Sir Ian Taylor asks: Do you really need your pension?

Sir Ian Taylor is on a mission to convince 1 percent of New Zealand pensioners that they do not need their NZ Super.

He is fronting a campaign for Share My Super, an organisation which enables NZ Super recipients to donate part or all of their pension payments to charities such as KidsCan, Women’s Refuge and the Wellington City Mission.

It was founded by Liz Grieve. Its most recent annual report shows it raised $618,082 in the 2024 year from 2892 superannuitants.

Taylor, now 75, said he had to be reminded when he turned 65 that he qualified for superannuation.

“It wasn’t even in my mind. I thought ‘I don’t actually need it at the moment, I’m fine’ so I was going to leave it there but then someone said ‘if you leave it there the government gets to spend it’ so I thought ‘actually I won’t do that’ and I claimed it. But then I had this $400 or $600 whatever it is that I didn’t need ending up in my bank account.”

A single person living alone can get slightly more than $1000 a fortnight, or $800 each if they have a partner who also qualifies.

Five years later, Taylor said he discovered Share My Super. “What appealed to me was it was focused on doing something very specific for child poverty. If we could fix child poverty it’s valuable to everyone in the country. I never realised how bad it was.”

He said when he saw that the government paid out about $20 billion in superannuation each year, he decided more action was needed.

“That’s the biggest payout they make and it’s there every year. Also one in eight kids are in child poverty…. I thought what if just 1 percent of those people [receiving NZ Super] didn’t need it. I know a lot of people are like me, you don’t need to be really, really rich to do something. If you look at it and think ‘I don’t need that at the moment’ you can give half of it, or a quarter of it, or all of it, for now. On percent of $20b is $200m.”

He said being able to generate the money for charities would save them the significant time and resources they spent on their own fund-raising efforts.

“We could say to these organisations ‘don’t worry about the money, we’ll find it for you, go and do the good stuff you’re doing at the cliff face’… even if we can’t give [1 percent] – half of that is $100m, that is a huge amount of money to give to these charities.”

Taylor said while a significant number of pensioners were reliant solely on NZ Super, there were people in a comfortable position, perhaps still working in well-paid jobs, who could be in a position to donate.

“I went to university, my fees cost me $15 a year and I got paid $150 a term as part of my bursary. My education was absolutely free. When I went to school all my books were there already.

“People keep saying ‘we did this when we were young’ but we had it good. I wasn’t from a rich family, I’m from a little village on the east coast of the North Island but we never went hungry, we were never cold, everyone had a job. It’s not like that today.”

Shamubeel Eaqub, chief economist at KiwiSaver provider Simplicity, said he had discussions with Share My Super when it launched.

He said it was a “travesty” that there was universal support for people aged 65-plus “but we have persistent child poverty and a mean and grudging welfare system for them”.

“To make it worse, not only do we have stringent means testing for supporting children in poverty, benefits for poor are indexed to CPI, while NZ Super is indexed to the average wage, which increases faster. Is it a good thing to donate your money for a good cause you believe in? Of course. Is it a substitute for good policies to lift children out of poverty? A helping hand, rather than a substitute.”

Taylor said the process of donating via Share My Super was easy, and people could claim their pensions back again easily if they needed to.

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.

Get the RNZ app

for ad-free news and current affairs