Child Poverty and Retirees

There is a change in moral discourse that TV3's The Nation is encouraging, which is to vilify retirees and blame them for child poverty by taking too much in “tight financial times”.  In interviews with Dr Jonathan Boston and Dr Russell Wills on 14 June 2014, interviewer Lisa Owen asked such questions as, “Do we treat children as well as we treat retired people?”, “Do we need to take from retirees and redirect some of that money to poor children?” and “Is it time for our seniors to take a hit for the good of the younger generation?”.  While the good doctors refused to contribute to that particular angle, it is clear that The Nation is narrowing the debate to a simple issue of taking from one class of beneficiaries and giving to another.

This echoes Social Welfare’s reversal of attitude towards unemployment benefit recipients, from being victims of capitalism’s need for a flexible staffing resource, to being the cause of their own misfortune.

The Nation has created a straw man argument instead of examining the wider causes and cures.  The financial position of retirees hasn’t changed since the Superannuation Scheme was introduced in 1977. Since that time there has been a massive shift in ownership of public resources into private hands, tax reductions for the wealthy and none for the poor, and punitive taxes such as GST affecting the poor disproportionately. Instead of examining issues such as the tax base, rural unemployment, or alternative economic redistribution The Nation is urging segments of society dependent on benefits to fight each other like rats on an electrified floor.  The “tight financial times” spoken of is a contrived situation maintained by dissembling.  A real current affairs programme should be capable of exposing its fallacy.

Ms Owen’s core assumption was that the amount of money available for beneficiaries is fixed and only the proportions can be changed, but this is clearly false.  It is a subject of government policy.  She did not ask what policies needed to change to aid New Zealand’s poorest.  She never raised questions of changing tax policies such as reducing GST by taxing a wider range of transactions. 

The Nation considers raising the age of eligibility of superannuation as an unavoidable necessity, without considering its obvious concomitant, that of reduced job availability.  Why isn’t The Nation advocating the moral obligation of retirement at 65 to release occupations to younger people as a means of reducing poverty? 

I have no issue with The Nation taking a crusading line, but its producers need greater breadth and depth of vision, not to mention historical insight, before articulating it.