KEY POINTS:
It's been one year since KiwiSaver was let loose on New Zealand and Finance Minister Michael Cullen and Revenue Minister Peter Dunne are celebrating more than 718,000 members joining up.
This means a little under 2000 people have joined the scheme every day over the past year. Cullen said that initial forecasts for KiwiSaver were for 275,000 to have signed up after a year.
"A year ago I was confident New Zealanders would prove the KiwiSaver sceptics wrong," Cullen said. "The Labour-led government knew that New Zealanders were serious about building a nest-egg and we knew that KiwiSaver would make that easier than ever before.
"But one year ago, no one would have predicted that we would already have over 700,000 KiwiSavers. Certainly no one would have predicted that we would have around 200,000 KiwiSavers under the age of 25 - those people who still doubt KiwiSaver will lead to net new savings need to get to grips with these numbers."
- NZPA
