Pavlova Paradise Revisited by Mitchell Austin

Author:Mitchell, Austin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007546992
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Absolutely, Positively, Wellington Dunnit

Wellington isn’t just another New Zealand city with worse weather. It has the most beautiful situation, and a harbour which makes Auckland and Sydney look like paddling pools. Its kids have higher than average IQs. It’s the capital of this city-state posing as a nation. It’s the elite with real people segregated out of the way into the hills, the flat sprawling suburbs down the Hutt Valley, and the distant delights of Wainuiomata and Porirua, to leave the city free for power to prowl the streets.

Wellington has all the appurtenances of a capital: embassies, international organisations, and national organisations such as Federated Farmers, the Knights of the Business Round Table, burnished knights (now a vanishing breed with no more knighthoods available) all burning to bum regulations. There’s the Federation of Labour, the political parties, the lobbyists and – still powerful despite all the free market assaults – the government, its departments and Parliament from whence all blessings flow, plus master of all it surveys – the Reserve Bank smiling malignly down on mere mortals. Wellington is the home of government, politics and power and their servants and hangers-on, all growing in number as government’s role has been cut back and the great beast of power tamed by the market.

It was in Wellington that New Zealand’s welfare state and the machinery of economic insulation and management were built in the thirties and forties. Here, too, that it was all pulled down or daubed with monetarist graffiti as the grand design of a government-free government emerged in the eighties and was carried further in the nineties. Power, particularly in matters economic, was transferred from politicians and administrators to the market. Governments of both parties proclaimed their dearest wish as to do themselves out of jobs, give up power, make the world fit for the Round Table to rule in and get down to the essential job of government: abusing the other party.

Economic problems were the lever of political change. By the 1980s the economy was stagnant, none of Robert Muldoon’s continuous reorganisations, new regulations and controls, initiatives and plans for Thinking Big, Small or Petty had been able to kick-start an economy living on debt. The Reserve Bank and the Treasury, already taken over by monetarism imported from Chicago via Christchurch through the recruitment of Canterbury University’s dimmer graduates, was beginning to despair of Muldoon’s ability to deny what they saw as the laws of economics. Horrified at the growth of debt, and deficit, unheeded and unwanted, they set out to undermine the last Great Socialist.

Behind the scenes they plotted a counter-revolution and began to develop an alternative programme which some believe was shared as the election approached, with Labour’s Finance Spokesman Roger Douglas, a businessman with an accountant’s view of government, who had already set out his own nostrums in There’s Got to Be a Better Way in 1981. There had but that wasn’t it. Until the Treasury put backbone into it, helped by a business leadership

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.