Bryce Who? Small and unprepossessing, smiling his grandfatherly smile, Dr Bryce Wilkinson would be passed, unrecognised, in the street by 999 out of 1,000 New Zealanders. And yet, unelected, and largely unknown outside the neoliberal elite, this little man has left a very big impression on our country.
DR BRYCE WILKINSON can make a reasonable claim to have
written the book that launched neoliberalism in New Zealand. The name of that
book was Economic Management, and
although its official author was the New Zealand Treasury, most historians
agree that the book’s guiding intellect was Dr Wilkinson’s.
Economic Management
knitted together, into what amounted to a detailed manifesto, a raft of radical
economic measures that had been worked out in “Economics II” – described by Te Ara, The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand,
as: “a think tank in the Treasury in the late 1970s and early 1980s.”
Economics II was staffed by young economists who had studied
at universities in the United States where the monetarist theories of Milton
Friedman, and the ideas of neo-classical economics generally, were already
well-entrenched. Along with Dr Wilkinson, Treasury’s “think tank” included
Graeme Scott, Rod Deane and Roger Kerr – individuals who would go on to play
pivotal roles in the execution and consolidation of the neoliberal order in New
Zealand.
When the Labour Party was swept into office at the snap
election of 1984, Economic Management
was waiting for them.
“But, wait a minute!”, I hear you object, “Since when does
Treasury supply New Zealand’s political parties with ready-made manifestoes?
Didn’t Labour have a manifesto of its own in 1984?” Indeed it did – but not the
sort of manifesto in which anyone could place much confidence.
Though the public were not told, Labour’s manifesto was a
hastily-cobbled-together mish-mash of the policies advocated by Labour’s left-wing
dominated Policy Council, and the ideas emanating from the faction in Labour’s
caucus led by Roger Douglas and his fellow “reformers” Michael Bassett, Richard
Prebble, Mike Moore and David Caygill.
So extreme were the ideas of Douglas’s faction, and so
hostile to Labour’s traditions, that a new faction was summoned into existence
to fight them. By May of 1984, this latter group was circulating a document
posing a radical left-wing alternative to the right-wing measures being fed
directly to Douglas and his followers by their special Treasury adviser, Doug
Anthony.
Had the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon, fearing a loss
of his parliamentary majority, not called an early election on the night of 14
June 1984, it is fascinating to speculate as to which of these two,
diametrically opposed, factions would have triumphed. An election held at the
usual time, in November 1984, would have given Labour four more months (and an
annual conference) to decide its future direction. Denied that time, the
contending factions were persuaded to let David Lange’s deputy, the former Law
Professor, Geoffrey Palmer, compose a manifesto both sides could live with, but
which, as a reliable guide to the party’s future conduct in government, was
next to useless.
Labour’s Bastille Day victory ceded the political initiative
to Douglas’s faction. That the country was said by the Reserve Bank and
Treasury to be in the grip of a “financial crisis” contributed hugely to the
Right’s ability to control the course of events. Precipitated by a policy paper
outlining Douglas’s determination to devalue the NZ dollar by 20 percent (which
somehow ended up in the hands of the news media), the “financial crisis”, and
the new government’s decisive handling of it, brought the Left/Right policy
debate to an abrupt (if only temporary) end. It would be Dr Wilkinson’s Economic Management which set the course
for what would later be called “Rogernomics”.
Readers of Bowalley Road born after those heady days in 1984, and thus played no part in the
great struggle for Labour’s heart and soul that raged from July 1984 until the
ejection of Mike Moore from – and the elevation of Helen Clark to – the leadership
of the Labour Party in 1993, have been supplied with this brief sketch of the
role Dr Wilkinson has played in New Zealand’s recent history, so that they can
put his statement on foreign investment and racism, released earlier today
(17/8/15) into some kind of context.
Commenting on the KPMG report showing China to be only the
second-largest foreign investor (after Canada) in New Zealand (excluding
residential property) Dr Wilkinson is reported as saying that “the report
tackled many New Zealanders’ fears that China was buying up land, farms and
businesses.” Anxiety about China was producing a “silly defensiveness” he said,
adding that “racist attitudes and red tape were making New Zealand one of the
most restrictive regimes in the world”. According to Dr Wilkinson: “We should
be much freer and more open to the rest of the world and that helps New
Zealanders get a better price for their assets which means they can invest more
in the rest of the world themselves.”
More free and open! Such is the prescription of the man who,
along with his colleagues from Economics II, persuaded the fourth Labour
government to transform New Zealand into the most “free” and “open” economy on
Earth. The man who urged on the sale of public assets to “foreign investors”,
who were then free to repatriate the billions of dollars of profits extracted
from them to their new owners offshore. The man who now calls those attempting
to keep what remains of New Zealand’s assets out of foreign hands “racist”, but
whose policy of preparing state-owned entities for privatisation saw
tens-of-thousands of Maori forestry workers, railway workers and construction
workers thrown out of their state jobs – leading to the disintegration of whole
communities and the fracturing of whanau.
Small and unprepossessing, smiling his grandfatherly smile
in the group photos of the New Zealand Initiative (successor to the now defunct
Business Roundtable, which for many years was run by another alumnus from
Economics II, Roger Kerr) Dr Wilkinson would be passed, unrecognised, in the
street by 999 out of 1,000 New Zealanders. And yet, unelected, and largely
unknown outside the neoliberal elite, this little man has left a very big
impression on our country.
I’ll leave it for you, the reader, to decide whether it has
been for good or ill.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Monday, 17 August 2015.
