Introductory Notes for Brightstar Seminar: The Delivering Equity for Older People in New Zealand Grand Millennium Hotel, Auckland on Apr 30 & May 1, 2024

Thankyou for the invitation to contribute to this panel.

About twenty years ago, Suzie Carson and I were investigating wellbeing via the Household Economic Survey. We got what at first seemed to be an odd result: that there was not much of a relationship between income and wellbeing for the elderly.

The reason turned out that for the majority of the elderly – about four fifths – their income was New Zealand Superannuation with only a little more private income from savings, private pensions and the like. So their income distribution was very bunched up. That meant that other factors were statistically swamping any income effect.

We could not pursue this research because its funding was cut off, even though we were already publishing useful results. This was not a time when systematic independent research on wellbeing and the economic distributions was a priority. It is still not – so much policy in New Zealand is anecdote-driven rather than evidence-driven.

The factors which seemed to be swamping any income effect included accommodation, health and disability together with less tangible factors we could not have chased up from this data base including living situations, social networks, and the like.

I’d also have liked to explore the effect of age. Current thinking often ignores the difference between the young-elderly and those who are much older. Ninety-year-olds are very different from seventy-year-olds. Moreover, in twenty years’ time the experiences of ninety-year-olds will be very different from today’s, which makes thinking ahead even more challenging.

What does all this mean for policy? First, it says nothing about the current policy of increasing New Zealand Superannuation in line with general prosperity. But it suggests a very strong case for targeting extra spending on accommodation, healthcare, disability and social support.

It is not easy to target efficiently. Not only, as I explained, because of the differences between ninety-year-olds and seventy-year-olds but because the differences are changing – the targets are moving.

We are targeting – after all, this is what this conference is about – but because we have little comprehensive research, any targeting tends to be erratic, based upon a toe pinching rather than a full examination of the foot.

Or to use another well attested New Zealand trope, we need to pay attention to fences at the top of the cliff rather than just provide ambulances at the bottom. Actually, we don’t keep the ambulances near the bottom but expect them to turn up sometime. By golly, it can take a long time. That is because we focus on the pinching toe – on anecdote – and lack a comprehensive overview.

So, all power to your complaining about the pinching toe and the ambulances turning up late. But I make a plea that we also need a systematic independent research program to provide a framework which would enable the design of fences and the planning of ambulances. The research program that Suzie and I were pursuing would be a good immediate start, but in the long run we need an ongoing longitudinal survey of the elderly.

Brian is  a Research Associate of the Pensions and Intergenerational Equity Research Hub of the University of Auckland