John MacDonald: Our view of the pension needs to change

Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

Life’s all about choices. And we need to make some.

Outgoing Treasury boss Dr Caralee McLiesh says cutting costs here and there, like the Government is doing at the moment, isn’t going to be enough to really get the country's finances in order.

And she reckons one of the things we need to do is make changes to the government superannuation scheme.

I agree with her. Because we are dreaming if we reckon we can just keep on keeping on, paying out the pension to people just because they reach a certain age.

Which is where we get to the choice we need to make. Because doing nothing isn’t an option.

The two options we do have is, either, raising the retirement age; or means-testing for the pension.

I’m no doubt that, at some stage, we have to start means-testing for the pension.

I’ll tell you why I’m in favour of means testing and why I’m not in favour of raising the retirement age.

The fact is, no matter how active we think we are or how active we try to be, age catches up with every one of us. It happens to everyone.

And some people have careers and they work in jobs that can be almost impossible to do by the age of 65. Some people even struggle by the time they’re 60. Painters. Builders. Most tradies, really.

Others might have jobs that aren’t all that physical, but age still catches up with them and the idea of working beyond 65 is just not on their radar.

What I’m saying is that everyone ages and expecting everyone to work past 65 just isn’t realistic. Because age catches up with all of us. There’s no variable.

What is variable, though, are our financial positions. Some people are loaded. Some people are hard up. Some people are somewhere in between. So it’s crazy that, when it comes to the pension, we treat everyone the same.

The loaded people get the pension, and it’s beer money. The hard up people get the pension, and it’s their lifeline. So their lives are completely different, in terms of what they can and can’t afford, but we pay them all the pension.

And we can’t keep doing that.

The other strong argument in favour of means-testing the government pension arrives in our letterbox at home on a semi-regular basis.

Our kids are all at university in Dunedin and Wellington but a lot of their mail still turns up at home, some from their Kiwisaver providers.

So, here they are - not all that long out of school in the grand scheme of things - and they’ve got Kiwisaver accounts.

Maybe some of that money will get chewed up on home deposits down the track. But, the point is, thanks to Kiwisaver they are saving for retirement at an age when most of us probably never even thought about it.

And these are the generations who, I reckon, won’t even have an expectation that anything other than what they save themselves and what their employers contribute through Kiwisaver, will be what they will have by the time they get to retirement age.

But, if you're already in your 60s, chances are you’re of the thinking that you’ve paid your taxes, you’ve done your bit, and that you deserve every cent of the pension. Which is an argument I struggle with. Because we all pay our taxes but we don’t necessarily use all the services that our tax money goes into.

But, somehow, the pension is different. And there is this sense of entitlement that, even if you don’t need it, you should still get it.

Which needs to stop. Because we can’t afford it anymore.

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