Letter to the Editor Tuesday July 8, 2014

All together now

I see this year's leader of the Act Party is paying a compliment to the perennial Dear Leader of the UnitedFuture Party by imitating his annoying tendency to post political propaganda items in the letters columns of local newspapers.

Jamie Whyte's letter 'Old-fashioned bullying', (June 24) takes issue with the compulsory aspect of the present Labour Party policy on KiwiSaver contributions. Fair enough, nobody likes compulsion. This may extend to such matters as having to go to school or to pay taxes, which are other policy areas where the Act Party takes issue, and even to resentment at not being free to smoke in shared spaces, or to drive on whichever side of the road one may feel inclined to do on occasion.

At the other end of the KiwiSaver equation, nobody likes to experience relative poverty in their 'autumn years' either. There are additionally a range of potential negative outcomes for society through needing to deal with the effects of this, but there is no 'collective' in Act philosophy, only individual rights and freedoms.

Such poverty would be described as the culmination of someone's lifetime exercise of their personal choices, regardless of how much actual control they had over the outcome of those choices.

Mr Whyte argues as follows: "A skilled financial advisor knows that how much people should save, when they should save, and in what ways they should save, are complex matters, and that the right answers vary from person to person." Ahem - since 2008 those 'right answers' from 'skilled financial advisers' were uniformly just plain wrong for each one of about 80,000 New Zealanders.

Those 'right answers' gutted their life savings and retirement lifestyle hopes nurtured over a lifetime.

It could be perceived that many finance companies ascribed to the Act philosophy of unregulated personal opportunity and self-help, with the effect that collective wealth was concentrated then embezzled by a few. This was not the culmination of the 'free choice' of individual investors; this was dodgy under-regulated free enterprise that amounted to theft. What alternative to future victims does Mr Whyte offer? Just more of the same.

I had thought it was widely accepted by New Zealand politicians that the most long-term-damaging economic stuff-up of the late 20th century was Robert Muldoon's ideological rejection and subsequent demolition of the original (1974) Labour government compulsory super scheme. That collectively-accumulated internal fund would have resulted by now (40 years on) in a range of significant benefits to be enjoyed by every sector of our economy. Its kind-of successor, the Cullen Fund, is presently being sabotaged through neglect by this National-led government, which has shown a greater interest in borrowing than in saving.

In a recently televised panel discussion Mr Whyte looked genuinely perplexed when the word 'community' was used by other speakers. One of them tried in vain to explain the concept to him.

It does seem odd that someone espousing extreme individualism and declining to philosophically recognise the concept of community should nevertheless desire to influence or lead the New Zealand community from a collective construct known as 'Parliament'.

Seems to me that a party which doesn't even believe in 'us' are demonstrating their own compulsion to try and tell us what we should and shouldn't do.

MIKE RASHBROOKE

Opua