New figures from the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission show that more than half of age discrimination complaints it receives relate to employment, and the proportion is steadily increasing.

Two years ago, they accounted for 55 per cent of all age complaints, but have increased to 61 per cent so far this financial year.

Equal opportunity commissioner Kate Jenkins, who previously worked in the field of discrimination law, said age discrimination in employment started from about 45, and was ''pretty systemic and accepted''.

This included workers being picked for redundancy because they were older, or workers as young as 50 being asked when they were going to retire. ''It surprises me. It's really quite overt age discrimination,'' she said.

Ms Jenkins said the concern about the economic decision to increase the pension age was the fact age discrimination in employment was already a very big issue.

''I think we will continue to get complaints, unless we as a community really change our attitude to older workers.''

The Abbott government's first federal budget last month moved to increase the pension age to 70, after the decision by the previous Labor government to raise it to 67. The budget also introduced incentives for businesses to hire older workers. The changes must be approved by a hostile Senate.

There is also a debate about whether to increase the age at which people can access their superannuation, although Prime Minister Tony Abbott has ruled it out this term.

The equal opportunity commission provided examples of complaints of overt age discrimination, including:

■ A 53-year-old woman enrolled in a massage course ridiculed and humiliated by her instructor who said she was too old to massage in Australia.

■ A 54-year-old man sacked as a car dealer trainee because he was told he was too old, and the dealer wanted someone in their 20s.

■ A 53-year-old property manager at a real estate company that preferred younger staff was subjected to ageist jokes, ridicule and insults.

Kamal Farouque, principal in employment law at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, has identified a growing problem of older blue-collar workers being terminated by employers if they have an injury or were seen to have a predisposition to injury.

Mr Farouque recently ran a seminar for union clients on the subject, titled ''Clearing out the old and the injured''.

He believed people somehow thought age discrimination was less illegitimate than other forms of discrimination. ''People make jokes about people's age in a way which they probably wouldn't readily do about race,'' he said.

Mr Farouque noted the way Commonwealth legislation had unfolded: age discrimination was outlawed only in 2004, compared with laws against race discrimination in 1975 and sex discrimination in 1984.

''I think there's a big disjunction between social perceptions of acceptability of age discrimination and the legal prohibition on it,'' he said.

''Social values haven't really caught up. Economically, people are expected to work longer, but the social values really aren't tracking with either the economic expectation, or indeed the legislative prohibition.''