The policy disjuncture in New Zealand is clearly dated to 14 July 1984, when
the Muldoon-led National government was defeated by the Lange–Douglas
Labour Party. On welfare and tax matters, this led to increased selectivity or
‘targeting’of cash benefits—a return to the Australian tradition of selective
welfare as a working-class safety net—and the progressive replacement
of universal child benefits with tapered‘tax credits’, some of which (for
example, the present in-work tax credit) applied only to families in substantial
employment. National Superannuation—becoming a‘guaranteed retirement
income’—was subjected to an indirect means test. However, as New Zealand
Superannuation, it became universal again in 1998 due to the influence
of Coalition Treasurer Winston Peters, a political disciple of Robert Muldoon.
While there is no strong present-day movement to extend universal
welfare provision, those forms that exist, including the restored New Zealand
Superannuation, are more resolutely defended than they were in the 1980s
and 1990s.
The return to universal retirement pensions was made possible by the
introduction of the mixed member proportional (MMP) electoral system in
1996, following referendums in 1992 and 1993. Lower House proportional
representation (PR) is exceptional in the Anglo-world, although it does exist
(albeit through different voting mechanisms) in Ireland, Tasmania, and, more
latterly, Scotland. The process in New Zealand of adopting a new voting
system was a reaction both to the National Party’s ability to rule from 1978
to 1984 despite Labour gaining more votes, and to the post-1984 policy
revolution that took New Zealand voters by surprise. Efficiently implemented,
and endorsed by a further referendum in 2011, New Zealand proudly owns its
exceptional electoral system, which combines local representation with pro-
portionate outcomes, much as it owns its exceptional demogrant system of
publicly sourced retirement income.
15.8 Reflection
New Zealand is both a unique British‘far-west’and a Polynesian‘south west’.
Its circumstances of geography and brief human history—discovered and
settled across the ocean by Polynesians, rediscovered and settled by people
from its antipodes—ensure that. But has New Zealand been exceptionally
exceptional? Maybe it is different from Australia due to its mix of Polynesian
and British settlers. New Zealanders differ from their own source populations
by virtue of those journeys made; they are adaptive in policy, as in the
economic techniques of surviving and prospering. Australian immigrants
made many of the same journeys, although in different Anglo-Celtic mixes
and, in Australia’s early years, in more coercive circumstances.
Keith Rankin