By: Mike Hosking | Tuesday, June 12, 2012 9:20 AM

If the TV3 poll last night on the superannuation age is remotely accurate, doesn’t John Key find himself in a weird old space.

63 percent want the entitlement age raised to 66 or 67, and 54 percent think he should abandon his promise not to touch it. It’s a rare old day when you have the public urging the Government to make a current policy less attractive and even rarer when they’re seemingly telling them to walk away from promises.

So what does all this tell us? Well I think the days of super being the lightning rod it once was are coming to an end. For decades it has been this sacrosanct issue you don’t touch, or if you did you made it better, not worse. Remember the surcharge fiasco with the Bolger Government? Remember that mad attempt to try and get all the parties together in some sort of super accord? The more it got talked about and touched, the more it got heated, inflamed and shambolic.

A lot of the tension around super came from the current set of retirees who by and large have been badly treated. They were promised one thing only to watch that promise eroded and abated away. The specialist savings scheme that governments set up, the whole entitlement v benefit debate. In a nutshell they got a raw deal and as such it’s been a touchy subject ever since.

But having said that, anyone under 50 has been growing up in this country under the broad belief that if you think the Government is going to be there for you in retirement, you’re a fool. It doesn’t mean they won’t but the message has at last been drilled into us that basically you need to be taking care of things yourself and if there’s something from the state by way of an entitlement then that’s a bonus, not a living wage. The growth of KiwiSaver has been proof of that.

There is also no doubt that the cost is unsustainable. It’s an easy equation. We know how many people we have and we know how old they are, therefore we know what the bills are going to be and when in the not too distant future you have two and a half people working to pay for each retiree versus the five we currently have. That’s not an equation you want to be lumped with.

In general I would draw a great deal of optimism from the poll. It shows a maturity and understanding of a complex issue. It shows perhaps that by increasing the retirement age we understand that the state should not be playing a large role in our lives, that the state as the sole provider of any sort of income is not a healthy thing, and the whole concept of retirement is changing. The ‘quit work at 65 to play bowls while the Government pays you’ days are over. If I were Key I’d grab the poll, embrace the mood and run with it.

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