Significant Policies
- National superannuation
By 1975, New Zealand had a generous welfare system, which included unemployment and sickness benefits, a benefit for single parents (the DPB) and a means tested old-age pension. The third National government scrapped Labours contributory scheme and introduced National Superannuation, a non means tested pension available to all New Zealand citizens over the age of 60, linked to the average wage (initially 70% with the intention of increasing it to 80%). This was enormously expensive, costing NZ$2.5 billion per annum by 1984, but nevertheless far more popular than Labour's alternative of a Singaporean Central Provident Fund-style set of individualised compulsory savings.
Read more about this topic: Third National Government Of New Zealand
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“By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.”
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