Chris Trotter has given The Media Party a swift kick in the gentleman’s vegetables over their shock and horror that some pensioners earn over $100,000. It was a sentiment that ‘Pinko’ Farrar echoed to show just how red both he and Radio NZ are.
Recently, however, a couple of sentences from “The sound and the fury”, the Listener editorial team’s assessment of the RNZ Concert debacle (22 February 2020) struck me as unusually perceptive.
“To retain its taxpayer-guaranteed revenue, RNZ must also retain its most precious commodity: public respect and support. That can be imperilled by poorly thought out judgements, including assuming that it should set the political climate.”
Radio NZ has been deeply red for years but they have embroiled themselves deeply into political arguments and rather than reporting on issues they have instead decided to campaign and advocate on those same issues, picking sides and angles to push.
That climate-setting quip should have prompted a double-take from RNZ’s bosses. Its clear intention was to alert them (gently) to the fact that some of its key producers’ and editors’ more recent judgements have raised a few important eyebrows – and not in a good way. There is a growing feeling among those whose education was vouchsafed to them in the years before our universities became customer-driven businesses, that RNZ has taken up an ideological position at some distance beyond either its listeners’, or the general public’s, comfort zones.
Their promotion of Maori language and their attacks on NZ First are to the forefront of people’s minds.
A telling example of RNZ’s determination to set the political climate was broadcast on the public broadcaster’s Checkpoint programme of Wednesday, 26 February 2020, in which RNZ reporter, Nita Blake-Persen, secured prime placement for her story “NZ Super costs up as NZ retirees on $100k passes 30,000”.
It is difficult to assign any other motive for producing this sort of story than a desire to fan the flames of intergenerational warfare. Singling out high income-earners over 65 (whose annual contribution to the IRD, based on a minimum salary of $100,000 is a bracing $23,920!) was certainly inflammatory. Ms Blake-Persen’s analysis also hints strongly that the abandonment of the universalist principles underpinning NZ Superannuation may have to be accepted as unavoidable collateral damage in the aforesaid war between the generations.
More disconcerting, is what appears to be a lack of sensible editorial oversight of Ms Blake-Persen’s story. Having read her copy, did Checkpoint’s editors, Pip Keane and Catherine Walbridge, not warn Ms Blake-Persen to calculate the total tax contribution of the 31,048 New Zealand superannuitants earning more than $100,000, and then compare that figure to the $608 million paid out to them by way of NZ Superannuation? A pretty sensible precaution, I would have thought, given that if the 31,048 older Kiwis so provocatively singled-out by Ms Blake-Persen proved to be net contributors to the state’s coffers, then her whole story falls flat on its face.
Which Trotter proceeds to demonstrate, and easily which is something a statistics wonk like David Farrar should have done too.
Which is exactly what we discover when we subtract NZ Super payments totalling $608,000,000 from Income Tax payments of $717,600,000 (31,048 x $23,920). Far from being greedy Boomer leeches bleeding their hapless GenX offspring dry, these workers are contributing a net $134,668,160 annually to the public purse!
All of which raises some disconcerting questions about RNZ’s overall ideological agenda, and on whose behalf it is being run? Did Ms Blake-Persen’s highly tendentious story make it on to the airwaves simply because nobody thought to check it? Or, is it evidence of a broader RNZ agenda to shame and blame the older generation for having the temerity to be born a couple of decades before its younger reporters and presenters? It would be tempting to dismiss this suggestion as Boomer paranoia had the RNZ Board and its CEO not demonstrated so unequivocally their readiness to sacrifice older listeners for a “younger demographic” in relation to RNZ Concert.
Ouch.
In the meantime we can only sit back and admire Ms Blake-Persen’s propaganda skills. Imagine the outrage among that “younger demographic” when they discover that a body of overpaid Boomers, equal in number to the entire city of Blenheim, is living high on the hog while they sweat away in the salt mines of Neoliberalism! Imagine their fear and loathing when presented with such doom-laden factoids as: “Last year, NZ Super cost $14.5 billion and that cost is increasing by more than $1b each year. By 2024 it’s predicted to cost the country nearly $20b a year.” (A figure, BTW, that places us well below the current pension costs of many European states when measured as a percentage of GDP.) Or that – Quelle horreur! – “Inland Revenue figures showed 2500 people were getting Super payments while on incomes of more than $300,000”.
Just imagine it! $300K a year!
Once again, however, there is no mention of the Income Tax paid annually on that sum to the IRD: a trifling $89,920! Which is more than four times the $21,380 paid annually to an individual New Zealander aged 65+ and living alone.
Bowalley Road
That’s because The Media Party is campaigning without the pesky need to trouble themselves with actually getting elected.
Sadly, the masses (and I include David Farrar in that group) just pounce on the shock and outrage that some pensioners dare to earn more than $100,000 per annum.
Sometime soon we are going to see a real political actor come out and agitate to remove entitlements that have been in place since 1977. The last time someone tried to do that it was 1985 and the Labour party implemented a controversial surcharge of 25 per cent on a superanuant’s other income over an exempt amount. There was an outcry and it turned into a festering sore that saw Labour lose the 1990 election in a landslide to Jim Bolger’s National Party. Unfortunately, despite pledging to revoke the surcharge, National instead kept it in place, breaking their election promise.
The anger and outrage led indirectly to two major events, the creation of NZ First and the removal of First Past the Post in favour of MMP. Eventually, in 1993 there was a cross-party accord on superannuation and then subsequently as part of the 1996 coalition agreement with NZ First, a compulsory savings scheme was proposed and ultimately defeated in a referendum. Sadly we missed the boat back then and Labour subsequently introduced what has effectively become a compulsory savings scheme, called Kiwisaver, in addition to National Superannuation.
Now, it appears from the agitation of The Media Party that we are being softened up again for more superannuation turmoil. The Media Party should create a manifesto and actually campaign on their agitprop. Then we will see how popular their ideas really are.
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