This coming Sunday will be the 40th anniversary of the 1984 election, which ushered in a decade of radical economic reform in New Zealand. The
Listener magazine has a cover story (or set of them) on “Rogernomics and how it continues to shape our lives”. The first article is by Danyl McLauchlan (and isn’t bad in itself, even if it could have done with some economic policy fact-checking in a few places), which the contents page introduced with the description that the accelerated reform programme was a “momentous shift in direction for a country on the brink of bankruptcy”. The only problem with that story is that it simply wasn’t so.
