Editorial: Tinkering at disaster's edges

Prime Minister John Key. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The Prime Minister's signals this week that KiwiSaver is in for a shake-up in Thursday's Budget are all consistent with the Honest John image he is fond of cultivating.

Key signalled that the Government incentives - the $1000 "kickstart" payments for new KiwiSaver members and the $20-a-week tax credit - were likely to be slashed, in the face of a forecast $15 billion deficit and a "zero Budget".

The changes to KiwiSaver will not take place until after the election, lending them a "taking it to the people" lustre.

That has the feel of the fair deal about it, but it does tend to confirm the impression that this is a timorous Government, wanting to look like it is doing the right thing but not to the extent that it might hurt anybody's feelings.

Almost half of New Zealand voters have signed up to KiwiSaver, although their average total contribution - of the order of $2500 since the scheme started - does not suggest a passionate commitment to it as a savings instrument.

Anecdotal evidence - not to mention good sense - rather points to people investing the minimum of $1043 a year to get the dollar-for-dollar tax credit, and then putting the rest of their money elsewhere.

And why should they not? Savers who have done so since the beginning have got something like a 160 per cent return on their money - a figure not to be sniffed at, as anyone who has had sharemarket exposure over the same period will attest.

The problem is that the Government is borrowing the money to give it to us, which was never sustainable and certainly is not now.

New Zealanders always get jumpy when politicians start playing around with their retirement savings or superannuation entitlements. But we are also a pragmatic people and we know that desperate situations call for desperate remedies.

Even if we were not in the financial hole we were in, the KiwiSaver incentives would make no fiscal sense. Far better to ditch them and make retirement savings compulsory - albeit at a nominal rate while household budgets are as stretched as the national one.

The bigger elephant in the room that the Government is ignoring is that of interest-free student loans. The outstanding $11 billion - which is an incredible 6 per cent of GDP - means forgoing other spending or saving (a so-called opportunity cost) of $65 million a year.

Bill English rightly condemned the axing of interest on student loans as an election bribe when Labour announced it in 2005. It was exactly that, and it saved the Clark administration's bacon in that election.

But when we are borrowing $300 million a week (or around $70 a week for every New Zealander) just to stand still, it is an insane waste of money.

In an interview John Key gave to the BBC when he was in London for the royal wedding, Key smiled a lot and insisted that the expert independent commentary about the crises we face was "just people's opinions".

That's a politician's job - to put a brave face on it. Deep down, Key knows the shape we're in. But he seems to lack the political will to do anything about it.

Act leader Don Brash, whose public pronouncements have so far been conspicuously devoid of specific policy, got one thing right in his open letter to Key this week: the PM, he said, is frittering away "the greatest reserves of prime ministerial popularity in New Zealand history".

It's not too late for Key to prove him wrong. But time is certainly running out.