Defending the SuperGold Card
new-zealand-first-party
Thu Mar 17 2016 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
Defending the SuperGold Card
Thursday, 17 March 2016, 2:10 pm
Speech: New Zealand First Party
Rt Hon Winston Peters
New Zealand First Leader
Member of Parliament for Northland
17 MARCH 2016
Embargoed till delivery
Speech by New Zealand First Leader and Member of Parliament for Northland Rt Hon Winston Peters
Grey Power Whanganui
Public Meeting
Central Baptist Church Auditorium, corner of Wicksteed St and Dublin St, Whanganui
2pm, Thursday 17th March, 2016
Defending the SuperGold Card, other parties out of touch on the flag
And Immigration Policy Imitation
New Zealand First values its close association with Grey Power, a relationship which has been strengthened because of the SuperGold Card.
The SuperGold Card has been providing hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders access to a range of services, one of the most notable being free off-peak travel for seniors.
New Zealand First introduced the card to improve the life of the senior community and as an acknowledgement of the contribution they have made to the country over many years, sometimes during periods of the highest taxation.
Not that it has been easy. When we tried to get the SuperGold Card up and running we faced a lot of opposition.
But New Zealand First won – and the SuperGold Card came into being, although it must be said that it has been made difficult by a government that has never liked it.
Remember, in 2010 Minister Steven Joyce decided secretly that he wanted to stop free SuperGold transport on off-peak public transport services.
When his plans became known the cry of outrage was loud, and prolonged.
And it had the desired effect.
Advertisement - scroll to continue reading
Mr Joyce backed down. He thought better of it and beat a retreat.
Last year New Zealand First’s SuperGold Health Check Bill came before Parliament. We wanted to help our senior citizens again and considered this was important legislation.
Grey Power members know that it can be expensive going to a doctor and we all know people who do not go because it is too costly.
The intention of the bill was to provide three free GP visits with the SuperGold Card each year.
New Zealand First didn’t want our seniors sitting at home feeling ill and worried about going to a GP because of the cost.
Too often minor ailments can turn into more serious conditions, such as pneumonia or bronchitis, because they have not been nipped in the bud by a visit to a GP.
We all know an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
We were pleased to see Grey Power support this bill. The Listener magazine commented also that our bill was a public-health strategy which few New Zealanders would decry.
Unfortunately those few New Zealanders included the government. Our bill failed to pass its first reading by 60 votes to 61.
As a result, a great opportunity was lost.
This bill could have saved lives and precious health dollars.
But National, ACT and United Future did not want it.
Now this government has decided to have another crack at the SuperGold Card.
They have renewed their attack on the card that has added to the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of senior citizens, helping them remain active and engaged in their communities.
From July 1, as a result of the government’s new policy, cardholders who want to have free off-peak travel wherever smart cards are used – smart cards like Auckland’s HOP card and Wellington’s Snapper card - will have to go and buy a new smartcard, and pay $10.
If seniors travel to another region they will be forced to buy a new card.
This latest attack on the SuperGold Card has been under way in Auckland for two years with Auckland Transport forcing people to abandon their SuperGold Card and buy a HOP card.
Just as the population of seniors rises, as the general population rises, National has put a lid on funding and pushed responsibility on to regional councils.
That means ratepayers could have to pay for any shortfall.
This latest attack on the SuperGold Card is the action of a mean-spirited, penny pinching government that has little respect for its older citizens.
Paying for a card goes against the logic and rationale of the SuperGold Card – the card is free and is to allow seniors to occupy empty seats in off-peak hours.
National is deceitfully undermining the card’s value and using it to cut government costs. First it froze the travel costs for six years and now it is allowing local councils to artificially impose their costs.
Councils around the country are not happy about it. In Christchurch, Environment Canterbury will release a report this month as to how much ratepayers will have to pay to top up the fund to keep the scheme operating.
The point to make is: It’s time now for seniors to speak out again, as they did in 2010 against Steven Joyce’s covert, cost-cutting plans.
All Grey Power members must tell the government: “Hands off our SuperGold Card.”
And they should also say “we refuse to buy any smartcards for public transport.”
The only way to make the government change its mind and turn the policy around is to speak up and apply pressure.
Governments react to pressure.
We beat off Mr Joyce in 2010 and we can do it again over free travel with the SuperGold Card.
And just overnight we learned from the Minister of Finance that he hasn’t done any work or costings should there be a flag change after the current referendum.
