Retirement – For richer or poorer

You have to be really old to remember the Platters 1955 hit “Oh yes, I’m the Great Pretender, pretending that I’m doing well.” It’s a song due for revival, never more timely as the rich-poor gap yawns ever wider in New Zealand.

Roughly, the top one per cent of us own 16 per cent of the nation’s wealth and the top 10 per cent of households own half of everything worth anything. Internationally, all of that drops us into the bottom third of OCED rankings and falling as the world economy unravels.

And yet we still believe we’re a country where we give each other a fair go and equal rights. The myths that promote that mindset are alive and well. We entertain ourselves with TV programmes about buying real estate that most of us couldn’t dream of affording, of holidays you’d have to extend the mortgage to enjoy. And as for the adverts that invite you to sip wine at sunset in expensive retirement villages, 60 per cent of seniors have little or no savings and survive on the government super. Only 20 per cent of us could afford to get through the gate.

The annual debate over school uniforms is raging again. One popular argument in favour of keeping them is that they level the gap between rich and poor kids. My memory of school days is that we all knew exactly who the rich kids were, whatever they wore.

Kids can’t be fooled but we can, more and more the older we get. We fool ourselves into thinking issues that won’t go away – homelessness, failing schools, a post code health lottery, a recycling prison population – can somehow be fixed by ignoring the growing wealth-poverty gap.

Obviously, it’s disastrous for our health and wellbeing as a nation. Less visible is the negative impact that gap has on the country’s economic growth.

If you are old enough to remember singing that Platters song, wearing luminous socks and rocking and rolling along with it, be sure to remember all the lyrics. They went on to say “Too real is the feeling of make believe”.

We’ve been kidding ourselves ever since that things will get better, while denying the truth about the siloed society we’ve created. Kidding ourselves that we can ignore the wealth gap, the race, gender pay, skills, literacy and every other sort of gap that’s been widening ever since the Platters stopped singing.

We should have taken a break back then and listened to all the verses. “I’m not you see what I pretend to be, I’m wearing my heart like a crown.”

But for the generation that let this shameful divide open ever wider, it’s never too late to listen. And we’ve got an election coming up. I’ll be looking for a party that dares to speak honestly about the gaps between us and how to start bridging them.