Hi all Boyd alluded briefly to New Zealand down-sizing its Government recently. I am not sure if he meant the 1980s market reforms, but I will address them anyway, since they had a major impact on the country. While they were painful at the time, I think most realised these reforms were vital.
The 1980s have been variously described as something of an economic and political revolution in reform. The 1980s were a time when New Zealand was forced to confront a social and economic morass that had been progressively forming for more than two decades and started in the 1960s. It came about when we had a baby boomers generation of people being born while New Zealand was one of the most affluent societies in the world. Times were good - the farming sector for which we are probably most famous, was growing nicely. Despite a Cold War and heightened international tensions existing, the country enjoyed just as any other western nation at the time, the onset of mass communication, icons such as coca-cola in large quantities. The supermarket arrived. In 1975 Robert Muldoon came to power - he had a plan: to create 400,000 jobs in a land with just under 3 million people, and he proposed to do this through a massive capital works scheme costing billions. It included an aluminium smelter and associated power station, two large hydro power projects, a massive gas and petroleum exploration leading to commercial production. Also on the cards were what may have been a sort of fore runner to the modern fuel cell car. This may sound socialist, and maybe it was, but the funny thing is a "conservative" party promoted it. Muldoon was leader of the National Party, which promoted nuclear powered ships visiting New Zealand, racially selected rugby teams visiting the country and dawn raids against illegal immigrants. Anyway, that was the plan. Reality was very different, not half as promising and in the end very, VERY costly. As well as the aforementioned, several other large works were proposed, which included a large and very controversial hydroelectric power scheme at Clyde. This was in simple terms a hugely expensive exercise that showed the Muldoon administration at its most inept. In 1973, Britain joined the E.U. We should have seen it coming, but no one did, and both the 1972-1975 Labour Government and the 1975-1984 National Government decided to subsidise the farming sector. Since taxes were already high, the decisions to do this eventually contributed to our radical change in the 1980s. When the National Government was finally booted out of office, it had nearly bankrupted the country. When Labour realised the dollar was grossly over valued, supposedly high and mighty businessmen like Sir Ron Brierley, Michael Fay and others sold their stock overnight and made hundreds of millions while draining most of what little remained in the banks in NZs biggest ever case of insider trading. They should be doing time. Labour under David Lange did a number of things. It sold the railways, costing the jobs of thousands. It closed its public works depots - from here on, most large contracts would be in private hands. The subsidising of exports and their producers stopped. With all of this happening unemployment soared to 247,000 (latest figures show only 40,000 out of work). The many local Government authorities were merged into several provinces on November 1, 1989. It introduced a single over-arching piece of environmental and resource management legislation called the Resource Management Act to replace multiple pieces of legislation and a bloated bureaucracy. ---- There is no denying that this hurt. But few deny that it was necessary - it was simply unsustainable to continue like we were. My next piece, later on, discusses where to from here. Rob ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> See what's inside the new Yahoo! Groups email. http://us.click.yahoo.com/2pRQfA/bOaOAA/yQLSAA/KlSolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ForumWebSiteAt http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
