You should change your name to 'The Mysterious Tagit'

As a country we are facing the same issues as many other countries at the moment.  An aging population, with the ratio of retired people to working people changing.  We simply can't afford to maintain the current benefits to retired people that we have in the past -there are too many of them and not enough people working and paying tax to balance it out.  The obvious solution, which several countries are doing, is to increase the age of retirement -but unfortunately John Key categorically ruled that out some years ago.  So the government are struggling to find alternative ways to reduce cost.  I think we can look forward to means tested pensions, getting rid of gold cards completely -or severely reducing their uses, and in the future we will still have to raise retirement ages.  Problem is this increasing older population are exactly the people who bother turning out to vote, so none of the parties want to tell the truth about the real situation.

The gold card was vote buying in the dying moments of the labour government. Politically difficult to remove but there is no reason for this card to exist

i have no problem with goldcard holders using the ferry to go waiheke for free,I mean it is a timetable service run and has to run under the terms of contract,whether there 1 paying passenger of 10 card holders the get a subsidy that covers running costs,I think the problem here is that a new player is town and possibly cheaper.

Having worked all my workable years and paid all them-there taxes, surely a pension and a bit of respect (and a Gold Card) are justly mine to have earned?

Think there is more to this than meets the eye. With commodity prices continuing to fall we have alot less money coming in. We still have debt and interest to pay. A Greek default looming in the next week or so. The ripple effect of this added to falling commodity prices could be catastrophic   for N.Z.  In which case the gold card may be part of the initial cost cutting measures.

Kevin.S wrote: Depends how you look at it corosanta.  That's a little bit like saying "I have lived in this rental house for 30 years and paid my rent all that time, so surely it should be mine now".  The taxes you paid were used to run the country during that time, not saved away to give back to you later on.  Perhaps, as Reel Deal explains, our governments should have taken a portion of money every year and invested it.  But, generally speaking, our past governments haven't been that smart (not that I think the current one is either).

Someone in the Herald woke up to this now -