The 1980s and all that

Thoughts from a revealing panel discussion at the 2025 Featherston Booktown Festival

Featherston does books. Really, really well. Normally there are eight good bookstores in a town of less than three thousand. The bibliophile highlight is the autumn “Booktown festival” where there are even more booksellers and a programme of events. That’s where I found a signed copy of Robert Muldoon’s book on economics (dreadful economics, great insight into why politicians do dreadful economics). It was also where I discovered the work of Madison Hamill. Better still, the Featherston Booktown is now the best place a Wellingtonian can go for meaningful discussion of New Zealand politics and history. At the 2025 festival I went to the Sunday morning session “Rogernomics: 40 Years on through the lens of a Wairarapa Community”.

The Myth of the Neo-liberal Fall

The session was in the ANZAC hall, a high ceilinged room with dark wood panels, large windows and a stage at one end. The discussants were on the stage in a shallow semicircle, the audience of 500 or so looking up from stacking chairs in the body of the hall. This was not a young audience. Most would have adult memories of the 1980s.

I confess to pessimism as the hall filled. Partly I booked accommodation late so stayed in a Greytown hotel. There is a reason why a place has rooms in the midst of a festival that doubles the local population. The 1980s is also where culture wars start, with all the lack of intelligence and perspective that implies. New Zealand’s universities’ contribution, eagerly repeated by public servants in spending ministries, is The Myth of the Neo-liberal Fall.

The Myth goes something like this. After the second world war New Zealand was an Edenic country of happiness and equality except for Māori, who did land hikois and needed white people to demonstrate at rugby matches. Then in 1984 the snakes of Neo-Liberalism appeared. These snakes did tempt New Zealand’s Eves and Adams with the forbidden fruits of free markets and, though universities and state sector issued stern commands, people partook of the fruit. Lo their nakedness was exposed and they were sent forth from Eden to a miserable life tilling against rapacious financial markets …

At so many levels the myth is pernicious. In academic policy circles, where The Myth is canon law, discussion of the reforms no longer starts with those defending the reforms, but with an academic critic of the reforms describing as an assist for another critic to truly let rip.

A Snake’s Tale…

Booktown was far enough from Wellington they invited Richard Prebble, one of the reputed snakes of the 1980s Labour government. The local perspective was to be offered by Liz Mellish, a community leader, and Bob Francis, mayor of Masterton in the 1980s/90s. They were joined by a National and Labour MP from the 1980s: Marilyn Waring and Rick Barker, respectively.

First up, the chair of the discussion asked Richard Prebble and Liz Mellish to offer their perspectives, starting with Prebble. The audience seemed unsympathetic to him. Judging by his tone, he sensed this. New Zealand academics describing the reforms talk of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the Mont Pellerin Society. If New Zealand is mentioned, then Treasury and the Business Round Table are centre stage. Abstractions and generalisations to make New Zealand fit preconceptions familiar in London and Washington. Richard Prebble talked about rotting meat.

The story started at the end of 1984. He decided to show his young children “where Daddy worked”, so agreed to be duty minister, the minister who stays in Wellington to offer official government soundbites in the summer holidays. Unluckily for Prebble, the duty minister had real work to do that year.

The duty minister arrangement still exists. Everything else Prebble described is from the past as a foreign country where things are done very differently. In that foreign country, New Zealand only forty years ago, it was a minister’s problem that meat was being stored in poorly refrigerated train carriages because freezing works freezers were full. They were full because the state fixed the price paid for meat produced by New Zealand farmers. The price had been set so high consumers would not buy the meat. Therefore meat wholesale salesman was part of the job description of New Zealand government ministers.

Fortunately for New Zealand, Iran was in the tail end of a violent revolution won by religious fanatics and the new Iranian government was happy to buy the meat as a job lot. Unfortunately there was a complication with the financing, about $2.4bn in today’s money. Fortunately a Japanese bank was willing to provide the finance. Unfortunately the bank, quite reasonably, wanted the New Zealand government to guarantee payment if Iran defaulted. More unfortunately for Richard Prebble, barrister, MP and Minister of Transport, happily ignorant of the beef and lamb industry and its operations, for the deal to go through he needed to take responsibility for the deal and personally sign off this commitment.

