Compulsory Viewing
NZ on Screen has six clips from the Revolution mini-series. Together they form the entire first episode.
Many readers probably can not recall Fortress NZ. The mini-series captures the changes:
Documentary series Revolution mapped the social and economic changes in New Zealand society in the 1980s and early 1990s. This first episode focuses on NZ’s radical transformation from a heavily regulated welfare state to a petri dish for free market ideology. It includes interviews with key political and business figures of the day, who reveal how the dire economic situation by the end of Robert Muldoon’s reign made it relatively easy for Roger Douglas to implement extreme reform. Revolution won Best Factual Series at the 1997 Film and TV Awards.
I don’t think Roger’s reforms were that extreme. Most of the world has now done them. He was just leading the pack.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
I don’t think Roger’s reforms were that extreme. Most of the world has now done them. He was just leading the pack.
Extreme when implemented in a country described as ‘Poland with sunshine’, perhaps.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
I was too young at the time, but from what I understand the country would have gone bankrupt otherwise.
Anti Rogernomics people, have no answer on what should have been done. They just wanted to keep going on as things were. It is like they had their heads in the sand and just didn’t want to know about looming economic catastrophe.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Yes, I remember the mini-series. T
he house I was living in was used for a scene.
I never knew so many people could be behind the cameras.
I also remember how Bruce Allpress was dressed in a mish-mash of airman’s (ie., NCO) (the hat badge is a give-away) and officer’s uniforms so he could play the part of Air Marshal Sir Ewan Jameson — especially interesting was how they had managed to put the air marshal’s rank insignia on his epaulettes the wrong way round.
Another Tom Scott ‘triumph’, I thought.
Speaking of whom, I wonder how soon it will be before his latest effort, apparently boosted by much free publicity from TV, will be consigned to video shop oblivion.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
While the Revolution mini-series is worth watching, for a more critical version – which in my opinion is more accurate – check out Alister Barry’s documentary, “Someone Else’s Country”. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be online, but you can watch Barry’s follow-up 2002 film entitled “In a Land of Plenty” at NZonScreen:
http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/in-a-land-of-plenty-2002
Bryce
August 26th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
I can remember when you couldn’t get foreign currency without an airline ticket.
When anyone lucky enough to travel overseas had to take a massive shopping list of clothes and appliances you couldnt buy here.
When most bags had “school bag” printed on them to qualify for a sales tax exemption.
When you could practice driving in a mall car park because they werent allowed to open on the weekends.
BNZ tower; Mangere bridge; Southdown freezing works – organised labour anyone?
August 26th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Douglas wasn’t leading the pack. The UK and the US had already had their go by the time he started. The UK had a similar privatisation/reform lump in the 1950s and of course, the folks who literally invented the term and introduced it to the English language, privatising while all others in the western world were nationalising, were the National Socialists of Germany, who had completed their privatisation programme by 1937 before their other programmes took precedence. I avoid their emotive title so as not to distract the thread. The one set of policies were not necessarily related to the other, more objectionable ones.
Douglas was unique in how far he got before the backlash. Even Reagan and Thatcher didn’t get as far as Douglas in their political terms, although they survived politically for much longer. (Perhaps because they didn’t get as far, weren’t so “extreme”?)
There’s no doubt that NZ was at an extreme before Douglas got started. Too bad he rushed to the other extreme is my personal opinion.
August 26th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Frog, Douglas was implementing his reforms at the same time as Reaganomics and Thatcherism (which were all derived from Hayek’s economics, which were a complete departure from Keynes).
Unfortunately, those people among us who weren’t politically cognisant at the time, have no sense of the context under which these three dynamos were operating.
The state was ubiquitous. Inefficiency was not only rife, it was raping us.
Muldoon, an arch Keynesian, had succeeded in running the economy into the ground, stifling enterprise with regulation, engaging in building assets with crippling debt, at a time the oil shocks of the seventies were rocking the global foundations.
Along came Douglas, who threw off the fetters and allowed enterprise and initiative to flourish.
He was, at the time, applauded. Until 1987, when the global correction came. Up to that time, the results he’d put on the ground, were a freaking miracle.
Douglas made some mistakes, INVHO.
He sold assets too cheaply, but he had to, since if he didn’t do it when he did, he may have lost the opportunity.
He allowed a wild-west environment to flourish whereby pricks like Messrs Fay and Richwhite were allowed to, with “Chinese walls,” both advise upon and eventually purchase, state assets, which they proceeded to run into the ground and eventually sell at huge profit. Those wankers both deserve prison, not knighthoods.
However, on balance, Douglas changed the business and civil landscape of the nation, for the better. He gave us a perspective of a better way, that by-and-large, we haven’t resiled from, even throughout nine long years of a Hulun-Liarbore govt that could have sent us back to the dark ages.
