Dr Oliver Hartwich: Australia’s economic future is on display in NZ’s present

As an economics student in Germany in the 1990s, I kept encountering two countries at the other end of the world. Whenever a professor wanted to prove that reform was possible, the examples were Australia and New Zealand.

Germany, under Helmut Kohl, never attempted anything like it. Kohl had reunification to manage, a fair alibi for half his sixteen years in office. But labour and product markets stayed as fenced in as ever. Shops could not legally sell a litre of milk after half past six in the evening, and unemployment climbed past four million.

The German language even coined a word for the condition: Reformstau, reform gridlock.