Labour vs. National- Where's the Smart Money?

It's election year... can you tell? We weigh up the two major parties' policies on superannuation and examine their impact on taxation and the commercial superannuation sector.

Thursday, September 23rd 1999, 12:00AM

Superannuation is one of the major issues currently facing New Zealanders. It is one of the biggest items of Government expenditure and the cost of providing pension is likely to balloon out as the country's population ages rapidly.
How the Government will continue to pay for New Zealand Superannuation in the future is also an issue of great debate.
Superannuation is likely to be one of the major issues of this year's general election. Already several of the political parties are talking about the issue. For example, Labour's finance spokesman Michael Cullen is regularly addressing conferences on the Superannuation.
Recently the Super 2000 Taskforce launched its public education programme. This government-appointed taskforce wants to talk to New Zealand about superannuation, and is charged with producing, by November 2000, a proposal for the Government.

Good Returns is planning to take a major, leading role in educating New Zealanders about the issues and facilitating debate on the subject.

Currently we are in the process of building a number of pages on the site that will be dedicated to Superannuation.

The pages within the site will provide:

News and columns
Relevant press releases
Other resource material
Policies produced by all the political parties
Analysis of the policies and what they mean
Discussion forum
Regular polls on Superannuation issues

The idea of these pages is that they will provide readers with as much information as possible on Superannuation, comment on the issues, and it will provide a place to debate the issues.

Debates in the past, for instance around the referendum, tend to get diverted away from the major issues onto some of the peripheral issues.

We plan to break this rather complex subject into its various components, and have articles and debates on the parts. The idea is that the debate would remain focussed on the key issue. Another option we are considering is to use facilitators to help keep the debate focussed.

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