Blair wants public involved in the Accord

Retirement Commissioner Colin Blair has floated the idea of the public being involved, alongside the politicians, in the process of drawing up a new Accord on retirement income policies.

Monday, September 7th 1998, 12:00AM

Retirement Commissioner Colin Blair has floated the idea of the public being involved, alongside the politicians, in the process of drawing up a new Accord on retirement income policies.
Blair has for some time now been expressing the view that politicians need to readdress the accord issue and come up with a new version of the document to form the basis of New Zealand's superannuation policy.
"Recent attempts to get all parliamentary parties around the table through the Accord structure...are encouraging," he says.

However this issue is too important to be left solely to politicians.
"The process should go further than politicians negotiating behind closed doors and then pronouncing to a suspicious and sceptical public that they have solved all the problems and produced Accord Mark II."
He says effective and lasting policies need to have the best available input and the appropriate community leaders and experts should be involved in the process.
"To achieve public support, the agreed policies must be strongly endorsed by a range of public opinion leaders."
The approach to developing such policies should be open and consultative and the result should be one that is supported by Parliament, not just the Government.
"One possible approach would be for the political parties to agree that their representatives join with a small, but representative, group of community, business and academic leaders and openly discuss and analyse the issues and the realistic options," Blair says.
"Through such a process not only will the participants' knowledge and understanding be expanded, but an important bi-product will be that the public will gain a greater understanding of the issues and options."
Another important element is that the public would see that an agreed result has been reached through a process of consensus.
Blair says Sweden and the United States have achieved "very satisfactory" results by taking this approach to dealing with superannuation policy.
New Zealand, he says, needs to apply the time and resources to come up with well-considered proposals for retirement income policies.
"We certainly do not have the luxury of another year of political sparring before getting down to business," he says.

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