ACT starts thinking about super

The ACT party has set up a team to address superannuation and is planning to re-enter the debate on what is the best proposal for the country.

Friday, August 11th 2000, 12:00AM

The ACT party has set up a team to address superannuation and is planning to re-enter the debate on what is the best proposal for the country.

ACT has been quiet on the superannuation issue for several years, and ignored it in last year's general election campaign. The main reason for its silence is that the ACT party's policy was essentially the same as New Zealand First's and that was comprehensively defeated in a referendum.

ACT leader Richard Prebble told the Economists Conference in Wellington on Friday that "ACT intends entering the super debate with ideas of our own."

"Within the party we have started a fundamental review of our superannuation policy ideas."

In the meantime he, and finance spokesman Rodney Hide, are opposing Labour's idea of prefunding New Zealand Superannuation.

"Prefunding a tax paid benefit like superannuation makes no more sense than prefunding any taxpayer benefit, such as the DPB," Prebble says.

ACT would rather use surpluses to pay off debt as opposed to putting it into a dedicated fund to pay future public pension costs.

Hide says the prefunding plan requires successive governments to run surpluses of two percent each and every year.

"Surpluses of that size have been achieved only eight years out of the past 50. Indeed, for 35 years up until the late 1980s successive Governments ran deficits," he says.

For full details of what Prebble and Hide are saying click on the following links:

Prebble promotes positive ageing
Why the Big Cullen Fund will fail

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