And remember, only one political party refused to join John Key’s flag change parliamentary committee. Every other party wanted a flag change. New Zealand First does not.
We know it is $26m already, but what the costs will be if there is a change Mr Key and Mr English have no idea at all because they haven’t been even responsible enough to do any work on it.
The cost could escalate to twice the $26m figure but so cavalier is this government that they haven’t bothered to find out. And they haven’t bothered to tell you while secretly attacking the SuperGold Card benefits.
But such costs will come from within existing departmental baselines and the department administering your SuperGold Card may well be one of them.
The SuperGold Card is yours and you need to fight to keep it.
Make no mistake if you leave it to someone else he will get away with it. Every one of you has to talk to your family and your friends and send the government a message: Leave our Gold Card alone.
IMMIGRATION AND WHAT THE OTHER PARTIES HAVE DONE
This brings me to an issue which is having a major impact on our country – immigration.
Immigration is creating problems that the government continues to ignore and it is impacting on our senior citizens.
Statistics New Zealand has released figures which show immigration to this country continues to break records.
There was a record net gain – more arrivals than departures – of 65,900 migrants in the January 2016 year and over half of these migrants are moving to the Auckland region.
The government’s open door immigration policy has brought with it wide-ranging consequences for all sectors of New Zealand society and it has been at the cost of ordinary New Zealanders.
And every other political party in Parliament is to blame for it. The Labour Party in the late 80s and then from 1999 pursued a high immigration policy, unfocused and with few restrictions, at enormous cost to the ordinary New Zealand working man and woman, their jobs their health and their housing.
They even wrote into the 2008 China free trade agreement, a provision to allow in Chinese chefs from mainland China.
The last people that thought they could eat their way to wealth were Hansel and Gretel and they existed in a fairytale.
When New Zealand first pointed out back then what damage it would do economically and socially other parties including Labour, shouted xenophobe and racist, so we will leave it to you to decide who can be trusted on this issue.
One that these parties should have foreseen was the effect on hospitals.
The situation has got so bad that New Zealand First believes a new policy is now critical.
Free medical services are what New Zealand taxpayers have paid for.
When you go to hospital seeking medical assistance you should prove that you are entitled to it because you have been living in New Zealand long enough to justify it.
The Auckland District Health Board says it is struggling to deal with the enormous pressure on their systems as a result of immigration.
Large numbers of immigrants are flocking to the DHB’s hospitals seeking treatment for quite ordinary ailments which could be handed by a GP.
This means if New Zealand taxpayers who have paid taxes all their lives go to hospital they have to join a queue comprising a large number of immigrants who have been in the country five minutes.
The immigrants have worked out that if they visit a GP, a charge would be required.
If they go to the hospitals instead, however, chances are, care will be provided free of charge.
New Zealand First says this must stop. It is only fair that immigrants should pay for a doctor like the rest of us.
A second measure to lessen the pressure on hospitals is one New Zealand First has expressed for years:
It is - put a brake on immigration. We have said it for a long time - we need time to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have come to New Zealand in the past two decades from all countries.
We need to pause and take a breather from this tsunami of migrants.
Auckland is a city where its leaders have a tiger by the tail. They haven’t got a hope of fixing the problems but none of them have got the guts to say why. They are so politically correct they cringe from the most obvious response to demand far outstripping supply - cut the demand.
Auckland’s vacuum-like demand for taxpayers’ money is hollowing out the regional economies.
You in Wanganui get no benefit from this but your taxes are paying for it.
That’s why to ease pressure on our health system we would require immigrants coming on a parent reunion visa to take out private health insurance for their first 10 years here.
Over 82,000 parent reunion immigrants have come to New Zealand in the last 15 years and obtained the full benefits of superannuation and social security, and health and other services, whether they paid a cent towards it or not.
No other country allows this so why does your government allow it?
Why are other political parties against protecting you from the costs of this artificially inflated demand?
Our solution is what happens in other countries, why not here?
New Zealanders are renowned for giving people a chance but it has been abused and massively so. One Chinese couple can bring in four parents and there is not one Chinese politician back in China that thinks that our government’s policy is rational or sensible.
It is only fair and right that parent reunion immigrants should have some self-support by way of private health insurance.
While on this topic of health, it is worth mentioning that the funding of district health boards has failed to keep up with population growth and inflation.
