Former finance minister Ruth Richardson has called for an increase in the retirement age, warning New Zealand faces a balance sheet crisis without urgent action.
The newly appointed chairperson of the Taxpayers’ Union, a right-wing political lobby group, told Q+A that government debt needed addressing.
“We need to control our spending appetite, we need to bring debt under control, and we need to restore New Zealand’s books to a state of fiscal responsibility,” Richardson said.
“From a central government perspective, it’s clear that we have a crisis, and the crisis is looming — as it is in many other countries in the West, we’re not alone.”
The architect of the 1991 “Mother Of All Budgets” said the Government should follow her previous reforms that raised the superannuation eligibility age from 60 to 65.
“On my watch, we increased the age of eligibility from 60 to 65, with near a mutter. It was done as part of a broader package of reforms to put New Zealand on a sounder footing, and we need to do the same again,” she said.
“We should have a superannuation age of eligibility, just like the electoral boundaries. You just adjust it for — in this case — the data that tells you about the age of longevity.”
Richardson, who became aligned with ACT after retiring from politics, criticised the coalition government for ultimately committing billions more in spending at Budget 2025.
She said: “We’re starting to swamp education spending, we’re starting to swamp defence spending — that is not defensible. We need a credible deficit track.
“At the moment, we’ve got fiction. What we want is fact, and fact is going to require some pretty hard decisions taken about the issues… starting with superannuation.”
She also rejected the characterisation that the country had a lack of funding for infrastructure, saying instead that too much money was being spent on “vanity projects” at the local government level.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis has previously rejected suggestions she had broken an election promise to return to surplus by 2027.
It was despite Treasury forecasts now showing a return to surplus wouldn’t occur until 2029 under the Government’s preferred accounting measure known as OBEGALx.
By the traditional measure, known as OBEGAL, New Zealand wasn’t expected to return to surplus until the 2030s at the earliest. OBEGALx excluded the costs of ACC.
Richardson also advocated for asset sales, suggesting the Government should sell state-owned enterprises, including power companies, Landcorp and commercial broadcaster TVNZ — which she said was “probably worth a dollar”.
Richardson steadfast on views nearly 35 years on
Speaking on Q+A, Richardson, who was recently made a companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the King’s Birthday Honours, defended her 1990s reforms after being presented with poverty statistics showing persistent increases following her Budget cuts.
When presented with data showing child poverty rates grown significantly after her reforms and never ultimately corrected, Richardson defended herself, saying doing nothing in her time would have been “the most immoral option”.
“We took our courage in our hands and did the right thing, and the economy prospered. You’re not putting up the stats that showed the rise in growth, the rise in employment, the halving of the debt and putting the books back into balance,” she said.
“If you were balanced, you’d be showing those statistics.”
She added: “The real poverty was New Zealand’s if we had done nothing. If we had done nothing, then New Zealand would have most certainly faced the crisis that the Labour government did in the mid-’80s. And in a crisis, the people who are hurt most are the poorest people, the people on the bottom of the rung.”
For the full interview, watch the video above
Q+A with Jack Tame is made with the support of New Zealand On Air