Sam Stubbs says he’d be ‘stunned’ if there was not a bold response.
It has not been a great few days for Chris Hipkins and Labour, with a Curia poll for the Taxpayers’ Union putting the party south of 26% and a wave of fresh questions about whether the small-target strategy will be enough to pull off what would be a historic victory.
One of the areas in which other parties, not least National, have so far stolen a march on Labour is KiwiSaver. At the party conference in June, Christopher Luxon pledged that a re-elected National-led government would move to automatically enrol newborns in the retirement savings scheme with the government chipping in $1,500, make it compulsory for all workers and increase default contributions.
There were criticisms. Winston Peters suggested that it was rich for a tough-on-crime party to nick his policy. Labour noted that it was curious to see National’s conversion to measures it had previously opposed. But there were plenty of accolades, too. Sam Stubbs, who founded and leads Simplicity, a non-profit KiwiSaver provider, found cause to celebrate, and declared this could be “the KiwiSaver election”.
It was a “dramatic U-turn”, said Stubbs, speaking to The Spinoff for an episode of At Large with Toby Manhire. “KiwiSaver is now a massively popular brand. So if you’re a politician, you stick your name to it. Three and a half million Kiwis have got one, right? So I think … they’ve woken up to that. Also, you cannot look at the future of New Zealand without realising that ultimately we’ve got to save our way to prosperity and not spend or borrow our way.”
In doing so, National had also “ankle-tapped Labour,” he said. “We haven’t seen Labour’s response yet. I’d be stunned if they had no response.”
He’d like to see that response include a ban on “total compensation” packages, in which KiwiSaver is wrapped into the overall pay figure. “They could increase contribution rates faster,” he said.
As well as kickstarting KiwiSaver for kids, he’d like to see ongoing top-ups, which might also lift people out of poverty. “The government should put in something like 10 bucks a week into a kid’s KiwiSaver account, and due to the power of compounding interest, that would be something around $18,000 or $20,000 by the time a kid was 20. That’s a lot of economic empowerment for kids that would otherwise have nothing.”
Asked about the tax-axis on which the early campaign exchanges have operated, Stubbs said: “I think we’re at an important junction now as a country. We either have to decide that we want to keep tax rates low, and we’re going to trust capitalism or enterprise or whatever to generate the economic activity, which then pays tax and to keep the schools and hospitals open, or we decide that we need to tax people more to keep these critical institutions going, or a blend of both.”
He continued: “It’s going to sound like a wussy answer, but the answer is a blend of both. I think … it is impossible for us to keep free schools, free hospitals, national super, all these very expensive but very vital-to-being-a-Kiwi institutions, without more tax.” He supported the move to a capital gains tax. “I don’t like the inequality in New Zealand … I don’t like how rich the rich are getting, and I don’t like the fact that the only way we get to tax them is on income, not on capital gain … and I think we’re just going to have to have a serious conversation at some stage about some redistribution here.”
These are hardly the words you might imagine coming from someone who made a small fortune in fund management at Goldman Sachs in London and Hong Kong. Stubbs, who calls himself “a bit of a gamekeeper turned poacher,” has rubbed some in the financial world up the wrong way with his outspoken views on the sector, and he’s never been shy to share an opinion about the state of New Zealand politics.
As Simplicity marks its 10-year birthday – with offshoots Simplicity Living and InfraKiwi turning five and one respectively – could the next step for Stubbs be into the political arena itself?
“Absolutely not,” is the response. He’d been asked a number of times over the years, the first being by Michelle Boag, then-National Party president, about 25 years ago. “She said, ‘I quite like the look of you.’ She had a long chat and said, ‘Listen, there’s this seat coming up, and it’s the second safest seat in the country, and it’s yours if you want it, because the only other guy looking at it is this trader guy from Singapore.”
Stubbs declined, and John Key was elected in Helensville.
“But here’s why I don’t want to go into politics. I think I can actually do more good in this job. I think we can actually do more sustainable good over the long term by investing what will hopefully be tens and then hundreds of billions of dollars in New Zealand. I think also there’s an ability to work across party lines, because we want long-term solutions,” he said.
“I’ve looked at it and haven’t [seen] the ability to make an impact – it’s just so random, you know; you sit on the back benches, and then you might get picked, and then you say one thing wrong, and you get kicked out. It doesn’t seem like a particularly stable career where you can make a big difference, as much as I have incredible respect for those people who do it because it’s such a hard job.”
Listen to the full conversation with Sam Stubbs here.
For more from At Large with Toby Manhire, follow here for Spotify, or here for Apple. For YouTube, subscribe to the Spinoff here and find all the episodes here.
