Listener 30 September, 2000.
Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money;
It is extraordinary how much economic debate in New Zealand is oblivious to any evidence. Recent advocates of the New Zealand economy going into monetary union with Australia or the US seem quite unaware that it has spent over half of the time since 1840 in one, and is currently in one. We can learn from both experiences, but the lesson is not what the advocates want us to hear.
Chapter 11 of The Nationbuilders The ex-cabinet minister had been through many battering years including the fag end of the Fourth Labour Government, losing a safe seat in the 1990 landslide. But his paper recalling the exhilaration of Norman Kirk’s time, lifted a quarter of a century off the mid-fifty year old.[1] Kirk alone among…
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Chapter 6 of The Nationbuilders
Keywords: Health; Political Economy & History;
Douglas Robb may appear to be among the most privileged of the nationbuilders in this book. His father was a manager of the Kauri Timber Company and the father-in-law from his marriage to Helen Seabrook in 1935 was even better placed. He was too young for the First World War, too old for the Second. The depression of the 1930s did not impact as heavily on the practice of the promising young surgeon as it did for many other occupations. But a year before he was born, Robb’s father came to New Zealand because the climate would be better for his tuberculosis. Two of his sons caught the disease in their infancy. There were no particularly effective therapies in those days, and the eldest died from TB at the age of 21. The second, Douglas, suffered until he was almost 40, when the symptoms suddenly disappeared.
Chapter 3 of The Nationbuilders Keywords: Political Economy & History; It is easier to become prime minister than to be a good one, for that involves transcending the leading a political party to leading a nation. Unlike the much beloved Michael Joseph Savage, Peter Fraser was bereft of public charisma. Yet he is the greatest…
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Listener 16 September, 2000
Keywords: Political Economy & History;
Barry Gustafson’s comprehensive biography of Rob Muldoon was launched in the same week that the New Zealand exchange rate sunk to a record low against the US dollar. Had Muldoon been alive he would have predicted the collapse (although not its exact date), and he would be predicting further turbulence on the world financial markets (as he did before the 1987 sharemarket crash). Of course Muldoon got a lot of things wrong, but his single biggest prediction proved far too correct. He resisted the advice to liberalise the New Zealand economy other than at a cautious pace, because he said it would not work and it would damage people.
Auckland University Press. 2001. 318pp.
Who shaped the New Zealand nation in the middle years of the twentieth century: Whose were the ideas. the visions. the practical skills: The Nationbuilders is a collection of linked essays on individuals and companies in the years from 1931 to 1984 who contributed in major ways to building a New Zealand nation. They include well known individuals like W.B. Sutch and forgotten influences like Douglas Robb. The book captures the intertwining of the lives of politicians. their advisors and their mentors as well as the experiences which drove them.
While the focus is on the economic strategy of the times. Brian Easton also looks at the cultural. social. union. business and foreign policy strands in the nationbuilding project. The book finally explores what happened to nationbuilding in recent years and options for the future. An original lively and provocative book. it is backed by powerful nationalistic emotions and by a deep distaste at the kind of country that has been fashioned since 1984.
Chapter 14 of The Nationbuilders
Keywords: Political Economy & History;
The day I finished the first draft of this chapter I walked past the Henry Lang Memorial sculpture, in a small park nestled between various government buildings, where once had been Broadcasting House, an architectural gem in its own right, and an important centre of the nation’s culture in general, and drama and music in particular. In the Great Hall of Parliament House, magnificently restored by the Warren & Mahoney partnership, Helen Clark, the Prime Minister announce a major funding and structural package, ‘Building Cultural Heritage’, for her adjunct portfolio, Arts, Culture and Heritage. Did I hear Peter Fraser and Norman Kirk chuckle? Henry Lang would have said, ‘absolutely first rate.’
Chapter 10 of The Nationbuilders The earlier part of his life. Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Political Economy & History; Sutch must have returned to New Zealand in 1951 with renewed self-confidence. His overseas sojourn had proved he was world class, while he had successfully published two books in the previous decade, and…
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Chapter 7 of The Nationbuilders Chapter 10 – later life from 1951Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Political Economy & History; Bill Sutch was not only one of a handful of public servants who shaped economic and social policy between the 1930s and the 1960s. His thinking has continued to influence economic and…
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Chapter 3 of The Nationbuilders Keywords: Political Economy & History; ‘Fraser ruled in very close consultation with the Federation of Labour. The other powers in the land were Walter Nash and Bernard Ashwin.’ [1] ‘[He] was clearly one of a small group – Nash, Fraser, and Walsh being the others – who were at the…
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This was originally intended as an appendix to Chapter 10 of The Nationbuilders. It was decided that the story distracted from the main themes of the chapter (and the book) and was omitted. It is placed here on the record. This is the version prepared in September 2000.
Keywords: Political Economy & History;
The evidence that Sutch was security compromised before the meetings which led up to the incident in Holloway Road in 1974 is almost non-existent. It is true he admired the Soviet Union, and the US government treated him as a security risk in the 1950s, although given its McCarthiest frame of mind that may say no more than he had thwarted the US over UNICEF, and in New York he was friends of East-Central Europeans (some of whom subsequently fled to the West), although apparently he had little to do with the Russians.
Listener 2 September 2000
Keywords: Literature; Social Policy;
This column is written more in sorrow than anger. Hopes were high when the then Leader of the Opposition, Helen Clark, announced that on assuming the premiership she would also take the Arts and Culture ministerial portfolio. The National Government had been squeezing public spending and that, with the appointments it was making, was generating an authoritarian, politically correct, and backward-looking distribution of the limited funds and leadership in the arts and heritage sector. Hopes were exceeded with Clark’s announcement of some $86m funding for the next three years, although much was a catch-up of the deficit arising from the miserliness of the previous government.