pension, page-11

"http://www.news.com.au/finance/australias-official-retirement-age-of-70-highest-in-the-world/story-e6frfm1i-1226903204989

how come a relativily poor country like nz can pay a universal pension

and

we as a relatively rich country cannot?

they can still pay a pension at 65 and we will have to wait until 70!

something is wrong!

nz should have budget surplus this year and we will not!"
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To take your last point first, how on earth could we have a surplus this year in Australia, given the profligate spending waste of six years of Labor. It's now up to the Coalition to try to get the Budget back on course so that we can continue to pay pensions etc into the future for the ever increasing numbers of aging people who will be claiming it because they've not saved enough to fund their own retirement.

Further, because the Coalition in election mode agreed to continue with the NDIS, Gonski and god knows what other spending initiatives Labor had proposed without thought for how they were going to be paid for, it's now necessary to fund all these well into the future.

Comments such as the present debt to GDP ratio are meaningless. It's the upward trajectory of spending in the years to come that the Coalition is trying to address.
No one, of course, wants to listen. Everyone just wants to whine about what they might as individuals be losing.

Yes, NZ pays a non-means tested universal pension.
But it forms part of the individual's taxable income, unlike here where it is tax free.
NZ are more smart than Australia when it comes to working out the most efficient way to do things.

There is no tax free threshold in NZ so everyone pays tax at some level (unless this has changed since I left there).

So it's just not possible to reasonably compare the situation of pensions in Australia and New Zealand because the way they are structured is so completely different.