Grandma, 81, running for election is a walking ad for active ageing – and win or lose, Astrid Heiberg plans to stay busy
Use your brain if you want a long life, Hong Kong audience heard from doctor who was first woman president of the International Committee of the Red Cross and who champions age-friendly policies in retirement
Astrid Noklebye Heiberg is not your average grandma. At the age of 81, she is the oldest candidate to run for Parliament in Norway, where a general election will be held in September. And it looks like nothing will stop her, not even cancer.
When we meet in June at the Knowledge of Design Week – a conference held by the Hong Kong Design Centre where she spoke on the topic “More Years More Opportunities” – she has just finished chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer, the only sign of which was the scarf she wore on her head.
A senior political adviser to the incumbent Conservative Party of Norway, Heiberg recently helped the government draft a “grey paper” – a comprehensive strategy for building an age-friendly society. It covers areas such as how long people should be able to work, making transport systems more accessible, and how innovation can enable active ageing.
“The challenge is we have ageing populations all over the world but people haven’t adjusted to it. People still live in the age of the industrial revolution. We believe people are robotic in their ways and minds so that, when we get older, we are in a sense broken. We are rusted and need to be discarded,” says Heiberg. “People haven’t really grasped the idea that humanity is much more than that.”
While Norway has been consistently ranked as the best country in the world to grow old in, Heiberg believes its government still has a lot to do. One of these is to remove the upper age limit for employment, currently set at 80.