Mike Hosking: Nats taking a risk with super age talk

National Party leader Simon Bridges. Photo / John Borren

OPINION

The retirement age was always going to get the headline. That's why I would have said all the other stuff the Nats have said, separately. Because the other stuff they have said is part of what looks like a fairly concerted and organised effort by a party that is on the ascendancy.

Cutting the corporate tax rate is well overdue, and juxtaposes a party looking to increase taxes. I didn't know we take in one of the highest tax takes in the OECD, which is nothing to be proud of. But what I did know, is we are out of whack with Australia and it's never a good sign when you're taxing higher than one of your biggest trading partners.

When a business can so easily choose one side of the Tasman or the other, you want to make it your side, and tax helps that argument. The tax bracket creep already addressed by the party makes sense, and is also badly overdue and yet another reminder of just how highly taxed we are.

The fact that the average income in the major centres now enters into the top tax rate is bordering on criminal.

To earn 75, 80, 90 grand a year does not make you rich or wealthy or indeed all that comfortably off, but according to the Government you are.

Which apart from anything, tells you how badly paid we are.

The other stuff they've announced is window dressing. Red tape, rules, regulations. It's the stuff most people say, but if and when it ever happens, we'll be old. Which is where the super cuts in.

Remember John Key, one of the greatest retail politicians of our time, said he'd quit rather than increase the super age. And he did that for a reason: there were votes in it.

There still are, which is why what the Nats have announced is a risk. They have covered themselves off by delaying it until lots of people are dead, but the intention is still there.

Super is going to get harder to get. And it's not the specifics they've announced that are the trouble, it's the intent, it's the slippery slope. Once you start messing with it, is it 67? Or 68? or 71?

It's like KiwiSaver. The trick is, don't touch it. Get the Government involved and what did they do? Touch it. Super's magic was the certainty. The moment you move the age once, there's nothing stopping you moving it 27 times.

Yes, most of us should have got the idea that super is not to be relied upon. Super is a top up. It's a contribution, but that message hasn't been received or accepted. Hence, so many - too many - use it as their sole income. And because of that, it's political dynamite. The same way you can use a tax cut to drive votes your way over a government that likes tax increases.

The party that holds the super age where it is - oh I don't know, think Winston - can take your upping the age and use it to beat you about the head. You watch, next year, the Nats have just handed him rocket fuel.