I’m doing a review of Remaking New Zealand and Australian Economic Policy: Ideas, Institutions and Policy Communities by Shaun Goldfinch. In essence, the core purpose of the book is to ‘compare and contrast’ to help work out why the NZ free-market reformers got things so badly wrong. Wrinting in 2000, he observes:

Despite policymakers in New Zealand being able to achieve their policy aims to a remarkable extent and notwithstanding claims that New Zealand provides an exemplar of economic reform, the New Zealand economy has generally not performed well since 1984 as measured by commonly-used economic indicators.

Goldfinch gives a lot of evidence to support the standard critical view, that the New Zealand system with a unitary & unicameral government and a relatively small elite was open to capture by a small group of ideologues, what Brian Easton calls ‘market Leninists’, who then bypassed or over-rode any critical views. As Goldfinch says

there are good reasons to suppose that better policy can be made through compromise and negotiation

Since the election of a Labour government which raised the top rate of income tax and partially reversed the 1991 labour market ‘reforms’, there has been some recovery. A few hardy defenders of the reforms outside NZ have had the chutzpah to suggest that the credit is due to Roger Douglas and the Business Roundtable but within NZ, Rogernomics is discredited beyond all hope of revival. It’s been dumped by the Nationals and even the free-market ACT party relies mostly on law-and-order populism for its modest electoral appeal.