Peter MacDonald
Every three years, the New Zealand Government is handed a dense, sprawling, Review of Retirement Income Policies (RRIP): hundreds of pages of modelling, projections and technocratic jargon that ordinary Kiwis can never fully grasp and so, most never read it. While these reviews appear to be authored by the Retirement Commissioner, Jane Wrightson, the reality is they are largely the work of a team of contracted economists, actuaries, policy analysts, academic partners and financial advisers. Technocrats dominate these reviews, which often focus on highly technical scenarios, extreme projections and theoretical funding options.
In effect, the RRIP creates the illusion of expert oversight while shielding political and economic decisions behind layers of complexity, giving confident cause to PM Luxon to argue that the current retirement age of 65 should be raised to 67. The system has become the public policy equivalent of a PPP roading contract: outsourced, overcomplicated, over engineered and over billed. Complexity has become the product and taxpayers foot the bill. What should be a simple in-house check up on a straightforward system has turned into a consultancy-driven industry – a classic ‘wool-puller’ exercise, like a mathematician climbing a stepladder to scribble endless equations on a blackboard that nobody, not even the mathematician, can fully understand.
Muldoon, The Soldier Who Built NZ Super
The architect of NZ Super, Sir Robert Muldoon, is often caricatured for his political style but his formative experiences shaped a unique vision for New Zealand. A World War II veteran serving in Italy, Muldoon completed his accounting qualifications in his downtime while on service, demonstrating a combination of discipline and foresight.
He did not stumble into NZ Super. Muldoon designed it deliberately, promoted it as opposition leader, campaigned on it and pushed it through cabinet and parliament. For Muldoon, retirement security was a right of citizenship: a public duty of the state, not a financial product for speculation.
Principles Behind Muldoon’s NZ Super
Muldoon’s system was guided by four clear principles:
· Moral fairness: retirement as a right, not an investment opportunity
· Simplicity: easy to understand without need for technical interpretation
· Safety: avoid handing billions to banks or finance houses, protecting citizens from market risk
· Immediate benefit: deliver security to older New Zealanders from day one.
Labour’s 1974 compulsory fund, by contrast, appeared to Muldoon as a massive capital pool for banks and investment managers vulnerable to crashes and financialisation. He rejected handing retirement security over to private, profit-driven intermediaries and ensured NZ Super remained under state control.
What Muldoon Would Think of Today’s Review System
Modern retirement reviews are the absolute antithesis of Muldoon’s vision. They are produced by an army of contractors, including economists, modellers, academics and industry advisers. Every projection, issue paper and framework justifies another round of consultancy and expanding the pipeline at taxpayer expense.
What was designed to protect citizens now protects consultants and the private for-profit finance sector. Complexity has replaced clarity and layered modelling has replaced the moral simplicity that guided Rob Muldoon.
The Contrast: Simplicity vs Technocracy
Muldoon’s NZ Super was universal, affordable, low admin, predictable and insulated from market volatility. In contrast, today’s KiwiSaver-dominated policy environment is consultant heavy, over modelled and financially captured. Policy drift has shifted focus away from citizens and toward the interests of private fund managers, who benefit the longer a worker’s KiwiSaver is kept out of reach. This is why workers are made to jump through hoops when seeking to access their funds in an emergency.
Where Muldoon built a straight, solid house, built on granite, not sand like KiwiSaver, technocrats have added complex extensions, mezzanines and basements with basements: all expensive and all distracting from the original purpose of what Muldoon created for Kiwi workers.
Whom Does the System Now Serve
Muldoon would ask one simple question, ‘Is this serving the people of New Zealand or serving the consultants?’ The answer is increasingly uncomfortable. A simple, safe, universal pension has been encumbered with technocratic complexity, undermining the original purpose of NZ Super.
Reclaiming Muldoon’s Original Vision
NZ Super endures because it works. It remains the backbone of retirement security in New Zealand, not KiwiSaver, not private funds and not endless expensive taxpayer-funded reviews.
If we want a fair, sustainable system for future generations, the first step is cutting out the consultant pipeline and returning to Rob Muldoon’s founding principles: Universality, Simplicity, Safety and Dignity.
We do not need more modelling. We need to restore the clarity, courage and moral purpose of the man who designed NZ Super – a patriot who believed retirement security belonged to the people.
Mainstream media, economists and certain politicians, including the prime minister, keep trying to convince the public that the universal NZ pension at 65 is ‘unaffordable’. They repeat the line that ‘people are living longer’, as if longevity itself is some kind of offence to policymakers. It’s nothing more than perception management and soft propaganda.
Another myth they push is that Muldoon made ‘the worst political decision in NZ history’ by abandoning Roger Douglas’s superfund, claiming New Zealand would now have a $500 billion nest egg and be ‘the richest country in the world’. Kiwis know that’s laughable. If any NZ Government had ever controlled a fund with hundreds of billions in it, it would have been squandered long ago: we’ve seen that behaviour from more than a few ministers of finance.
Muldoon wasn’t reckless: he was defending New Zealanders’ money, not only from global investment managers but from spendthrift political hands at home. The fate of the Cullen Fund proved his point – frozen for years under John Key, then dipped into by both Labour and National whenever convenient and steadily eroding its value...
The mainstream media have spent years maintaining a false narrative about Muldoon, continually tarnishing his political achievements and policies. NZ Super is one example but “Think Big” is the most misunderstood. Those projects protected New Zealand’s economic sovereignty during international oil shocks, ensured domestic fuel security and kept our economy insulated at a time when global markets were dangerously unstable.
Compare that to today: we are now completely beholden to international shipping lines to bring fuel into the country, after both National and Labour effectively dismantled Marsden Point through privatisation and neglect. Now it’s gone and New Zealand has lost its last line of energy independence.
Given his contributions, there should be a larger-than-life statue of Muldoon standing outside parliament. Instead, mainstream media continue to erode his reputation and legacy, repeating caricatures while ignoring the policies that safeguarded New Zealand’s sovereignty, prosperity and social stability for decades. However, there remains a solid remnant of Kiwis in NZ who know these truths and will never forget them.
