Via the Herald I spotted this State of the Nation report by the Salvation Army (Note:  The core report can be found here).  It is nicely put together, taking a whole series of publicly available data and making it fit for public consumption!  Also I appreciate their focus on shining attention on issues that get underplayed in public – let us be honest, house prices and interest rates get more play in the media than they really deserve, while some issues around poverty and discrimination receive less play.  I don’t blame the media for this, it is just the way of things, but having analysts publicly trying to talk about these other issues (as the Sallies is) is choice.  I tried to make this point when discussing the report on the panel.

Of course, you know me.  I find the “scoreboard format” a bit naff – making these things into strict “targets” can be a bit misleading.  Furthermore, the report embodies a set of value judgments – and these just may not be the moral judgments of the public.

Here are the notes I quickly tied together when I found I would have to speak on the report.  The notes have very little to do with anything I said – as they involved discussing and critiquing the report, when the interview ended up being a defence of the focus of the report.

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On stuff I noticed the following comments by Michael Littlewood.

“Simply citing that there are 2.2 million members and $19 billion in the scheme doesn’t actually tell you anything,” the paper’s author, Michael Littlewood said.

“It just tells you that KiwiSaver’s popular – and why wouldn’t it be, with the incentives that it has.”

Littlewood said with the limited data available, there was no way of knowing whether New Zealanders would have saved just as much without KiwiSaver.

This is true.  Back in 2008 we mentioned research by John Gibson and Trinh Le calling into question claims that Kiwisaver had “increased national savings” – in fact suggesting that the make-up of Kiwisaver had reduced national savings.

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