“I think the core of it would be to imitate the things that have made KiwiSaver itself successful as much as possible,” he said.
“So there’d be a kickstart for parents to start saving, maybe $1000. Then you’d have the government matching small amounts of parental savings.”
Rashbrooke said there could be government contributions for those that couldn’t afford to contribute to ensure no one missed out.
Six scenarios were modelled in the report with different levels of contributions from both the government and parents.
The first-year cost to the government ranged between $20 million to $80m across scenarios.
Rashbrooke said in 18 years the total savings could plausibly be somewhere around $10 billion to $13b in total.
There have been various attempts to introduce similar schemes around the world.
In the United States and Hungary there were “baby bonds”, while the United Kingdom previously had “child trust funds”.
Meanwhile, domestically, Ngāi Tahu operates a matched savings scheme, Whai Rawa, which runs similarly to the proposed Kids KiwiSaver scheme.
As of early 2025, Ngāi Tahu’s scheme has more than 35,000 members and $165m in funds under management.
Ngāi Tahu has contributed over $75m in matched savings, payments to newborns and annual distributions.
