Don't make us join plan for saving

Remember all the hoopla when KiwiSaver was launched in 2007?

Apparently it was going to turn us from a nation of debt-ridden impulse purchasers into conscientious savers, with the financial means to look after our future.

Fast forward four years, and despite the acknowledged success of the scheme, the government now intends to go ahead with KiwiSaver auto-enrolment as a way to further increase the country's savings.

Under the plan, all employees not already in KiwiSaver will be enrolled, although they can still subsequently opt out. It's been estimated that about 55 per cent, or 275,000 of the some 500,000 employees expected to be auto-enrolled when the changes come into effect in 2014, will either choose to stay in the scheme or neglect to opt out - just as they have to date when automatically enrolled at the start of a new job.

Finance Minister Bill English has described the plan as "a bit of a shove" towards saving. He may want to watch out for one almighty shove coming back the other way.

The Government should be concerned about ensuring it doesn't incur the same sort of accusations of "nanny-statism" that plagued its Labour-led predecessor.

Most people do recognise the need to save for their retirement. If anything, one of the few positive spin-offs that can be argued to have come from the global economic downturn and its accompanying job losses is an increased awareness of the importance of saving.

While, as a country, we may well have the poor record for saving that we keep getting told about, there are likely to be more than a few people who will turn up their nose at any hint of enforced savings. We know we need to save - what we don't like is being told how we have to do it.

In any event, it's hard to view the planned KiwiSaver changes as being really that compulsive, when anyone who feels inclined to do so can pull out after being automatically enrolled.

The devil (and the exit clause) may well be in the detail, but most people will look no further than the fact they're initially being forced to enrol in the scheme.

For National, a party which espouses personal responsibility and individual freedom and choice, the idea of a compulsory savings scheme really shouldn't sit that comfortably.

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