seventies through the mid nineties. So it was the right wing authoritarian Muldoon and the neo-libs wot dunnit. Clearly we need a good dose of what ails us from Hide and Garrett to sort things. What a waste of time... Get the man who as RBNZ governor had a policy of supressing wage rises to inquire into why our wages are so much lower than Australia's -- you couldn't make this stuff up. BTW, has anyone calculated how our credit rating would look now if Brash was elected PM and put through his tax cuts? Brash deserves to be as discredited as his buddy Greenspan has become in the US. i can see what danyl is saying. brash has an ideological approach to economics, not a reality-based one. Ah... exactly what Phil Goff was chuntering on about this morning -- but I find it easy to believe he doesn't have an ideological or any other kind of thought in his pretty little head. Rather boring, and lazy, the way 'ideological' has become a pretentious synonym for 'I don't agree with you'. yes. the same way much criticism of the labour govt centred on it being "socialist". socialism is an ideology, no a means of government. thing is, this govt maintains dozens and dozens of interventionist policies and programmes, all of which can easily be characterised as "socialistic". moreover, they're proposing and implementing them as we speak. but if you're exclusively wedded to an ideology that says "only the market can