OLD AGE PITTANCE.

Auckland Star, Volume LI, Issue 293, 8 December 1920, Page 4

OLD AGE PITTANCE.

A STRUGGLE TOR X-CEE. I ON £3 5/ A MONTH. "I am over seventy years of age, and ' have not spent ten pounds on drink in Jmy life," said an old-age pensioner to I a "Star" reporter, this morning, in the I course of some remarks about the hard time old people had just now in getting I along with the present pittance of £3 5/ a month attWed by the State. |He was saying that some people said | the old age pensioners could do all right iif some of them did not waste their I money on drink. That was absurd. The : present pension was more like a pauper's I pittance than like an old age pension. I He explained that it was bad enough for i people who had their own homes, but j for old people who had to pay rent it was a continual puzzle to know hour to get along. He thought that there should be some difference between the I way of treating old people with their : own homes and those who had to pay rent, and instanced the exorbitant money asked for a single room nowadays. His own case is a particularly hard one. In his younger days he did good service for the Government, and has never been afraid of h___ work, but through illness and other causes has not been able to put by anything, and so in his latter days he had to apply for the pension. And the hard task it is for such an old colonist and his wife to struggle along on £3 5/ a month can be realised by anyone with prices at their present abnormal level.