KiwiSaver’s racist secret
Just as festive shop window displays in shops appear in the run up to Christmas, so warnings to claim your KiwiSaver member tax credits proliferate in the weeks before June.
Okay, I promise this will be the last sentence in which I use that hideous, profoundly in-human ‘‘member tax credits’’ jargon.
From here on I will call it a ‘‘bribe’’ to save into KiwiSaver.
But once again as my email inbox fills up with seasonal warnings from KiwiSaver providers, I am struck by the sad truth that there is a strong link between the likelihood of a person collecting a bribe and the colour of their skin.
It’s more than an accidental outcome of the ‘‘invisible hand of the market’’.
Yes, unemployment levels are lower, and incomes generally higher for Pakeha than for Maori or Pacific Island people.
But KiwiSaver is a recentlyconstructed bureaucratic creation.
This is not the equivalent of me calling Christmas racist because statistically Pakeha households have higher incomes to spend on presents and mince pies.
People sat down just over a decade ago, and nutted the rules of KiwiSaver out.
Part of that nutting out involved Understand the KiwiSaver bribes Get your full KiwiSaver bribe
Don’t get frightened by the jargon coping with high rents as a result of us stuffing up the housing market.
A household with two grown-up KiwiSavers wanting the full bribe would need to set aside just over $2000 a year. Much easier for a household with an income of $100,000 than one with a household income of $40,000.
ANZ told me this week it was working hard to encourage the roughly half of its 600,000 or so KiwiSaver members who have not qualified for their full bribe to take action and make a voluntary one-off payment into their KiwiSaver to get it.
I encourage you all to try and get over that line, and perhaps have a word with your local MP about whether it was time to reorganise the KiwiSaver bribes on a fairer, less accidentally racist basis.