By keeping the health allocation down, the government has been passing the buck to district health boards, such as Wanganui, which are struggling to manage within their resources.
Another aspect of the government’s open door policy is that workplace corruption and exploitation of vulnerable workers is thriving.
The Labour Inspectorate has confirmed widespread breaches of New Zealand labour standards, which involve hundreds of employers throughout the country.
The Labour Inspectorate cited an “inadequacy of record keeping” by rogue employers. In other words blatant fraud and this must be stopped.
The problems are made worse by the appalling mismanagement of our visa application process.
Last year a Waikato-based Filipino woman single-handedly showed how incompetent Immigration New Zealand is.
This woman managed to gain commercial benefits from falsifying documentation.
We have also ended up with tens of thousands of low skilled immigrant workers whilst the real level unemployment in parts of New Zealand is around about 10 per cent and much, much higher when it comes to young people.
Also the proliferation of student work visas - more than 92,000 - adds fuel to the fire as rogue employers target migrant students desperate to stay here.
This country has numerous examples now of Third World standards in wages and employment practices, but there is a deafening silence from most parliamentarians. They prefer the feel good factor of your charity than making a stand for the quality of life of New Zealanders, old or new.
Export education is about another country’s economy paying the New Zealand economy to educate their students.
But the purpose of these student visas has been totally perverted to the extent that for tens of thousands of these students it is our economy paying for their education.
It is clear that there must be more oversight of employers, more regular inspections and raids, stiffer penalties, and immigration at a level that can be controlled.
Convicted employers, if new immigrants, under New Zealand First, would be sent home.
New Zealand First is the only party that has spoken up consistently about immigration being unfocused and against our national interest.
You will all remember how often they labelled us as racist and xenophobic but these same critics have helped construct a nightmare, in Auckland in particular, and it is those critics we are going to target in the future because their penchant for diversity is economic and social destruction to a once great society.
We have warned of record immigration and foreign buyers causing an explosion in housing demand in Auckland. Government SOE Quotable Value has confirmed that we are right.
Quotable Value stated that there has been “a large increase” in Chinese immigrants under the investor and investor plus categories and “this had correlated to rising house values in Auckland.”
Auckland is bursting at the seams with all sorts of infrastructure problems and still the immigrants surge in.
You are probably asking why a sensible government would allow this.
The answer is that our economy is so fundamentally weak that only massive immigration and the Christchurch Rebuild has been propping it up.
The Prime Minister and his government have no idea as to what should be done now. They are in total denial hoping that somehow the demand bubble that they created will go away.
And now with our dairy industry in crisis and farm land dropping in value, foreign owners are lining up to buy our most productive land.
You have to ask yourself the question:
Is the government working in the best interests of New Zealand citizens, or in the best interests of foreigners?
Certainly the government’s track record shows more concern for immigrants and cashed up foreign buyers than they do for New Zealanders born and bred here, who have grown up here and who have paid taxes all their lives.
These are salt of the earth New Zealanders who, when they get to retirement age, receive a small thank you like the SuperGold Card.
New Zealand superannuation has had a very chequered history.
It was attacked by the 1984 Labour government with a surtax, then National promised to remove it but put that surtax up to, at its worst, 92 cents in the dollar.
New Zealand First, in 1997, had the surtax repealed but then the Shipley government attacked the percentage of the net average wage and took it down to 60 per cent.
When next New Zealand First had the power we legislated NZ Super to be no less than 66 per cent and brought in the SuperGold Card and other benefits. And now National is back attacking it again.
Conclusion
Well over 640,000 New Zealanders now have the SuperGold Card and enjoy superannuation at levels New Zealand First has secured.
But be warned, you have to defend what you have got and you need to send Mr Key and Mr Joyce one clear message, which is, Touch our SuperGold Card and our benefits at your peril.
The SuperGold Card is yours, you have earned it, but please in your own interests fight to keep it.
ENDS
Advertisement - scroll to continue reading
a.supporter:hover {background:#EC4438!important;} @media screen and (max-width: 480px) { #byline-block div.byline-block {padding-right:16px;}}
Using Scoop for work?
Scoop is free for personal use, but you’ll need a licence for work use. This is part of our Ethical Paywall and how we fund Scoop. Join today with plans starting from less than $3 per week, plus gain access to exclusive Pro features.
Join Pro Individual Find out more
Find more from New Zealand First Party on InfoPages.