The superannuation burden
There’s nothing magic about age 65. It’s not the stroke of midnight when we all turn into pumpkins and start to roll down the big hill. Sixty was the age of retirement in the 1970s when New Zealand originally established today’s superannuation scheme. That threshold rose to age 61 in 1992 and climbed to age 65 by 2001.
Now the opposition National Party has resurrected a plan to push the age of superannuation to 67, contending that the age of retirement needs to be dragged into the future. It would be 2037 before any change was effected.
Demographics make a compelling argument for the change.
In the 1970s there were four children under the age of 15 for every person 65 and older. Since then, birth rates have fallen and longevity has increased by a decade. We now live into our 80s, on average.
Consequently, the ratio of young to old has dropped very close to one to one. Soon it will reverse, so that old people outnumber children.
Similarly, the ratio of workers to
retirees is falling; it’s 5:1 now, in a decade it’ll be just 2:1.
Super is funded by taxes and currently costs about 4 per cent of GDP. It’s a huge and rising burden of care spread across a workforce that foots the bulk of the bill, despite the fact that super recipients are taxed.
It is with this realism that National will battle it way to the polls next year. Finance critic Paul Goldsmith has already begun the task of trying to persuade older Kiwis that they’re younger and more sprightly than they think, and that they ought to be happy to put in a few more years at the mill.
It’s true, though perhaps not compelling to voters, that the last thing a government wants to do is encourage productive workers to stay home and that’s exactly what happens when super kicks in.
Labour on the other hand has chosen to fight with idealism. Prime Minister Jacinda Arden says she won’t raise the age of eligibility. She’s reminding voters that it was her government that re-started payments to the Super Fund, a savings pot that is intended to defray the cost of providing the benefit down the road.
She’s also returned to a theme of fairness. In this case, it’s that manual workers and ethnic groups like Maori with shorter life expectancy, would be unfairly affected by delayed retirement.
But she’s ignored the much larger question of inter-generational fairness. To what degree can younger working people be expected to accept either rising taxes or the diminishment of other government services to pay for ballooning retiree benefits?
Economists say the situation will be made more difficult still because the demographic shift from young to old will slow overall economic growth.
Ardern is likely motivated by more realism than she lets on, since the nitty gritty of politics means she’s in a tough spot.
She holds power in coalition with New Zealand First which is deadset against lifting the age of superannuation.
It’s also true that the voting public don’t have much appetite for delaying what many see as their great reward for a life of work.
In 2011, Phil Goff led Labour to an electoral defeat with a platform that included raising the age of eligibility to 67. In 2017, Bill English did the same for National when he failed to forge a coalition partnership with NZ First.
National has lifted a favourite catchphrase for its proposed policy change, arguing superannuation must be sustainable – to take the word’s original meaning, Super must be able to endure. It’s an important aim, the trick will be forming a government to start the job.