Saturday 14 September 2024

Forty Years Of Remembering To Forget.

The Beginning of the End: Rogernomics became the short-hand descriptor for all the radical changes that swept away New Zealand’s social-democratic economy and society between 1984 and 1990. In the bitterest of ironies, those changes were introduced by the very same party which had entrenched New Zealand social-democracy 50 years earlier. Labour has yet to atone adequately for its most grievous historical sin.

EVERYBODY AND THEIR DOG, it seems, is marking the 40th anniversary of “Rogernomics” by writing about its meaning and legacy. The plain fact, of course, is that any journalist with a serious interest in politics and economics should have been writing about little else since 1984. Rogernomics is the driving narrative of our times.

Over the span of those 40 years, the term for the phenomena described by Rogernomics has changed frequently.

In the years preceding the election of the Fourth Labour Government, when New Zealand journalists still had their eyes on the “overseas” depredations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the analytical catch-all phrase was “The New Right”. When the nostrums of Thatcher and Reagan arrived on these shores they were bundled together under the heading of “Labour’s Free Market Policies”. Then, Rob Campbell (still a prominent trade unionist in the mid-1980s, as well as a popular columnist for the Sunday Star-Times) translated the US catch-all term Reaganomics into Rogernomics.

That one stuck.

Rogernomics became the short-hand descriptor for all the radical changes that swept away New Zealand’s social-democratic economy and society between 1984 and 1990. In the bitterest of ironies, those changes were introduced by the very same party which had entrenched New Zealand social-democracy 50 years earlier. Labour has yet to atone adequately for its most grievous historical sin.

As the years, and then the decades, passed, however, Rogernomics seemed increasingly inadequate to the task of describing the new society that was taking shape – let alone the ideological foundations upon which it was being built. Some writers, well aware of the historical origins of the ideas that were now driving not only New Zealand’s, but the entire world’s, economic thinking tried, unsuccessfully, to attach the “Classical Liberal” label to them.

For journalistic purposes, however, the word “classical” was just too old and too dusty to characterise an ideology that was relentlessly laying waste to old and dusty things. For reporters without the slightest grounding in economic history, the policies being implemented all around them seemed new and dynamic. Twenty-something journalists weren’t to know that similar policies had been tried, and had failed, a century before they were born. They didn’t care – history was so last millennium!

A better word than Rogernomics still had to be found. Something with intellectual heft – and a twenty-first century ring to it. If the soubriquet “Neo” was good enough for the hero of the Matrix, then it was also good enough to update and turbocharge the rather lame legacy of economic and political liberalism. Thus was born “neo-liberalism”. But, since hyphens, too, were old and dusty, the noun was swiftly shortened to, “neoliberalism”.

That one stuck, too.

There was, however, another reason why the shock of the neo was crucial to the changed economic, social and political order. As everybody who’s ever taken a marketing course (and that includes far too many journalists!) will be aware, describing a product as “new” gives it a palpable edge. Because who wants to buy something “old” – right?

Certainly not the neoliberals, and certainly not the Labour politicians and their advisers charged with making as many New Zealanders as possible cringe when they “remembered” what their country was like before Rogernomics picked it up by the scruff of the neck and set it on the right track to a freer and more prosperous future.

And, boy, were they good at it! Even today, 40 years later, journalists who were barely out of nappies in 1984, will roll out the same terrible hardships listed by the Rogernomes as they set about persuading their fellow citizens that the New Zealand of 1935-1984 was a cross between a Soviet supermarket and a Polish shipyard. Whole bulldozers, they said, could be made to disappear completely by New Zealand Railways. If you wanted to subscribe to a foreign magazine, then you had to apply in advance to the Reserve Bank for the necessary ‘overseas funds’. Everything closed for the weekend. There were no decent restaurants. And, you could not get a decent cup of coffee for love or money!

It would be quite wrong to suggest that there was no truth at all to any of these carefully crafted anecdotes. But, truth or falsehood wasn’t really the point. Their real value lay not in what they encouraged people to remember about the years before Rogernomics, but in what they made it so much easier for people to forget.

We Kiwis are an insecure bunch, and nothing encourages our tendency towards cultural cringe more successfully than suggesting the rest of the world sees us as being out-of-touch and behind-the-times. Who hasn’t heard about the story of the American tourist who, having been dropped-off in downtown Auckland, was obliged to set his watch back twenty years?

In the end, the number of Kiwis who wanted their country to be “just like overseas” was more than enough to make it happen. When the Rogernomes set out to eliminate the “dinosaur” institutions of old New Zealand, they were pushing on an open door.

What New Zealanders failed to grasp (or willfully ignored) was that the highly-taxed, highly-regulated economy that the Rogernomes and their neoliberal successors set out to dismantle and destroy, was also the economy that made it possible for the overwhelming majority of Kiwis to have a job, own their own home, save for their retirement, and fund a public health and education system that allowed them to predict with confidence a life for their children that would be better and more fulfilling than their own.

Yes, the “opening up of New Zealand” meant 24/7 shopping, excellent restaurants, and world-beating coffee. But, it also meant that the men and women who had cringed at the thought of living in a country that closed for the weekend would, as the price of their unimpeded retail therapy, be required to watch their children grow up in an nation that made them pay for their tertiary qualifications, spend the first 5-10 years of their working lives paying off their student loans, and watching, helplessly, as house prices climbed beyond their reach.

