Labour Party rebuild NZs economic sovereignty with Universal Super policy

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Now we will start seeing the policy ideas get rolled out. The brains trust of David Parker, Stuart Nash and Grant Robertson have built a raft of smart economic policies that put together generates the hands on momentum NZ requires from new monetary tools to rebuilding Christchurch to regional job creation to affordable homes to extended maternity leave and now to economic sovereignty.

One of the legacy policies Labour could offer NZ First to get them on board and to help Winston swallow his discomfort of working with the Greens could be a fund built by universal super that invests in buying back state assets while upgrading them to be sustainable. Winston gets economic sovereignty as a legacy, the Greens to upgrade assets to being sustainable and Labour get to have the numbers for a Government.

Universal Super is another plank in the superstructure of economic policies Labour have clever devised to provide an economic upgrade.

It makes KiwiSaver universal while keeping the $1,000 Kick-start and government contribution of up to $521 each year. It will only increase employer and employee minimum contribution rates gradually by 0.25% a year for six years and it uses variable Kiwisaver contributions as a tool to control inflation rather than just relying on interest rates, meaning people pay more into their savings instead of more in interest.

After 6 years of hearing John Key telling voters what government can’t do, Labour are trying to show voters what government can do.

16 COMMENTS

  1. Still reflects neo-liberal thinking. Forced PRIVATE savings – how can this be good? Its quite possible to put a lifetime of savings into such a scheme (and scheme is the right word in this context) and come out with nothing if the stock market/ financial markets tank at the wrong time – 2008 anyone? More free money (OUR money) for private capitalist investors to gamble with.

  2. It beggars belief that after six years of telling voters what the Government can’t do John Key still has his party on 50 per cent and his own popularity at sixty nine per cent. I can only conclude the voters are listening, but to whom?

    • Perhaps they are listening to the corporate* controlled media?

      *TVNZ has to turn a profit so they count too.

  3. Sorry – not only is this fuelling the private funds management industry and giving them a greater hold over the economy, government and people’s lives, at the same time people are being told to take more risks with the money by moving from default schemes to higher risk options without anyone stressing to them that THERE IS NO GOVERNMENT GUARANTEE FOR KIWISAVER. You might assume that a major collapse would see the government step in, but they only moved on the finance company collapses because of the retail deposit guarantee scheme that arose through the GFC. Maybe they would do something similar, but that’s not the disposition of the Treasury that is the adviser. If individual schemes fall over – buyer beware. But when the buyers have no choice, except over who they gamble their money with, it is a high risk compulsion.

  4. …and this will turn off almost every voter with a student loan.
    I’m all for compulsory retirement but Labour just don’t get it do they.
    People I know are earning a barely liveable wage and then with student loan repayments, GST, and relatively high tax on low-mid earners, my friends are struggling…now Labour want to introduce what will be seen as another tax?
    This policy makes sense if we ditched GST, student loans and reduced the cost of renting. But Labour have no policy which will lower the cost of rent, and their GST and student loan policies will just be a tinker at best.
    National and Key must have breathed a sigh of relief when they saw this lite-blue piece of shit policy. God help us all

  5. Compulsory superannuation is basic common sense and had NATIONAL not repealed it in the 70’s, instead bribing and pandering to the self centred morons a generation ago with an inherently unsustainable and now failed super scheme, this country would be miles ahead of where it is now. Because look at what we have now or more to the point what we don’t have as a retirement policy!

    And it is no coincidence that the National Party, who features large in our housing bubble, with its absence of retirement policy (amongst many other reasons) is still clueless and is still trying to appeal to self centred New Zealanders, the same kiwi’s who, in lieu of a proper superannuation policy in NZ, think the housing market is all about them and their retirement “nest egg/s”.

    Lets not make the same mistake again and learn from history.

  6. I don’t see anything about economic sovereignty here.

    To me economic sovereignty is flipping over a coin and seeing the Queen’s head there.

    Because you can’t do that with electronic money most people don’t realise that if could flip a bank deposit over you wouldn’t see the Queen’s head, but rather a banks’ logo.

    98% of money is created not by the Reserve Bank, but directly by banks. Banks directly control how much money is in the economy, creating too much in the good times thus fuelling bubbles and too little in the bad times. The Reserve Bank can supposedly influence how much money banks create with the OCR (Official Cash Rate), but when it comes to the crunch (GFC anyone?) the banks look after themselves.

    Economic sovereignty would be the Reserve Bank making all money (electronic included) at a rate equivalent to the growth rate of the economy (as measured by something like the CPI) and then giving that money directly to the government or the people or both to spend.

    • Which is what the first Labour government did, what the Social Credit Party sought to espouse, (referred to as ‘funny money’) and what is now known as ‘quantitive easing’. The Bank of Finland is responsible for the country’s currency supply and foreign exchange reserves. Finland rates as one of the better places in the world to live.

      • The Social Credit Party is still going, still doing it’s thing. Ironically what they advocate is to change our current ‘funny money’ system to a government backed stable NZ dollar.

        Quantitative Easing is not the same thing, central banks make only ‘reserves’ that can only be used by banks (to settle debts between themselves) not people or businesses. This makes the banks look more solvent in the hope that they lend more (lending creates the actual money). It had little effect.

        Finland uses the Euro; your point is moot.

  7. We all want to get rid of Jonkey, and saving a bit for your old age isn’t a bad idea, but compulsory savings schemes (1) make everyone into mini-capitalists (2) usually cost a fortune in fees, and (3) give people very little control over where their savings are invested (eg mining, casinos, armaments, etc).

  8. Making Kiwi Saver compulsory, tells me Moana MacKey is failing as the ‘Spokesperson for the Environment’ For her supposedly environmentally aware leader, to suggest even the continuation of Kiwi Saver shows she has failed to inform the party about the truly terrible situation we are in …. ask Gareth if you don’t believe me.
    For say an 18 year old joining Kiwi Saver now, they are saying there will be an economy/environment functioning in 49 years time.
    By that time at the very best we will see oceans at 26 + meters above what they are now, global average temperatures of around +6 – 10 above now, oh and no humans.
    We are currently 30 to 40 years behind the affects of 400 ppm CO2, there is a minimum of ten times more CO2 than humans have added to the environment, trapped in the fast melting land and ocean permafrost
    This stuff MUST come out of the ground within the life time of most Kiwi Savers, it is totally unavoidable.
    The human habitat can not evolve or move fast enough to adjust to this light speed increase in global temperatures.
    Kiwi Saver, like hope is escapism of the highest degree
    There are 2 reasons this future is set in stone – 400 ppm CO2 and humans.
    And that is regardless of how much carbon tax you pay.

    • Saving money doesn’t save anything and the required return on capital means that we must grow the economy despite this essentially being a death sentence ourselves and our children.

  9. Compulsory saving is not ‘Universal Super’ and Labour raising the retirement age is to the RIGHT of National!

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