She didn’t, because she isn’t stupid, and she could see, that the Douglas economy was better than the Keynesian, by a wide margin.
August 26th, 2009 at 11:27 pm
“I don’t think Roger’s reforms were that extreme. Most of the world has now done them. He was just leading the pack.”
why did the world follow stupid, insignificant, unknown, irrelevant NZ.
What made us relevant?
Two tiny little islands with the population the size of a European city and they all followed our initiatives
Unbeleivably bizzare, unrealistic and completly conspirital.
Roger Douglas was set up by Muldoon to change the status quo then formed Act with National and Labour ex ministers.
And we’re to believe it was all coincidental?
Xcuse me while I kiss the sky
August 26th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Not sure what you are getting at wwb? What Douglas realised was that people behave according to the incentives put in place.
Fortress NZ resulted in expensive, shoddy NZ made products. Business was more about what protection or favours the government and bureaucracy had given it rather than producing what the consumer wanted.
No surprises that the rest of the world were beginning to realise the same things around the same time.
A pity that the 5th Labour government coasted on the gains from Rogernomics but didn’t learn the lessons and increased the incentives for wasteful use private sector and government money.
Hopefully, the current government will steadily chip away at the perverse incentives still in place.
August 27th, 2009 at 12:18 am
I watched these clips. I was not old enough at the time, barely alive in fact, to know what was going on.
However, the difference in the National party today and that of Muldoonism is striking. Then everything was regulated and the state paid for everything. Then it was about how many were employed, not about the quality of the employees and the ultimate performance of the company. Business was distorted in needing permit to do anything. Competition was disallowed.
In fact, I would make a prediction that if John Key were a politician in 1984 he would be with Labour and all the Labourites today would be praising him. He would have slotted in nicely with Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble and probably even with David (I’m porking my speech writer) Lange. All the National die hards at the time would hate him.
Likewise, while I describe myself as right of centre, I really despise the old National ultraconservative politics of Muldoon and prior. All credit to the National Party for reinventing themselves.
August 27th, 2009 at 7:58 am
I forget – it was also against the law to ship goods more than 100 miles by truck. Greens would love to have that come back I’m sure.
August 27th, 2009 at 9:18 am
reid – I think if you check your history, you will find that the programmes initiated by Reagan and Thatcher had already done their dash before Douglas even got started. I am old enough to remember, and what was Reaganomics became Rogernomics in NZ, even after Reagan lost his majority control in the US Congress and Senate, shutting down his ‘reforms’. While I didn’t like the programmes and certainly don’t like the results, I would have to say that Douglas accomplished more and faster, as was his plan. He was absolutely right to insist on swift action before the backlash could stop his ‘reforms’.
I wouldn’t want to go back to the Muldoon era, but I certainly think that Douglas went way too far. We need markets and we need governments. The two have separate roles in society. When either dominates the other, the people lose.
You know the old joke? Why do we have free markets? Because the government provides them for free!
August 27th, 2009 at 10:37 am
In the 70s NZ was one of the wealthiest per capita and most egalitarian countries in the world.
Then we had the reforms – and I agree that they were needed…to a point.
Now we remain one of the most deregulated markets in the world and yet we have also become one of the poorest first world countries in the world, Australia which used to be much poorer than us per capita has leapt ahead over the last thirty years despite having incredibly high tax rates and having a very very regulated market system.
Free markets only work if everyone sitting down at the bargaining table is also a free market. Do you think China is a free market? Australia? America? Japan? No. None of them. Plus now there is hugely unequal bargaining power between us and some of our closest trade partners.
I think the myth of free trade and the ideology of Rogernomics are now actually a danger to NZ.
August 27th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
“I think the myth of free trade and the ideology of Rogernomics are now actually a danger to NZ.”
No one liked me saying that my way.
August 27th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
New Zealand never had a free market…its always been a regulated, overtaxed socialist joke….albut with the odd blip as Douglas managed.
In a true free market there is no coercive taxation,drugs are legal,there are no restricted trading hours or days,the State has nothing to do with employment issues or trade etc etc
As you can see the idea NZ became a free market is nonsense.
“Free markets only work if everyone sitting down at the bargaining table is also a free market. Do you think China is a free market? Australia? America? Japan? No. None of them. Plus now there is hugely unequal bargaining power between us and some of our closest trade partners.”
Rubbish.It matters not a jot if your trading partneres aren’t free markets….you can sell to them and enjoy their subsidised goods in return cheaper than they otherwise would be.
“I wouldn’t want to go back to the Muldoon era, but I certainly think that Douglas went way too far. We need markets and we need governments. The two have separate roles in society. When either dominates the other, the people lose.”
Crap….how do people trading freely compare to the state which is force? You do talk shit.