Max Rashbrook

Because if you're compelling people to save when they're already having affordability problems.

I mean, I would think about people as citizens, you know, and say, look, this is a conversation that we need to be demanding.

And I think people should be putting pressure on politicians about, well, you know, what are your answers to these long-term problems?

You know, we've been talking about KiwiSaver, but there's New Zealand Super as well, the Super Fund.

How do we want these things to work together in future?

I think politicians really struggle to deal with these long-term issues.

I'm quite a big fan of things like citizens' assemblies where you get a representative group of New Zealanders in a room together, give them six Saturdays to go at it, give them the evidence, and just then say to them, look, as Kiwis, once you've thought about this and you've talked to each other and you've argued the toss, what would you actually like the retirement system to look like?

I think that would be a really interesting question because I don't think any of us could hand on heart

say we know what retirement system the country actually wants at the moment?

Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more.

I think there's a lot of areas in life where you want good, steady, long-term policy, but superannuation more than anything, right?

Because people have to have that trust in the system, the trust that it's going to operate the way they think from now on for 20, 30 years ahead, right?

And you're absolutely right.

Every time we chop and change, it diminishes that trust.

Yeah, look, fundamentally people are saving wealth out of their incomes.

So if those incomes are very different, there's only so much that the savings policies can do.

And you do have to think about those bigger disparities and why are some people struggling so much?

You know, you look at the children who are in poverty.

Half of them have got parents in full-time work, you know, so real issues around low-paid work, for instance, in New Zealand.

But, yeah, I still think there are things that the savings vehicles can do.