If ideological politics is not dead, it has certainly gone into hibernation. What remains is simply branding.

Jacinda Ardern’s kindness has been replaced by Luxon’s corporate deliverology, both brands flexible enough to serve whatever policies are electorally beneficial. But these brands are for the public; technocrats and the political class have an esoteric language of their own. Kindness was just the populist face of “Proportionate Universalism.” Now, we have “Social Investment,” the serious face of the politics of delivery.

Social investment, despite its technical branding, is pretty straightforward. Finance Minister Nicola Willis champions it as “about using data, evidence, and modern analytics to invest in earlier and better intervention that can effectively break cycles of disadvantage, dependence and despair.”

The basic intuitions of social investment are simple: early interventions are better than late ones, helping the most acutely deprived provides the largest amount of benefit, continual assessment is crucial to effective welfare.

Super costs 16% of the core crown budget, 23.2 billion dollars annually—almost as much as all other welfare programmes combined.

By these measures, superannuation is the exact opposite of a good programme—a late intervention, given universally, to those with the lowest rates of material deprivation, with no ongoing evaluation of its worth.

And it’s not cheap. Super costs 16% of the core crown budget, 23.2 billion dollars annually—almost as much as all other welfare programmes combined.

When we spent an entire news cycle arguing about something as trivial as reinstating a five-dollar copayment on prescriptions, the Prime Minster stated bluntly, “I think it’s really unfair; it’s money that’s wasted on being spent on someone like me, for example, who can afford to pay.

The projected revenue generated by bringing back copayments (23.2 million a year) is exactly 1/1000^th of the cost of superannuation. NZ Super spends that much by lunchtime every single day.

This is not sustainable. The outgoing treasury chief pointed this out in her exit interview last week, but we have all known it for some time. Proposals to raise the retirement age ignore the fact that those not privileged enough to earn money from a laptop can’t keep working indefinitely. Nor is the actual superannuation payment especially generous for those who don’t own their own home.

The government wants to exercise spending restraint, fair enough, but there’s no point saving pennies while wasting pounds.

The core problem with superannuation is that we give an extraordinary amount of money to people who do not need it and would not face hardship were it removed.

The government wants to exercise spending restraint, fair enough, but there’s no point saving pennies while wasting pounds.

Social Investment promises a coherent framework for the centre-right welfare state. But, to date, the government has expressed no desire to apply it to superannuation.

If the single largest welfare program in the country is excluded from this sort of analysis, what’s the point? Without the conviction to pursue it consistently and relentlessly, it becomes a marketing scheme.

If social investment has nothing to say about superannuation, it has nothing to say at all.