Media Release: Flexible Superannuation

Grey Power has vowed to fight proposed changes to national superannuation released by United Future leader Peter Dunne today.

As part of the deal to retain United Future support the Government today released his Flexible Superannuation discussion document which suggests people will be able to retire at 60 and take 73 per cent of the standard rate of NZ Superannuation, or delay it until 70 and take 160 per cent of the payment. The rate of superannuation at retirement will be permanent.

Grey Power national president Roy Reid has slammed the proposal a cruel poverty trap. “This latest idea from Peter Dunne, for a so-called flexible superannuation scheme, is one of the more cynical, cruel and dangerous bits of stupidity I have heard in a very long time,” he said.

“From what we have heard so far the scheme will be a poverty trap for financially hard pressed people already on low incomes who will be tempted to take an early but low pension with no hope of it ever increasing to the rate that people who can afford to wait until they are 70 will get.”

Mr Reid said for Mr Dunne to suggest that the changes will give people the freedom to choose was typical of politicians who had no real idea what it is like to be at the bottom of the social heap where successive governments have thrown them.

“It's like offering a starving family a loaf of bread today and very day hereafter if you take it now or two loaves a day and a big box of sausages everyday if you wait for ten years to collect them. It makes the "let them eat cake" comment, supposedly uttered by Queen Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution as a solution to peasants who were starving for want of bread, sound generous by comparison.”

“If ever there was an issue for Grey Power to fight National Party policies and dump Peter Dunne from parliament, this is it.”

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