Airport), and most prolonged in relation to the applefire blight issue (Bertram
2009, p. 544). Fundamentally different natural environments meant there
would always be tensions over biosecurity. Both countries are exceptional in
terms of their histories of extreme caution over biosecurity matters.
The ‘neoliberal policy’ revolution (dubbed ‘Rogernomics’ after Roger
Douglas, Labour Finance Minister 1984–88) was framed as a reaction to a
stifling National Party‘statism’that allegedly reached its apex in the second
and third terms (1979–84) of the Muldoon-led government.^27 The reality is
that while Robert Muldoon exhibited a divisive and at times brutal political
style—he probably had to in order to prevail in the 1978 and 1981
elections—he was a cautious liberalizer over a period of nearly two decades
of stormy international political and market forces.^28 Through 1978–84 New
Zealand’s economic growth was above the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) average and inflation rates were
high, but not exceptionally so. Unemployment, hitherto exceptionally
low, increased. But it remained lowby OECD standards throughout the
stagflation of the early 1980s.
Both external and government debt increased substantially, but could
easily have been much higher had Muldoon’s trade and import substitution
initiatives not taken place. A significant proportion of that debt reflected
a countercyclical‘Think Big’investment initiative—reminiscent of Julius Vogel
110 years earlier—that focused on reducing New Zealand’s imported
oil requirements, and on using hydroelectricity and iron-sands to produce expor-
tables such as aluminium and steel. These developments gave a substantial eco-
nomic boost to provincial New Zealand, Muldoon’s power base. It is difficult to
envisage counterfactual policies for the early 1980s that could have achieved
higher growth for New Zealand’stradablesector.
Bertram (2009) summarizes twentieth-century economic policy-making as
following three major epochs. Thefirst quarter of the century was essentially a
farmer-led policy environment, with support for arbitrated family wages in
the‘sheltered’domestic sector. The middle third of the century was domin-
ated by the interests of the tradable sector as a whole, including substantial
(^27) Labour Prime Minister David Lange (1984–89) likened the 1975–84 New Zealand economy to
a Polish shipyard (‘His views’2005, p. 13; Goldfinch and Malpass 2007, p. 120), implying that it
had controls comparable to those of an Eastern-bloc nation in the then-Cold War era. Castles,
Gerritsen, and Vowles (1996, p. 219) perpetuate the myth in describing Muldoon’s prime
ministership as‘nine years in office, with extreme statist solutions across the board imposed by
steamroller tactics’. The‘Polish shipyard’image facilitated the acceptance in New Zealand of
neoliberal policy reforms, much as Paul Keating 28 ’s 1986‘banana republic’comment did in Australia.
See Gould (1985), Goldfinch and Malpass (2007), Rankin (2014a) for various perspectives on
Muldoon. Liberalizations relate to official secrecy, the removal of import licensing, restrictions on
Saturday shopping, restructuring of protected industries, and freight transport. With cautious
reform and a commitment to welfare principles established in 1938, New Zealand was not a
dirigiste society in 1984.
Australia and New Zealand