Page 65 - Group Insurance and Retirement Benefit IC 83 E- Book

Superannuation Schemes 27 He found himself in entire agreement with the opener's

remarks on unfunded schemes.
Essentially, pensioners did not want money; they wanted clothing, a house, food and so

on. The drawback to the ordinary pension scheme was that the pension was simply a
ticket, under the signature of K. O. Peppiatt, for a relative share in the current production

of the community, and not for an absolute share. It followed that the assets of pension
funds should be employed in increasing the relative production per head of the

community, so as to allow pensioners their share without reducing the standard of the

active workers. He was not entirely happy that that was being done in current investment
policy, and if it was not being done it was time that attention was paid to that aspect of

the matter. In the meantime, he would point out once more that a funded scheme was

surely saving, to which so much attention was being directed by the Government at the
present time. It was an unhappy commentary that on the one hand the Government should

advocate saving while on the other hand appropriating sums such as were mentioned by
the opener out of capital and treating them as revenue.

He would point out also that the decision whether to fund or not had an important bearing
on the scale of benefits adopted. Anyone who had taken part in discussions on the setting

up of a new fund knew the vital part played by past service cost. He was always in favor

of funding a scheme, whether by a private employer or a public authority, so that full
appreciation of the genuine costs of the scheme could not be avoided ; that full

appreciation could be achieved only when payment had to be made not only for current
benefits but also for past service pensions.

If he might attempt to find the keynote of the paper, he would suggest that it was a subtle
dissertation on the theme 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment'.

He would draw attention to the fact that there were so many parties to the marriage as to

resemble a harem. They had been at pains as a nation to break the bonds of slavery, and
he hoped that they would be reluctant to impose them, however disguised, on their

institutions. Let them have standardization, but not centralization or unification, for that

way lay frustration.
Mr R. S. McDougall (a visitor) said that he was the author of a paper on superannuation

presented a short time before to another body, and he felt then and still felt that the three