As our population ages and governments look for ways to contain long-term costs, the debate keeps returning. So, should we raise the age of eligibility and, if we do, who pays the price? <\/p>\n
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has confirmed<\/a> National would be campaigning on gradually raising the age of eligibility for New Zealand Superannuation, which it believes is becoming unaffordable – a view shared by the OECD.<\/p>\n Coalition partner and NZ First leader Winston Peters is holding firm, however, telling TVNZ\u2019s Breakfast the issue is \u201cnot a bottom line, it\u2019s a top line\u201d and that it\u2019s \u201cnot going to change\u201d.<\/p>\n University of Auckland Business School associate professor Susan St John told The Front Page<\/a> that the debate resurfaces because people are uneasy about paying a universal pension to everyone, including wealthy people.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve got this wonderful scheme, and everybody gets this income at 65, whether or not they\u2019re in full-time, well-paid work or whether they\u2019ve got millions or billions of dollars of assets.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd at the same time, we know that there\u2019s a huge degree of hardship and outright poverty within the New Zealand economy at the moment, and it\u2019s getting worse … But we\u2019ve got this payment that seems to be going to people who don\u2019t, strictly speaking, need it at all.<\/p>\n \u201cSo the idea of raising the age is kind of like a knee-jerk reaction to that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Not everyone can easily work longer. M\u0101ori and Pasifika tend to have lower life expectancy and poorer health later in life. And some women may also be disadvantaged after a lifetime of unpaid caregiving. <\/p>\n St John said raising the age would not really solve the underlying issue and would instead worsen inequality.<\/p>\n The idea of means testing generally accompanies debates about New Zealand\u2019s Super scheme. This is when the government checks a person\u2019s income and sometimes their assets to decide whether they qualify for a benefit and how much they should get.<\/p>\n “\u200aThe Australian one is enormously complicated, and I think most New Zealanders, if they looked at how it operated and how low the thresholds were before you started losing 50 cents out of every extra dollar earned or your asset level was so low that, you didn\u2019t have much of a buffer there before you were penalised from the asset test, I don\u2019t think they would have a bar of it.<\/p>\n “\u200aRemember, too, in Australia they jointly income and asset test, so that for married women, they can miss out on the age pension simply because their partner earns too much,” she said.<\/p>\n Listen to the full episode<\/a> to hear more about:<\/p>\n How NZ Super worksWhat is \u201cmeans testing\u201d?Tax clawbacks and other alternatives.<\/p>\n The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5pm. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime\/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.<\/p>\n You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio<\/a>, Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a> or wherever you get your podcasts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As our population ages and governments look for ways to contain long-term costs, the debate keeps returning. So,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":426690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[7127,138,246,1668,117,111,139,69,1118,28630,45644,17711,244,245,2515,3271,218867,313,6211,223,2443,80],"class_list":["post-426689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-age","tag-business","tag-finance","tag-front","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-page","tag-paper","tag-parts","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance","tag-raise","tag-should","tag-simplest","tag-super","tag-system","tag-the","tag-welfare","tag-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/426690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}