Nats’ Super blunder still hurting NZ

The Matthew Hooton article’s headline “communism by stealth is here” refers to a John Key quote regarding Key’s dire predictions on Labour’s 2004 then new Working for Families policy.

On Saturday, November 4, 2017, a leading fund manager and brilliant financial columnist, Brian Gaynor, wrote an article in the Herald succinctly laying out how 43 years earlier, in late 1975, National used a communist smear campaign against Labour to win an election and immediately terminate Labour’s innovative NZ Superannuation Scheme: National strongly implied in its election campaign that the scheme would lead to a communist takeover (some of us will remember the “dancing Cossacks” TV ads). The electorate fell for it.

But the consequences of National’s smearing of Labour and termination of the scheme led to the greatest financial blunder ever perpetrated on New Zealand. A blunder with huge, disastrous and permanently ongoing consequences.

Gaynor details how the wealth of New Zealand would have thrived had the scheme been left in place: for instance, instead of a paltry $36 billion the scheme would now be worth $500b; more than enough to fund what would be merely petty cash issues like Working for Families, world-leading wages for nurses, teachers and the like, and one of the world’s best healthcare systems. We would have retained the ASB and the BNZ banks and many other major businesses now in overseas hands and would own several large Australian businesses. In other words, New Zealand would be the envy of Australia instead of the other way round. We really would be the Switzerland of the Pacific.

Warwick Grey, Epsom.