1984 Revolution part I: The rise of Rogernomics and how it still shapes NZ lives
The 1984 election, 40 years ago this month, marked a momentous shift in direction for a country on the brink of bankruptcy. In the first of two articles, Danyl McLauchlan traces a political upheaval whose economic and social effects continue to define us 40 years on.
It happens every 40 or 50 years: the usually placid and gentle stream of New Zealand politics swells and bursts its banks, sweeping complacent politicians and established conventions out to sea. Five decades after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi saw the election of the radical liberal government of the 1890s: it introduced women’s suffrage, broke up the landed oligarchies that dominated the economy and declared that the nation was a dominion instead of a colony. Forty years after that, the first Labour government took office and constructed the cradle-to-grave welfare state.
These were nation-building projects with egalitarian and humanitarian goals. Socialism, Michael Joseph Savage explained, was “applied Christianity”. People’s lives could be made better through the benevolent power of government.
The revolution of the 1980s dismantled this tradition. It saw the welfare state as sclerotic, dying, dragging the country down with it. Government was the problem rather than the solution and most of its functions could be improved upon by the private sector: entrepreneurship, access to global capital, free markets: these would make us richer and freer.
Fear and loathing
The ideology driving the revolution had different names: it was sometimes called monetarism, neoclassical economics or the new right or, in New Zealand, Rogernomics. Over time, it would come to be known as neoliberalism.
In 1981, the Listener published a poem by Bill Manhire called Wellington. Part of it read:
And down on Lambton Quay
the lads in cars go past, it’s raining
and the boys from Beehive Real Estate
are breaking someone’s arm.