KiwiSaver turns 5

At age five, the time has come to transform KiwiSaver into a universal workplace savings scheme to help strengthen the economy and reduce New Zealand's debt, says Labour’s Finance Spokesperson David Parker.

With almost 2 million people now enrolled in KiwiSaver and $11.8 billion saved, the first retirees will be able to start withdrawing their money this month, said David Parker.

“KiwiSaver has been a huge success in the five years since it was launched. That’s despite National repeated fiddling at a time when our international debt is growing and our economy needs more savings not less.

“Labour created KiwiSaver. Now we want to take it to the next level. New Zealanders need better savings to help them into their first home and have a decent standard of living in retirement. It’s time to build on KiwiSaver’s success,” said David Parker.

Here are some of the facts so far:

• Treasury estimated that in the first 6 years only 680,000 would enrol. After just 5 years, we have almost 2 million KiwiSavers.

• more than 900,000 KiwiSavers are aged under-35

• IRD says around a third of the investment in the fund is new saving

“The scheme is helping build wealth for young New Zealanders and the future looks even better.

“One of the reasons the Australian economy performs better than ours, and its investors come over here and buy our companies, is that they have deep pools of savings capital. They save 9 per cent of their income and that is increasing to 12 per cent.

“New Zealand has to modernise like Australia did. We can’t keep putting off hard decisions. We need a universal scheme of our own.

“We know that many Kiwis don’t have much left over with the National Government’s squeeze on their incomes. But as wages recover from National’s slump, Labour will look to enrol all employees in a fair and equitable universal savings scheme with limited opt-outs.

“Labour is making savings a priority. National hasn’t helped people grow their wealth. Instead, it has fiddled with KiwiSaver. If National was serious about growing our savings and improving our standard of living, it would build the scheme as we propose.

“It’s time to modernise our economy and prepare it for the future. That means reducing our debt and building on KiwiSaver’s success,” said David Parker.