Review of
The former government concealed the substance of its review to the last.
In June 2008 former Social Development Minister Ruth Dyson announced the outcome of the
The occasion coincided with the release of two reports and two Cabinet papers, all of which had been kept under wraps until then. The Cabinet papers date from October 2007, but a key report had been withheld from the public since May 2004 and would not have been released in its entirety at all had a private citizen not made repeated appeals to the Ombudsman.
The Ministry's website does not acknowledge that these reports ever existed.
Their suppression speaks volumes: their content throws an embarrassingly revealing light on the former government’s account of its review. The government continued to deny and falsify the problems it was urged to address.
A seven-year review reaches an uninspired conclusion.
Former Finance Minister Michael Cullen had planned in November 2000 to have officials review the provisions for superannuation portability before the introduction of the New Zealand Superannuation Bill. The project’s size, however, meant that it was not until November 2001 that Treasury and Ministry of Social Development officials submitted a scoping paper (“Ministry of Social Development Report: Review of Portability - Draft Terms of Reference”) to the Ministers of Finance and Social Development and Employment which recommended expanding the review to encompass New Zealand’s international social security policies as a whole.
The review (beginning in 2001 and completed in October 2007) was undertaken by the Ministry of Social Development in consultation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, NZAID, the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs, the Treasury, the Inland Revenue Department, the Department of Labour, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, Veteran Affairs New Zealand and the Retirement Commission.
In May 2005, however, Cabinet decided that fundamental change to core New Zealand Superannuation policy was not expedient and asked officials to focus on “more modest options” for “modernising” the treatment of overseas pensions. (The subsequent 2005 Report attests to Cabinet's inflexibility: "It is difficult to solve the issues around treatment of overseas pensions paid into New Zealand because the current policy settings leave little room for development of policy options.”)
The review’s findings fall into two parts:
o Paper One - Overview
o Paper Two - Proposals
o the 2005 Report (delivered November 24)
o the 2003 Report (delivered February 14)
o the 2004 Report (delivered May 31).
The government's conclusions flatly contradicted the suppressed reports' findings.
The near-simultaneous release of these findings allowed New Zealanders to call into question the official account of the review. The contents of the three reports and the two final papers exposed a government that was tying itself into knots over the contradictions between its treatment of overseas pensions and its avowed policy in related areas - and between the review’s real findings and its failure to act on those findings.
By the time the review was completed, the unwholesome-looking aspects of
Had the Ombudsman not intervened to compel the then Minister for Social Development and Employment to finally release the complete reports of the Review of New Zealand Superannuation Portability, Members of Parliament and the public would have remained unaware of the enormity of the irresponsibility and outright deceit in the former government’s proposed adjustments to the state retirement program.
The government was warned in language which left no room for ambiguity that New Zealand Superannuation in its current form is “unfair”, “inequitable”, “unstable”, “unsustainable”, “out of date” and “out of step” with that of other countries. The Proposals outlined by Ms Dyson fail to provide equity or genuine cost-sharing with other nations. They do nothing to improve migration flows, nothing to enhance
The last government had nine years to address these problems - and its solution was to offer a band-aid.
* The title of the review had grown longer with the time it was taking to complete, even as its scope became narrower:
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The government's efforts to conceal and deny the truth
What the government was told it needed to do