Again! Just when you begin to think Labour are looking like a Government, one of the, “past their use by dates”, from the Rogernomics era, again! shows that they have NFI how to get elected and they are still clinging desperately to the Neo-liberal paradigm. .
Raising the age of super only makes sense if you accept the neo-liberal rights meme that transfer payments for welfare, including super, are solely a “cost”. As if transfer payments to the old simply disappear without trace, like tax cuts to the wealthy for Hawaii holidays.
If you accept that as a society we should no longer support those who are too old, young, ill or injured, to work.
It is a habit of right wing opponents of social wages to look at them in isolation, as a cost, just as they do with sick leave, as if the money disappears into a black hole.
You would think that those who take an accounting view of the world would understand a ledger has two sides.
Money transferred to the elderly, unlike the aforesaid tax cuts to the wealthy for Hawaii holidays, is paid to current workers to purchase goods and services for the elderly, adds to economic activity, increases the tax base, frees up the old to do volunteer, family, child rearing and community work, (with the long hours most people work now, it is the old who keep community services afloat), and decreases the economic and social costs to society, of poverty.
Too many people in mentally and/or physically demanding jobs, live in fear now. Fear that they will be left to the tender mercies of ACC, who seem to have narrowed the definition of an accident to exclude almost all work related injuries or illness, while accumulating huge surpluses, or WINZ, who define work capable as being able to move your eyebrow.
At least you are supported if you managed to stagger along until you are 65.
If nothing else Labour should consider, that a lot of the working class people at my work, have now decided, again, that Labour does not represent them.
On the other hand, you could say that universal super has been so successful in ensuring less than 3% of the elderly live in poverty, at a relatively cheap net cost to the economy, that, rather than reducing it, we should extend the concept to all ages. Beginning with children! (18 to 20% living in poverty)
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