Marlborough Express. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. WEDNESDAY, MAY 16, 1906. THE NATIONAL PENSIONS SCHEME.

Marlborough Express, Volume XXXIX, Issue 113, 16 May 1906, Page 2

Marlborough Express. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. WEDNESDAY, MAY 16, 1906. THE NATIONAL PENSIONS SCHEME.

The philanthropic plan of legislation with which Mr Soddon hopes to crown his statesmanship is in the making. We read that the -scheme of national pensions is being worked ont by Mr Morris Fox, actuary of the Government Insurance Department, ajnd Mr Frankland, a former actuary of the Department. The task has been entrusted to competent hands. Mr Fox's ability is of a high order; and Mr Frankland, we believe, had not a little to do with the origin of the important proposal that is to be the chief feature of the forthcoming session. The details of the scheme will be awaited with keen interest, not only in New Zealand, but in every other part of the civilised world. The main \ principles were made known some weeks ago. The idea is that anyone should have the right to deposit a certain sum monthly at, say, a Post Office, these payments to be subsidised by the Government in proportion to the means of the contributors,. and the whole fund to be so applied as to provide an adequate annuity for old age. The system is also designed to protect the mutual interests of husbands and wives. This impresses us as being an exceedingly wise and just provision. The extent of the deposits made by either the husband or the wife would depend largely on the personal thrift or household economy of his or her partner in life; and each would have a moral claim on the savings of the other. Take, for instance, a man, worthy enough as a general rule, but with a disposition to go off on a periodical alcohol tangent or some other kind of tangent, and supposing this man to be blessed with a prudent and unselfish wife: it would be distinctly unfair to allow such a husband to be able to draw at his own will the hard-earned savings for which his thrifty better-half deserves the "chief credit, and in which she centres her hope of an independent and comfortable old age. The underlying principle of the scheme of national pensions—the essential feature of which recommends it to not only the humanitarian but also the political economist, and which elevates it above the plane of the old age pensions— is its incentive to thrift, and this principle should bo preserved and safeguarded in'every possible way. The chief difficulty we sec so far is in the arrangement of a satisfactory ' means of differentiating between the circumstances of the depositors for the purposes of the State subsidies; but this is a detail that should not prove an insuperable obstacle, and which may, indeed,-have a solution simpler than' it appears to have at first sight.