it is humane, and it keeps families together at exactly the stage of life when that matters most.
What We Are Losing
What Jeremy found extraordinary was the instinct he sees in the other direction, that the first thing some young people seem to want to do is put their parents or grandparents into a home, and not their own.
He was careful not to condemn every family; circumstances differ, and care is sometimes genuinely necessary. But his broader point was about what a society loses when the default shifts from keeping elders close to moving them out. The natural cycle of life, the transfer of wisdom, the simple presence of grandparents in a child’s daily world, these are the things, Jeremy argued, that an algorithm and a nursing home can never give back.
Listen To The Full Episode
Catch the complete Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, recorded live around the dining room table.
Watch The Full Episode
The Court of Public Opinion streams live every Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. (ACST), right here at jeremycordeaux.com. Download the podcast anytime on your favourite podcast app, and join the conversation with your calls and comments.
