Securing New Zealand Super into the Future
Hon Michael Cullen
8 November 2000
Speech
Notes
Securing New Zealand Super into the Future
Speech by Finance Minister Michael Cullen to the Society of
Actuaries
Thank you for the opportunity to talk to an influential audience on an issue close to my heart. I am referring, of course, to the Government's plan to partially prefund New Zealand Superannuation.
Initial reaction to the proposal - among the public, in the media, in the savings industry and politically - has been heartening. It is important to me personally, and to the scheme's robustness, that we build a strong constituency of popular support for it. I am confident that can be done. We know the public wants clarity and certainty around this issue but we cannot just expect it.
We have to ensure a broad
measure of understanding in the electorate about what is
involved, and we have to satisfy people that what we are
offering is sustainable at every level - politically,
economically and fiscally.
The facts of the policy
challenge posed by the ageing population will be familiar to
you but let me just run quickly through some of the
actuarial issues surrounding sustainability.
Since 1992,
we have been moving the age of eligibility for NZ Super from
60 to 65. That process will be completed on 1 January next
year. Over the transition, the costs of NZ Super have
fallen. However, from next year they will begin rising
again.
They will increase most sharply after 2011 when
the baby boomers start to retire. The cost escalation will
not just reflect the relative size of the baby boomer
generation. It will also reflect improvements in life
expectancy arising from new medical technologies and
improved diet.
Not only will the number of retirees
increase, so will the time the average person spends in
retirement. We could call this the demand side of the
equation. Its effects will be amplified on the supply side
by lower birth rates and a higher educational threshold for
workforce entry.
What it all adds up to is a sharp
increase in the superannuitant dependency ratio. If you
begin, as the Government does, with a commitment to maintain
a universal pension which guarantees an adequate if basic
standard of living, some form of cost smoothing or partial
prefunding seems to me the only fair and viable solution to
the demographic circumstance facing us.
Some have argued
that immigration could be used to offset the increase in the
number of superannuitants but Treasury modelling of
different migration levels shows its impact to be marginal
even assuming a much younger age profile for migrants than
applying in the existing New Zealand population.
The
details of the proposed scheme will be familiar to you as
specialists in superannuation so I will not bore you with
repetition. Instead, I want to comment on two issues that
are starting to emerge in the public debate: is it
sustainable in a fiscal sense, and what economic impacts
will it have?
Before I do that, I want to reiterate some
points about the basic structure of the policy to counter
some misunderstandings that are emerging.
Firstly, the
scheme is not about the government saving on behalf of
individuals. The government is saving on behalf of itself.
This is a first tier scheme designed to secure the state
pension. If people aspire to more comfort in retirement
than NZS offers, they will need to save to provide for it.
I am not indifferent to the poor incentive regime that
currently surrounds private superannuation savings and will
open up policy development and debate on what we should do
about it once we have put this particular part of the
package – securing confidence in the future of the first
tier – behind us.
The Government has also come under some
criticism for taking a leadership role rather than setting
up blank sheet multi-party talks to try to establish a
cross-party agreement.
I have been Labour’s
superannuation spokesperson for thirteen years now. In that
time the need for consensus has never been far from the
formal political agenda and the content of consensus never
close to it. We simply cannot afford political skirmishing
for another thirteen years.
My view is that the enduring
consensuses internationally – like around the US or
Australian schemes – have followed rather than led scheme
design. The government’s proposal has a facility for
political parties to sign up to the new scheme as they
wish.
Let me get back now to the question of whether the
scheme is sustainable.
The discussion has to begin with
what it is designed to secure. The planks are:
An age of entitlement of 65
A married couple
rate no less than 65 percent of the after tax average
wage.
Single living-alone and single sharing
rates of 65 and 60 percent of the married rate,
respectively.
No means-testing or
asset-testing.
The public has accepted many cuts to
superannuation over the last 25 years. Since the so-called
Muldoon scheme, the gross relationship to the average wage
has been converted to net, the age of entitlement has been
raised, and the percentage floor has fallen from 80 to 65.
These are all big reductions.
They reflect a degree of
realism and tolerance by the electorate. But that tolerance
appears to have drawn the line on two additional changes:
means testing the entitlement and reducing it below 65
percent of the average wage.
We have made the
preservation of current entitlements our promise and our
starting point.
