Magic Bullet

Tracey Watkins bewails the apparent head-in-the-sand attitude of Key and English towards pensions. She and a number of other commentators recently have pointed out, correctly, that the present state of affairs cannot continue, in which people are able to draw a pension from age 65, but may live another 15-20 years. The logical thing to do here would be to link the pension age to life expectancy, as long as the vast majority of older folk are still employable and well prior to the new start age of the pension. It is such a sensible thing to do, and relatively painless, even for those forced to work a few more years. The majority of pensioners who are well, tend to continue to work in some capacity, anyway.

So why did an intelligent person like Key (apparently) foolishly guarantee he would not touch pensions and even seal his promise by tying it to his resignation, if it happened?

Two words. Winston. Peters.

Key needed a magic bullet to kill Peters. His ballsy political move, refusing point blank to work with Peters, removed the disaffected Labour voters that were starting to gather around him, making them choose either Labour or National or waste their vote, even if Winston had return to parliament (voting for Anderton and Dunne would already be a wasted vote). But this would not have, by itself, killed Peters. He had previously been returned to parliament without that extra vote.

What was needed was to remove some of the elderly vote from him. Key achieved this by removing the one lever that Winston could always count on to be able to use against National – pensions. Just by guaranteeing pension entitlement while he was Prime Minister, Key removed Peters’ greatest tool – the ability to drum up fear amongst the elderly and then stand like a white knight, defending them. The “Smiling Assassin” had effectively disemboweled him. A portion of the older folk were reassured enough not to vote for him and he was gone.

Key is certainly not going to give Peters any new leverage amongst the elderly, so don’t expect him to change his mind on pensions.

Of course, at some point, Key will resign as Prime Minister and the pensionable age will probably rise about ten minutes later. I have read somewhere that Key is not intending to stand for more than a couple of terms, which means he can comfortably resign somewhere in his third term and still have time, albeit not a lot, to start to mitigate the enormous drain on the economy that pensions will create.

If the delay in changing the pensionable age is the price we paid to be rid of Winston Peters, I consider it a small price. Presumably, so does Key.

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