New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern firm on keeping superannuation age at 65
Wellington: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says if the National Party hadn’t stopped contributions to the Superannuation Fund, there’d be no need to discuss raising the Superannuation eligibility age to 67.
National announced on
Monday it was sticking to its previous promise to raising the Superannuation eligibility age to 67 from 2037 if it were elected to government next year.
Prime Minister
Jacinda Ardern told
Morning Report: “Our argument of course has always been that if we continue to make contributions to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund that we can ensure the sustainability of Super and the settings as it currently stands.
“We want to give people some confidence of that. We restarted contributions as soon as we took office, over the next five years those contributions will swell to NZ$9 billion and that’s a firm commitment we have made that we are keeping. This is a policy that National had when they were last in office... We disagree, this is a clear policy difference between the two parties. Our view again is that if we’d had maintenance of contributions to the Super Fund, which the National government stopped, we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place.”
Ms Ardern said New Zealand was different to other countries that had raised the retirement age to 67.
“We do have differing life expectancy in New Zealand between different ethnicities. And we should be open about that. That is one of the issues that we have to grapple with as a nation.
“We also know that from international evidence that you are more likely if you work in manual labour or hard labour your life expectancy is also shorter.”
When it was pointed out that other countries also had blue collar workers, Ms Ardern reiterated: “In my view, if we are able to and are contributing to the NZ Super Fund sustainably, which we as a government are ... then our view is you are able to keep the rate at 65 and that is what I have pledged to do”. Increasing the retirement age was National’s policy to defend, she said. Asked if National’s policy exploited M ori and the poor, Ms Ardern said those were issues that were not answered by blanket increases.
“In some countries they have looked at ways of enabling people in different jobs to access (superannuation) earlier and then that affects their rate over a period of time. So actually, some countries have tried to deal with that issue. As I can see from the proposal from National, they haven’t dealt with that issue.”
Former Prime Minister John Key had avoided the retirement age policy during his time in office, but his successor Bill English campaigned on the policy in 2017.