Now take two scenarios. One is that we
put a dollar in a fund, earning net interest at 6 percent a
year, and the other that we do nothing. What happens in 25
years time? In 25 years time, the dollar invested today is
worth $4.30. If it is not saved now, the money will have to
come from radically higher taxes in the near future.
Some
people have questioned whether we will be able to produce
the surpluses necessary to finance the Fund. Their
scepticism derives from our recent history when the country
ran persistent deficits.
But by and large, New Zealand
governments have run surpluses except in exceptional
circumstances like the 1930s depression.
The aberration
was the response to the 1970s oil shocks. The increases of
producer subsidies and the Think Big underwriting created a
large hole in the public finances, and it took the period
from the end of the Muldoon era to the end of the 1980s to
fill it.
Since then, there has been a natural tendency
for surpluses to emerge. We have only failed to capture the
benefits of fiscal reconstruction that took place in the
late 1980s because the previous government adopted a policy
of dissipating surpluses by introducing rounds of tax
cuts.
Money illusion is the other danger. Opponents of
the scheme run large numbers across our personal radar
screens to lull us into the inertia that desperation brings.
But over time, two things happen. The nominal value of
money rises even with low, but persistent inflation. It is
important to focus on the real value of money. Secondly, the
economy grows, and with it the tax base. It is the value of
real money in relation to the size of our economy that
determines our capacity to make payments into the
fund.
When the issue of fiscal affordability is assessed,
we should be looking at today's equivalent money in relation
to the level of real GDP in the future.
On this basis,
the numbers are not so scary.
The highest annual
contribution to the fund is $2.4 billion in today's money.
That peak contribution is scheduled for 2010. By then,
though, GDP will have grown, so the contribution is around
1.7 percent of GDP.
Indeed, as a proportion of GDP the
contribution peaks in 2005 at a little less than 1.8 percent
of GDP.
By 2016, the annual contribution is less than $2
billion in today's dollars. By 2019 it is less than the
equivalent of one percent of GDP. By 2026 new injections
cease.
Overall, then, there is a tight period from 2005
to 2010 during which something like 1.7 to 1.8 percent of
GDP has to be put into the fund. That tightness reduces
gradually over the following 15 years. It is a discipline,
but not the fiscal straitjacket it is being portrayed
as.
It is easy to get carried away with fashions, but
equally most fashions exist because they resonate with the
public. One of the current fashions is goal setting. We are
encouraged to set goals, individually and collectively, and
to monitor progress towards meeting them. As long as the
goals are realistic, they help discipline expectations and
behaviour.
Goals on inflation targets, on fiscal balance
and on government debt have been useful contributors to
improving performance in each of those areas. I have no
reason to doubt that the same will not hold true for our
superannuation fund.
This raises the question about
whether the savings will squeeze out all other spending –
both current spending on government programmes and the
financing of its future capital programme.
A lot of work
was done on this in collaboration with our Alliance
coalition partner, because as you can imagine it was a major
concern of theirs.
I will start with operating
discretion. The government has established a long term goal
of keeping its operating expenses at around 35 percent of
GDP. It is hard to know what the longer term expense
elements will be. In the Fiscal Strategy Report this year,
we established what we called a “fiscal allowance”.
The
fiscal allowance was not a specific policy commitment.
Rather, it was an amount that reflected the fiscal
flexibility that the government had. It could be absorbed
responding to weaker than expected economic and fiscal
results, by spending initiatives, by revenue initiatives or
by accelerating contributions to the super fund. That amount
was set at an extra $1,200 million per year for each year
after 2003/04.
With that allowance, and the prefunding,
the government still operates within its 35 percent spending
target, with a degree of comfort and over the ten year
fiscal projection that is used in defining progress
outlooks. That, remember, is the decade under which
contributions impose the greatest discipline on the
government.
There is that level of fiscal flexibility
even with prefunding. It is not extravagant, but nor is it
excessively tight. It is as much tolerance as finance
markets and the monetary authorities would probably be
comfortable with. In other words, even if we wanted to spend
more than the headroom we have, after prefunding, the
constraints of modern global finance markets would probably
stop us doing so.
The contributions to the fund would be
a capital appropriation. The key here is that after the
contribution, gross and net debt – ignoring the balances
building up in the fund – would need to remain within the
long-term objective limit of gross debt not more than 30
percent of GDP and net debt no more than 20 percent of
GDP.