And that was just the middle-class! What the Rogernomes and neoliberals are determined to make New Zealanders forget is that the shift from a highly-taxed, highly-regulated economy, to one guided by the Nineteenth Century doctrine of laissez-faire, was made possible by the deliberate and brutal impoverishment of working-class Māori and Pasifika. God knows, the old New Zealand could, and should, have treated its non-Pakeha population much better than it did, but at least in the years prior to 1984 the stats were headed in the right direction. By the mid-80s, close to two-thirds of Māori living in Auckland owned their own home. Within 40 years, that number had fallen to 18 percent.

Everything comes at a price – even a decent cup of coffee.


This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Monday, 2 September 2024.

4 comments:

Guerilla Surgeon said...

Classical liberal is the phrase you use when you have a modicum of intellect and you don't want to describe yourself as a raging reactionary. Douglas, and later Jim Bolger have a lot to answer for. And yet, in spite of the impoverishment of much of society, I guarantee they still sleep like babies. Because as far as they're concerned, poverty is the price of "progress", and I'm damn sure it didn't affect them and theirs. Capitalists just love a reservoir of unemployed to keep wages low. I'm not sure we could in fact have kept New Zealand as a relatively high tax and egalitarian society, but it certainly would have been worth a punt. People are happier for instance if they know that when they grow old the medical/accommodation needs will be taken care of. They behave better as well. And God help us I'm sick of the stories about NZ rail losing carriages, or needing overseas funds for cars and whatever. It wasn't perfect but it was certainly better than what we have now.
Actually, the best story to come out of that time reflects our egalitarianism a little better. A maybe apocryphal American salesman was supposed to be travelling around New Zealand and staying in hotels. In this particular one he wanted a bit of a sleep in but was woken at 6 o'clock by one of the hotel maids with a cup of tea. The woman said "Do you take sugar?" "No!" he said. "Oh well, don't stir it then."

Archduke Piccolo said...

The Milton Friedmanite Chicago School of Neo-Classical Economics was - and remains - a complete crock - a crackpot 'theory' that is so devoid of any empirical backing, that it doesn't deserve the appellation 'hypothesis', let alone 'theory'. It is nonsense.

New Zealanders at large knew damned well they were being done like a dogs dinner by a Government 'reform' that was backed up by lies, damnable lies, and bogus statistics. At the time I was in a unique position to know about the nature of some of those bogus statistics at the time.

Of course, the Fat Cattists who were to profiteer from Government theft and subsequent fencing of stolen public property knew as well as I did that what was being served up was a load of BS - but what would you, when you have been given the licence to loot the Common Weal? It was said at the time that Rogernomics and its sequel, Ruthanasia, would enrich maybe 10% of New Zealanders; another 10% might remain pretty much as they were, and the remaining 80% would lose out. Who said that was right of course.

Who was going in to bat for ordinary New Zealanders? The one group that might have at least LOOKED as though they were offering resistance, the Unions, simply rolled over - a betrayal as monumental as the Labour Party's own socio-economic and political tergiversation. Of course, they still had their hands out for workers' subscriptions, oh, dear me, yes.

I recall a comment made in 1989 or 1990 by one very prominent New Zealand Fat Cattist - don't recall the name. He reckoned that we had to follow through with Doug and Ruth's economic vand--- 'reforms' lest we become 'a funny little country in the southwest corner of the Pacific.' Well, guess what. Those very reforms have brought this nation to where it is today: a funny little country in the southwest corner of the Pacific.
Cheers,
Ion A. Dowman

Guerilla Surgeon said...

I was doing an assignment at Massey paper about government, and I was looking at the "third way" so-called. I was including something about Douglas and company and their treatment of trade unions, so I cheekily – I guess because I was old – rang up the SSC and asked to speak to someone about it. I can't remember who it was I spoke to but the name would probably ring a bell even today. They were quite exultant about the way the state unions pretty much rolled over. They said something like "We did a real job on them". And then some years later I heard an old trade unionist, a veteran of the 51 waterfront dispute I think, say that he thought that the teachers union was the most effective in the country. Pretty sure that's the police union, but the fact that he could say that I regarded as a national disgrace.😇

Newview said...

Your nostalgia for pre rogernomics is evident Chris. Yes there were jobs with government run institutions but for how long would that have lasted. Our domestic economy functioned ok until it didn’t with bloated inefficient government departments, and an export economy that totally relied on the sheep’s wool and meat. When Britain cut us loose the party was over. I was born in 51 and my observation was having a great childhood and there was no crime to speak of. There were still poor kids who went to health camp. My father, a chemist, never owned a new car because he didn’t have overseas funds. He finally bought his first car in the seventies. There was little choice of goods to buy so not much advantage being too wealthy. I don’t disagree that rogernomics has failed but something had to change and it did. IMO it’s not the system we have that’s at fault it’s how successive governments have applied it. In general terms National governments have been good for business but lacking in social justice. Labour governments have run bloated administrations, looked after the poor but have always been happy to spend other peoples money without encouraging people to make it. There is rarely any balance but that’s not the systems fault.