David Farrar: Rogernomics not deemed interesting

An interesting comment on my Royal Society funding piece:

There is no biography of Sir Roger Douglas. As a Senior Lecturer in History, I asked the Marsden Fund to support my biography of Douglas. They ranked my application 62 out of 62, dismissing it with the shallow comment, “The topic of Rogernomics is not all that exciting.” -  This is political bigotry. It shows the poor quality of the Royal Society’s thinking, which has since been exposed on other topics.

Chris Trotter: Losing the Working Class

I always wondered what it would take to detach the New Zealand working class from Labour. Not all of the working-class, obviously, but enough to strip the party of the demographic heft that, for more than a century, has made it a decisive electoral player. Now I know, but it took a fair few wrong guesses before I got there.

Bob Jones: The political polls

It staggers me that journalists take political polls seriously and call the forthcoming election a close-run thing. That’s rubbish. Labour will be swept out in a landslide, as I’ve been writing for the past two years. Putting aside the indisputable fact of the government’s astonishing ineptitude on so many fronts, there’s a simple reason for the coming debacle, namely the outrageous and seemingly endless maori favoritism announcements.

There was a time when political polls were accurate. That was in the highly politicised decade of the 1970s. Back then the vast majority of voters were either National or Labour and most Kiwis actually belonged to one of those two parties.

Chris Trotter: A Real Revolution?

Suppose they made a revolution, and nobody noticed. Suppose the “Cabinet Office” ordered the nation’s public servants to implement an unmandated revolutionary transformation of New Zealand, and they complied. Suppose one of the leading authorities on Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Dame Claudia Orange, confirmed that this revolution was, in fact, a done deal.

This is what Dame Claudia told the NZ Herald’s Audrey Young:

Sir Roger Douglas: Timeless Wisdom – The Politics of Successful Structural Reform

It’s a well-known pattern in public policy – profligate politicians damaging their economies with out-of-control spending, massive borrowing and higher taxes – inevitably leading to fiscal crisis, sharp declines to growth and ultimately rapidly falling currency value and living standards. 

How do countries recover from such negative downward policy spirals?  The answer is bold and quality “structural reform” to right size government, eliminate special interest privilege and create an environment for strong private sector growth. 

The following article was written in 1990 by Sir Roger Douglas, who was the finance minister in the Lange Labour Government between 1984 and 1988. He was the driving force in rescuing his country from financial collapse with bold structural policy reforms which became known as “Rogernomics”.   Sir Roger was voted as one of the most influential New Zealanders of the past century.

Chris Trotter: Has Labour Become A Co-Governed Party?

The more the voters discover about Labour’s Three Waters, the less they like it. No matter, this Government has clearly decided that, if it is to be destroyed, then Three Waters is the hill upon which it will die. That being the case – and the still-unfolding Entrenchment Crisis leaves little room for doubt – then the only real question to be answered is: Why? What is it about the Three Waters project that renders it impervious to rational reconsideration?

When a group of people refuse to accept they have made a poor choice – even as it threatens to destroy them – then it is a reasonably safe bet that they are in the grip of dangerously delusional thinking. Cult-like thinking, some might even suggest. But is it credible to suggest that a mainstream political party could fall victim to delusional thinking on such a scale? Is Labour really crazy enough to put its long-term survival at risk?

Chris Trotter: A Strange Hill To Die On.

Curia Research recently conducted a poll in the Napier electorate. Bad news for Stuart Nash, the Labour incumbent, whose chances of holding the seat are currently fluctuating between slim and none. Bad news, too, for the Labour Government as a whole, because the issue of most concern to local voters, by a Hawke’s Bay country-mile, is Three Waters. Around a third of the voters polled put the controversial water project at the top of their list of concerns. That’s nearly twice as many as the next most pressing concern for Napier voters – the parlous state of our health system.

One has to go back a long way to find a government so willing to press on with a policy so roundly rejected by the electorate. It is more than thirty years since Richard Prebble, confronted with the evidence that close to 90 percent of New Zealanders opposed the sale of Telecom, responded with the observation that Kiwis should be proud to have a government with the guts to face down such a powerful pressure-group!

Karl du Fresne: How this revolution differs from the last one

We’re already more than a month into 2022, but I’m only now coming out of holiday mode and trying to rev myself up for the year ahead. As readers of this blog may have noted from my silence, this annual adjustment has taken longer than normal.

For this I blame the lingering sedative effect of a holiday in Nelson, where my wife and I spent 10 days in our caravan with two teenage grandsons.

Nelson has never been an ideal vantage point from which to assess the state of the world. It’s relatively isolated, barricaded as it is by sea and hills. My family and I spent four very happy years there during the 1980s and I know from experience that it’s easy to retreat behind those barriers and forget that the rest of the world exists.

Like Gisborne, another charming provincial city, Nelson isn’t a place you drive through to get somewhere else. Socially and culturally, it’s a cul-de-sac. Such towns tend to develop their own distinctive character, uncontaminated by outside influences (a point of difference magnified, in Gisborne’s case, by the fact that the population is 50 percent Maori).

When I lived in Nelson I likened it to living in a warm bath; so comfortably soothing that you don’t want to get out. There’s an insularity and sense of other-worldliness about the place that becomes even more accentuated if you head over the Takaka Hill into Golden Bay.