Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 14:20:25 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: Re: M-I: New Zealand Reforms


[Justin writes]
'The New Zealand figures are genuinely horrifying. Can Rob explain how this
government kept getting re-elected?'

[Of course the salient problem is the historic inability of soc. dems.
parties to keep ecorats out of their ranks.  In a two-party system, the
strategy of the soc. dems. is typically one of inhabiting the terrain
precisely one milimetre to the left of the Tories - forcing their
traditional constituency to vote for what they hate/fear least.

New Zealand is interesting because it seems the Labour Party exploded from
a position right of Muldoon's Tories.  Muldoon's Tories were of the
*noblesse oblige* Keynesian variety - consequently detested by the Mont
Pelerin-inspired (MP was the revolutionary free market movement set up
after the war by von Mises, Hayek and Friedman) baby-boomers (ie. the first
generation to have no memory of the depression).

Salient in the NZ branch of this pack of thugs was an ex-vitamin pill
peddler called Roger Douglas.  He was full of the 'post-industrial society'
stuff, failing completely to notice both NZ's natural comparative
advantages in primary and secondary industry, and the historic
manifestation of this; that NZ's economy did infact depend on these sectors
both economically and socially.

Just before the 1984 election, Muldoon was forced to devalue the currency. 
As shadow finance minister, Douglas had leajed his own plans to do so - and
he and his mates, along with the rest of the world's speculating parasites,
unloaded NZ dollars in hungry anticipation.   When the 20% cut came, these
bastards became instant millionaires.  As Labour came in, a full-blown
crisis had developed.  Radical problems requiring, pace Douglas, radical
measures.  Almost the whole of an agenda designed to be implemented over
five or six years was implemented in these tumultuous days days rendered
thus by the the very implementers themselves.

The new PM, Lange, was an adequate figure-head, but played ever less a role
in policy development - it had simply gotten out of his hands and he was,
after all, leader when the changes came about - he could not very well
criticise them immediately - and thus not after that either.  

In 1985, Douglas called an 'economic summit' (copying a Bob Hawke idea -
but even less democratic in its constituency) and this spawned the
'Business Roundtable', a group who represented 2/3 of the NZ share market,
nearly all metropolitan media and NZ's biggest bank.  Needless to say,
those roundtablers whose wealth lay in secondary industry did not last
long.  The Roundtable's CEO was a bloke called Kerr, one of the only three
NZders who were members of the Mont Pelerin group.

The Roundtable pushed privatisation in the media, in the house, and through
their pressure groups.  In all, $15 billion worth of the p[eople's capital;
was unloaded at firesale prices.  Funnily enough, $12 1/2 billion of this
was picked up by Roundtable members.  The Roundtable pushed its scum into
senior Treasury positions, and the scum reciprocated by handing back
millions by way of 'consultancies'.

Gawd, this is all so familiar to an Australian ...

Anyway, once Labor had effectively dissolved its public support by 1987,
the Roundtablers handed enormous campaign donations to Douglas personally. 
The consequent election advertising has rightly gone down in history as the
very best of its disgusting genre.  Labour fell in.

In 1990 not even money was gonna save them - and the Rountablers sent their
two Mont Pelerin members (Kerr and Gibbs) to the Tories' Jim Bolger with
the idea that if NZ's third MP member, one Ruth Richardson, was to be made
Finance Minister, Bolger might very well expect Roundtable media support. 
The country was copping some serious defecits at this stage and Bolger
managed to lay the blame at the feet of the people instead of the currency
float and the destruction of NZ's comparative advantage industries.  The
infamous *Employment Contracts Act 1991* followed, and unionism in the
workplace no longer existed in any meaningful way.  Now the NZ voter has
just voted in the same mob, with an electoral system not even political
scientists pretend to understand.  That's my understanding - most of it
>from LaRouchean sources, but much of it backed up by the general knowledge
of one who has long kept a doleful eye on our brave role model across the
Tasman.

Rob.




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