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notices and features - Date published:
5:30 pm, May 23rd, 2025 - 16 comments
Categories: Daily review -
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Daily review is also your post.
This provides Standardistas the opportunity to review events of the day.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Don’t forget to be kind to each other …
Today it was made clear a NACT government would increase the age of super.
Today it was also clarified that the $1.7B allocated for a policy to boost investment spending was merely an estimate. It could be a larger amount, one not budgeted for.
This places it in the category of the onshore costs of the large sized ferry purchase, which were hard to determine.
It also compares to the liability of government funding pay equity claims.
Treasury appears to have opposed only 2 of these in their advice to the current government.
Treasury likes what it likes and thus appears to others as inconsistent.
Fair payment of workers, investment in government provided infrastructure, not so much – but the private sector getting a tax break – good onya.
No, it’s not even an ‘estimate’, it’s a stab in the dark, utterly unpredictable – there’s no way of knowing how businesses will respond. I reckon it will be over-subscribed quickly.
How is there a figure in the budget without an estimate?
And how did they determine the amount saved in pay equity payments in the next year without identifying the money saved not meeting the 33 claims that were wiped from the record.
By estimating what the liability was in each of those cases?
So many questions.
Time for another Lux soap ad.
Look, here’s
the Taxpayers’mummy’s unlimited credit card, go to the movies and treat yourself to ice cream and whatever else you like. That’s irresponsible parenting. What do you call it when a self-proclaimed manager of the economy does it?Labour and measurement of the pay equity claims.
https://archive.li/XO1y0#selection-4707.0-4754.1
Denmark is increasing the retirement age to age 70 by 2040. 2030 to 67, 2035 to 68.
Some information about other nations in Europe.
The lowest rate, despite their recent increase is in France (the French one is more complicated because of qualifying rules – someone will tidy up their system at some point), one imposed by Macron because it did not have majority support in their parliament.
The Danes, like some others, determine the retirement age by life expectancy***.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg71v533q6o
This should raise the issue of
1.supporting retraining of ageing workers (at state expense)
2.paying retirement level support to those unable to work (disability in previous decades and or later unable to work due to poor health) and payments to those unemployed over age 60 (which we should have begun in the 1990s).
For mine both are pre-requisites for an increase in age of super.
3.Maori have a lower life expectancy*** than some here …
Paying super rate benefits from age 60 might cover that. Or from age 55 for Maori.
I'd like to see someone do some nice graphics of the ages at which people die by class, ethnicity, sex, occupation and so on.
Some of that is mitigated by state funded retraining and super rate benefits below the age of retirement – but the statistics would provide the evidence for why that would be more necessary the higher the age goes.
I was thinking it might be educational as a starting point in terms of what's fair. How many people die before 65? 70? What's a reasonable amount of time to be not working before one dies? Is it a few years? A decade? Longer? Why?
Live expectancy in NZ is 80 – 83 years. That's the average across all demographics. But what's the spread below and above that?
Pakeha women 82, pakeha men 79., maori women 76, maori men 73. Pretty stark.
In Europe it is based on the rise in the age people die at.
The original age for retirement was probably based on how long people could do physical work.
Which is why so many lawyers, accountants, judges worked after “retirement” age
And these days ancient geek programmers do as well. So long as they keep up, don't burn out, and don't start looking longingly at the golf clubs….
I'm on a part-time remote long-term contract these days. Mostly because it usually gives me more time to play with my own code. I don't have to (expensively) commute in Auckland. Helps that I don't have a mortgage. Although currently my partner has ambitions – that will probably get stifled by Auckland prices where she wants to live.
The part-time job pays for the home office gear, up to date hardware and software, a large chunk of expenses like insurance, maintenance, power, data, subscriptions and car expenses. It also keeps me on the learning curve. It just pays to have your main hobby as also being how to earn a living. Self-employed for me is way better because of the recoveries from tax. I wind up paying less tax overall because a lot of my expenses are work expenses, that I also had when I was on PAYE.
I recover GST and depreciation. I should capture coffee as it is almost completely a work expense, but I can't find space in a 55 sq m apartment to store a large sack of roasted coffee beans each month, let alone the emergency sack. Doing it by the weekly bag is too much accounting work.
Plus I get super.
Maybe I should look to see about getting a double cab Ford Ranger as a business vehicle so I can do the odd tractor around Auckland like all those people in Remmers. It should be able to carry my laptop and USB screen. But they'd have to produce a EV version…
/sarc
But all the above apart from getting stuck in the daily Auckland gridlocks in a light truck is true.
With longevity on the rise, there are also those who work as way to keep fit while earning money for their off work lifestyle.
Stu Wilson, former AB, does/did that as a hospital orderly.
to age 70 by 2040.
2030 to 67, 2035 to 68.2030 to 68, 2025 to 69.Apparently we need to get past the squeamishness …
/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/21/unitedhealth-nursing-homes-payments-hospital-transfers