Why so quiet Minister Sepuloni?  This is amazing and was found by chance on your department’s website.  Is vindication  for the small group of superannuitants affected by the Spousal Provision applied under section 70 of the Act imminent?
When this unequivocal statement was first discovered there was great jubilation, albeit tinged with anger that it had taken so long. Â
Then doubts crept in. Â If this is genuine new policy, why it was buried in the budget? Being such a contentious issue, some fanfare and spin would surely have been expected. Â I was at the social sector lockup and it was not mentioned at all. It is very hard to find any indication of it in the budget documents, and what is there is fudged in a very ambiguous fact sheet .
Along with many others, the Retirement Policy and Research Centre has worked assiduously for at least a decade to alert the public and politicians to grave anomalies in the policy for superannuitants with overseas state pensions.
Of these multiple anomalies the one that takes the cake is the ‘spousal provision’ .  On The Daily Blog you can read about it here: Justice delayed is democracy’s undoing and here: Policy changes to a festering sore are sadly in the far distance: and here Mean and petty and  wrong
This policy reduces a person’s superannuation when their partner has an overseas pension. A woman could have lived and worked all her life in New Zealand and entered into a second or third relationship later on life only to find to her horror that she gets less NZS, or even nothing, and thus loses her financial independence. Increasingly, men who marry women with long working histories from other countries are affected as well.
Fobbed off with promises for years that something is coming, usually after yet another report, a great deal of   bitterness and cynicism has festered. Early in 2018 three affected superannuitants, at great personal cost, went to the Human Rights Review Tribunal. A week of lengthy and banal filibuster submissions flowed from MSD to justify this anachronistic policy.  Fifteen months on, there is still no decision and nothing on the horizon. The best guess was that it would take three years to learn of the verdict given the backlog.
But maybe it is now irrelevant. If you look really hard, there is a line in the appropriations of $2 million allocated for 2020 to fix this anomaly.    Change is coming not because this is a human rights abuse (as Jacinda Ardern said in opposition in 2015), but because the system needed ‘modernisation’.  Slowly it is dawning that there has indeed been a genuine change of heart and all the affected spouses will get relief from 2020. Just like that. Lets break out the champagne after all these years of fighting!
The Spousal Provision clearly has been a source of extreme distress for so long for the 500 or so couples affected and the removal will greatly improve their financial situation. The mystery remains as to why the government not been trumpeting the new policy as  yet another example of how they are putting well-being of people first and not anachronistic and heartless, unintelligent, petty policies from the 19th century. Â
Yes and how come our mainstream media haven’t highlighted something so good as this, people have been lobbying our governments for some time perhaps our media are too busy trying to score brownie points
It is one of the biggest mysteries of the budget!
It’s because this government is essentially a right wing government and will do anything they can to avoid being called socialists.
Chris
Do you mean they want to do good but fear the label of socialist? That would not make them right wing- but a bit wishy washy. In all my years of budget watching I have never encountered something so fudged and buried. All this when it was actually very cheap to do and would make 500 people very very happy. Maybe that is why I am not a politician I just don’t get it
I think Labour is essentially a right wing party. There’s no other explanation for it’s attitude towards benefits and beneficiaries since 1991, particularly during the Clark years. They’ve been actively attacking beneficiaries since then, too, by supporting the Key government’s welfare reforms in 2014 and then passing the nasty Social Security Act 2018 which Key’s government also put together.
They rewrote the purposes and principles of the SS Act with amendment in 2007 that puts paid work at the centre and the requirement to look to your own resources before asking for anything from the state. That paved the way for National to push the boundaries and narrowed the interpretation of what welfare is for. Until Labour owns its own role in the social disaster that has emerged we wont get the transformation
Be careful Professor St John before National-lite asks for its gong back (I gather you haven’t actually been invested with it yet and that the bauble rests on a plumped cushion somewhere in Government House? Whatever, I just hope Treasury isn’t guarding the thing).
The more people tell the truth about what Labour did to beneficiaries during the Clark years the better. The “Labour-can-do-no-wrong” brigade, a number of whom hang out over at The Standard, refuse to accept what Labour did over that time. Labour needs to acknowledge what they did if they’re ever truly going to gain the respect they seem to so desperately crave, apart from their hard core supporters, of course, who are likely to remain just as blind for as long as Labour keeps its head in the sand.
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