People calling for a raise in the pension age can take a hike, frankly. 

You always hear this from the same kind of people, don’t you? Soft-handed city dwellers who sit behind a desk all day for their jobs, who only ever break a sweat in a gym class. 

For them, retiring a couple of years later is no big deal, because they work in relative comfort.  

They should try pitching their opinion straight to someone like a builder or a farmer and see how it goes down. 

Some of those people who do manual labour all day don’t have the option of working another couple of years extra. 

Their bodies are broken.  Sometimes well before retirement age.  Some of them have shot knees in their forties.  

If you firmly believe that the retirement age should be raised, you need to check your privilege, and if you hold a nice cosy office job where the biggest muscle you exercise is your tongue, then maybe you have too much privilege to really comprehend what a delayed pension means for some of your fellow Kiwis.

Because they will have to retire.  Once the body’s shot, it’s shot.  At least right now, they only have to last to 65 and then they’ll have some money to see them through. 

I’m as tired of hearing this argument as you probably are but it’s been raised again by Treasury in their long term economic outlook document where they argue something has to give because the pandemic is blowing out national debt. 

It is a fallacy that pensions are an unsustainable cost.  Right now they cost 5 percent of GDP.  In 40 years from now they’ll cost 7.6 percent.  

That’s not even the current OECD average. Right now, OECD countries spend more than 8.5 percent on pensions we’d still be short of that in 40 years. 

If Treasury is worried about spending, don’t cut the spending that matters: the spending that means we have one of the lowest elderly poverty rates in the world. 

Cut all the unnecessary spending the government’s racking up under the guise of Covid: 

Upgrading marae owned by wealthy iwi 

$30 million on investigating an hydro lake scheme so stupid they’ll have to abandon it  

$90 million on a fast train to Hamilton that isn’t fast 

We could save billions if we just spent money wisely. 

Leave the pension age alone.  The least we can do for hardworking kiwis who’ve paid taxes their whole lives is make sure they can stop working when their bodies are shot.