Wise Words: “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.” - Pamela Stirling, Editor, NZ Listener.
THE LISTENER LONG AGO ceased to be a cultural
talisman for progressive New Zealanders. Ever since the apparently
indestructible Pamela Stirling took charge and transformed the magazine she’d
once denounced as “the house journal of the Alliance” into the house journal of
the National Party. 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.”
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.
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 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.
One of the economists quoted in Ms Blake-Persen’s story is
Shamubeel Eaqub. According to this participant in the management consultancy
firm Sense.Partners:
“The reality is that we don’t want to penalise people for
working into old age and neither do we want to penalise people for accumulating
wealth, but we have to be consistent in our understanding that actually when we
look out to the next 20 to 30 years, our system of taxation and our systems of
supporting old age and superannuitants probably isn’t sustainable.”
Oh, what a multitude of sins can be concealed beneath a
little qualifier like “probably”! Even Ms Blake-Persen felt obliged (maybe
there was a smidgen of editorial input after all?) to mention the apple-cart-upsetting
finding of the Interim Retirement Commissioner, Peter Cordtz, that “the current
cost [of NZ Superannuation] was sustainable for the next 30 years”. You pays
your money and you makes your choice, apparently: the management consultant who
has a problem with our current tax and pension systems; or, the guy who told us
the former is more than equal to supporting the latter.
It will be interesting, BTW, to see whether the newly
appointed Retirement Commissioner, Jane Wrightson, upholds Cordtz’s finding on
the sustainability of NZ Superannuation. It is to be hoped that his
pronouncements weren’t inspired by the, sadly, not unreasonable fear, that the
new boss would soon be touting the same “we can’t afford it” nonsense as the
old boss.
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.
What a pity Ms Blake-Persen didn’t round out her story by
seeking comment from an old-fashioned democratic-socialist who has campaigned
for years to see those earning $300K p.a. socked with a much more progressive
rate of income tax. He or she could have explained how steepening the
progressivity of New Zealand’s Income Tax would once again make possible all
the things the members of Ms Blake-Persen’s generation missed out on.
Then we could all have agreed that it’s not the year you
were born in that counts, but the responsibility of every generation to so
organise society that young and old, alike, are able to receive their fair share
of its bounty. That would be a political climate worth setting – and definitely
preferable to the ideological climate RNZ’s bosses seem hell-bent on
heating-up.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Friday, 28 February 2020.
