John MacDonald: What the PM should have said about the retirement age

In his state of the nation speech yesterday, Christopher Luxon continued the great New Zealand tradition of kicking the retirement age can down the road. He said raising the retirement age was “inevitable”. But that was it. And, when I say kicking the can, it was more like nudging the can with his foot really. Because what the Prime Minister and every other politician should be doing, is showing some fortitude and accepting that tweaking with the retirement age is never going to be enough. What I think we should be doing, is telling people who are 35 and younger right now, that they’ll have to provide for themselves completely when they retire because there won’t be a NZ Super pension. That’s what needs to happen. Instead of increasing the age of entitlement by one year or two years, we should ditch the scheme completely. But over a sustained period of time. Because the problem we’re trying to solve is the fact that it is completely unsustainable. By the end of the decade, we’re going to be spending $30 billion a year on NZ Super and, as economist Brad Olsen said recently, every other thing in the government’s budget will be “rats and mice”. So, if we are serious about leaving a legacy for future New Zealanders - which is something the Prime Minister talked about a lot in his speech yesterday - we need to make sure that legacy doesn’t include lumbering future generations with an unsustainable state pension scheme. But, the way we’re going, nothing’s going to change. Because politicians seem to be terrified of doing anything meaningful. Whereas, what I’m talking about would be meaningful. It would have no immediate impact, given it would only apply to people 35-and-younger now. But you can’t underestimate the long-term benefits. I know doing away with NZ Super would be huge. But we can’t afford to be all sentimental about it. We have to face the reality that the way we do things now - and the way we’ve been doing things - can’t continue forever. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.