From: masljg@gdr.bath.ac.uk (L J Groves)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.new-zealand
Subject: Re: Sir Robert Muldoon Dies
Date: 18 Aug 92 17:53:18 GMT
Organization: School of Mathematics, University of Bath, UK

No matter what you think about the direct relationship between Muldoon's
policies and the current economic situation, I think Muldoon can be held
responsible for the mess that the country is now in -- but in a rather
different way than previous posters have discussed: political rather than
economic.

The hall-mark of Muldoon's approach was the managed economy.  There was a time
when this approach was generally regarded as sensible, and would have been
adopted by both major parties.  But in later years, Muldoon tried to patch
up the mess with increasingly desperate and half-baked measures, culminating
in the so-called wage-price freeze (it never seemed to affect the salaries of
the big business people, and a remarkable number of exemptions were granted on 
prices, so guess who really carried the can?).

By the time Muldoon decided to jack it in (I don't believe that he ever had
any feasible plan for how to end the wage-price freeze, even though it
obviously couldn't go on indefinitely, so he used Marilyn Waring as a scape
goat [on a pretext so weak that it could only be called dishonest] to call an
election that he knew he couldn't win: the only conclusion is that he decided
to just walk away from the problem!) everyone was anxious to dissociate
themselves with Muldoon and his policies.  Rather than looking at where the
bad decisions were made (eg perhaps "think big" might have worked if they
hadn't been so pig-headed and had concentrated on a smalled number of
projects, or selected their projects better), the whole approach of the
managed economy was slated as evil and labelled "interventionism".  Thus, the
Labour Party who we all used to think were a left-wing, socialistically
inclined party, for whom state control was the natural approach, took a mighty
swing to the right, and started spouting about the virtues of "free-market"
policies.

The "interventionist" taunt was used in such a disparaging fashion that no
politician who wanted to be taken seriously dared to say anything that could
be construed as supporting any sort of economic management.  The Labour ranks
suddenly all because good free-marketeers, with the odd exception such as Jim
Anderton who left the party.  The Nats went on a witch hunt to weed out any
closet interventionists -- Bolger had to clean up his act before he was
acceptable as party leader and people like Birch had to lie low and
metamorphisize for several years.  Even the old Social Credit lot found the
associations of their past unbearable and turned into the Democrats, with much
less emphasis on their old economic policy.

The net effect of all this is that the country is now firmly in the grip of
the free marketeers on both sides of the house who are happy to sell off the
country's assets (because it helps to balance the books), to charge for
medical services (because it doesn't hurt them and their cohort who are all
well-heeled and have had medical insurance for years), to charge for
university education (because the only benefit they know how to measure is the
benefit of the student), to destroy the foundations of government science
(because it doesn't see short term profit in basic research), to deregulate
everything in sight (because that's part of the doctrine -- with the effect
that hundreds, if not thousands, of small (and not so small) businesses close,
resulting in massive unemployment), etc, etc.  And there's no one to oppose
them -- except for Jim Anderton, Winston Peters, a couple of National party
defectors, and a handful of semi-stifled back-benchers.

  [Aside: One of the more bizarre effects of deregulation is that there are
  now so many taxis in Wellington that there are now enough taxi stands for
  them all.  They get fined if they park anywhere other than taxi stands, so a
  large proportion of them just continually cruise around town.  This will of
  course contribute to both polution and traffic congestion, not to mention
  the depletion of fossil fuels, but of course such things don't come into the 
  equations!  It is also an interesting comment on the free market philosophy 
  that many of the new taxi operators charge higher rates!]

Maybe many of the reforms of the post-Muldoon era have been necessary, but I
suspect that they might have been approached in a somewhat more humane way if
the politicians had not been quite so anxious to avoid being tarred with the
interventionist brush -- synonymous with "neo-Muldoonist".

Cheers
	Lindsay


--------------
Lindsay Groves                     On leave from:	
School of Mathematical Sciences    Department of Computer Science
University of Bath                 Victoria University of Wellington
Bath, England                      Wellington, New Zealand
ljg@maths.bath.ac.uk               lindsay@comp.vuw.ac.nz