This raises the completely spurious question of
whether the government will borrow to put money into the
fund. There are two extremes to this. One would say as long
as there was a dollar in the fund, the government could not
add a single cent to its debt or it would be borrowing to
pay into the fund. The other extreme is that the government
would say that it will never borrow for super, only for
health, education, prisons, defence equipment and the
rest.
Practical considerations suggest the real answer
falls somewhere inside these two extremes. The government
has a capital expenditure programme. It has to finance it.
It therefore needs to manage its debt. At times nominal debt
will increase, and at times it will fall.
The point is
not whether at any point in time nominal debt is increasing
or not. The point is whether the capital expenditure
represents quality investments, and the associated debt
burden is manageable.
Again, the projections show gross
and net debt well below the target ceiling over the next
decade, even alongside small increases in nominal debt in
some years.
The Alliance has argued that we need a much
more systematic approach to medium term prioritisation of
capital spending, and this will develop alongside the
prefunding to ensure that we manage capital needs and
superannuation funding in a harmonious way. It is a big plus
for the policy development process, and was necessary
anyway.
On all fronts then, the proposal is fiscally
sustainable, and consistent with prudent and sensible fiscal
management.
What will it do to the economy?
The bald
advice from Treasury is that the prefunding proposal itself
is not expected to have significant macroeconomic effects.
They argue that retirement income policies in general could
have economic effects, but they could be adopted regardless
of whether or not the fund existed.
In lay terms, if the
fund did not exist, governments could do many other things.
They could change tax rates, change policies towards
investments in SOEs or in granting student loans, or borrow.
They could cut the level of NZS entitlements, change other
spending programmes, alter policies towards the private
savings for retirement or run surpluses to accelerate the
reduction of debt.
Because the future is so uncertain, it
is not possible to isolate the effects that prefunding
itself may have from the effects that other policies may
have. I think Treasury was bound by constitutional
conventions and professional ethics to avoid speculation
about what other governments might do instead of
prefunding.
That is their job. My job is to do the
opposite. I have to speculate on what governments might do
if prefunding does not go ahead, because I have to put
realistic choices in front of the public. If not this, then
what?
As I have said, I don’t expect a substantial
increase in spending compared with what might have been if
prefunding does go ahead, although over time there could be
some weakening of discipline on both the quantity and
quality of public spending. The spending discretion is
constrained by the realities of financial market
disciplines.
Instead, my core expectation is that in the short term, the temptation will be to create an impression of a more rapid run down of government debt than if the prefund had taken place, but reality will be that debt reduction will be by a lesser amount than would have been building up in the fund. In short, the savings rate will be lower. There will be tax cuts in one form or another, and the emerging demographic pressures will simply build.
On the scenario of lower national savings, primarily through lower government savings, and higher private spending, we can anticipate various less than desirable economic results, in both the medium term – say ten years – and longer terms – say twenty five.
I would expect that a lower trajectory of
national savings would tend to postpone and reduce an
improvement in the balance of payments deficit.
I am
reasonably confident that any fund would increase the
liquidity of domestic capital markets. In the absence of a
fund, we will continue to rely more on foreign market
sentiment. In a pure market model, the fund would be too
small, as a part of global markets, to make a difference.
The market, though, is not pure.
There are scale economies associated with analysis of opportunities, and there are country specific exchange risks that fund managers have to take into account. I cannot accept that even with purely commercial motivations, a fund manager in New York will have the same information about New Zealand investment opportunities and the same exchange risk tolerances as a fund manager in Wellington.
I do see a better flow of funds through both bond and equity markets, and that will tend to improve prospects for investment, production and employment. The fund will be managed on an arms length, commercially prudent basis. The government will not be directing investments into ventures that do not stack up commercially. This is no soft loans facility. But I do think that a robust New Zealand based investment fund can only be good for us.
The worst thing you can say about the fund, from an economic point of view, is that it will make no difference.
That is in the medium term. In the longer term, if there is no fund, we will face a fiscal crunch as a future government tries to find the money. We cannot predict how that will spill out, but it will not be a pretty economic, let alone social or political sight.
The scheme has been launched. I am proud of the design, and would like to congratulate everyone – from inside the government and from the savings industry – who has made a constructive contribution to that design. I do not rule out fine tuning some details about how it might operate, but basically I think the framework is sound.
This is the best chance we have had to move to a politically robust solution. I am determined to seize it on behalf of present and future New Zealanders.
ENDS