image

Grand Ice Yeti held a town hall style meeting with locals in the Otago electorate on public pensions and retirement. Members of the community, young and old, packed the community center building.

Attached is a transcript of his opening remarks—

“Thank you everyone for coming here tonight. It is an honor and a blessing to be with you all as we are hitting the home stretch of this campaign.

Today, we are gathered here to discuss an issue that affects us all, eventually, at some point in our lives. That issue is retirement.

What we have in New Zealand today is a retirement crisis. Hundreds of thousands of seniors, from this electorate to every electorate in New Zealand, are barely getting by.

It’s the grim reality our seniors face today, and I find it almost sinister that we have parties in this parliament who openly advocate for cutting welfare benefits, making it harder to retire, and putting your hard-earned public entitlements in private hands.

So, to all of my conservative colleagues in parliament who have tuned in, I want you to read my lips—‘You think you’re going to hang seniors out to dry? Over my dead body!”’

It will be over my dead body - and the dead bodies of millions of hard-working Kiwis looking forward to a safe and secure retirement - when you slash entitlement funding, raise the age bracket, and privatize the system.

The goal here is not just to defend entitlements but expand them, and that’s just what I will fight for in parliament with a Green-Labour majority.

We need to get real about retirement in this country, and it starts here, with the people who desperately need our help the most.

Thank you, once again, for coming. Now let’s open the floor to questions.

First question—“