After a frantic few days he did sign it. The meat on the trains rotted but the rest kept Iran’s Islamic revolution well fed. Prebble went to Roger Douglas and asked if the government had a plan to stop this happening again. Douglas smiled and told him, “It’s already written”. The rest, as they say, is history. Prebble omitted to say what his children thought of their messed up Christmas.

Respect?

In truth, Prebble took a bit long. When he sat down the ANZAC Hall audience was impatient. The chair asked Liz Mellish to speak. Then, in one of those it-couldn’t-have-happened-better-if-you-planned-it moments, she was prevented from speaking. Not by Prebble, but by a reminder that Eden had an old Testament God with some distinctly traditional perspectives. Bob Francis had decided to speak. Both Mellish and the chair tried to stop him, but he had started and no woman had anything more important to say than him.

He did not use those those words, but it was that blatantly sexist. It was also downright rude by any standards. There was an audible groan from the audience that he must have heard. This being heartland New Zealand no-one shouted at him. We just rolled our eyes to each other. So on he went. And on. And on. I tried to take notes but it was an incoherent list of firms where “local men lost jobs and lost self respect in the 1980s”.

When the rant was over, Mellish had her turn. The interruption had stolen her pitch. She covered similar ground about loss of community but did not talk for long. Even then Bob Francis was triggered to interrupt a couple of times.

Rick Barker gave a hack Labour MP speech from the 1990s, offering homilies about the importance of work and the shame of lost jobs in the Wairarapa. The surprise was Marilyn Waring, who was largely sympathetic to Prebble. She offered anecdotes of her experience, including the 183 (yes, one hundred and eighty three) different agricultural subsidies that she as a committee chair in Parliament in the late 1970s had to deal with. She also quoted from a railway union report of the 1970s that suggested women were not suited to work as railway engineers or drivers or even railway catering work. There were risks to their reputation, you see ...

In the Mythosphere, like Victoria University policy circles, it is a truism that stories about 1960s and 70s inefficiency are exaggerated. What struck me, coming to New Zealand twenty years after Prebble’s holiday job in meat wholesaling, is how many stories there are. My favourites are having to write to the Reserve Bank for permission to take foreign currency on holiday (they did sometimes refuse), people using trips to Australia to buy TVs, and Lange finding the Ministry of Education did not work school holidays because, as former teachers, they always took that time off as well as their official public service annual leave.

But the best are about the railways. Waring’s anecdote was a response to a Bob Francis homily about the railway providing men with jobs that gave them pride in making a contribution to society at large. But even by this measure The Myth is policy fakelore.

When I worked in MSD in the 2000s there were people around who worked at the Department of Labour in the 1980s. One had been a very junior clerk whose job was to herd men - that might offend but it accurately describes what he did - towards jobs at the railway. He was sent to a site where the local manager wanted the ministry to stop sending him more men. He found the overstaffing those who experienced the 1970s and 1980s railway tell you about. But as a ministry official he was also shown a room of men sat around doing nothing. The manager explained these were the people he could not, in good conscience, find a task because it would be impossible to safely run a railway with them working on it. This, apparently, is what Bob Francis thinks gave “pride in making a contribution to society at large”.

The Fall

Of course, people like Liz Mellish are also right. The damage is visible close to the Booktown festival. Wellington public servants discovered that following SH 2 over the Rimutaka Range got them to towns that lucked out in missing the developments that made concrete dystopias of their SH 1 equivalents in Johnsonville/Tawa/Porirua. In turn, the towns learned quaint attracts conspicuous consumption from well paid public servants. As well as Featherston’s books, there is Carterton’s open air museum of buildings, Greytown’s twee antiques and Martinborough’s food.

However, this is localities dealing with a fall from grace. Quaint was left behind when the 1980s reforms emptied shops, closed workshops, and made housing cheap. Not all the wreckage has been cleared and it is visible if you go off the high streets, particularly in Featherston on the south side of SH 2.

Unfortunately no-one in the ANZAC Hall asked searching questions that might have linked the Prebble and Mellish stories. The session ended with a couple of audience questions that tried to rally the audience to The Myth. They got Pavlovian clapping but their heart was not in it. I am not sure if the audience were persuaded by Richard Prebble, reminded by Bob Francis why the New Zealand of their childhood was not actually Eden, or could not bring themselves to support the side that so obviously lost that day’s debate.

A Booktown Reflection

As I left to do more book browsing, I realised why the Booktown Festival debates are so good. They are solely about New Zealand experiences. The 1980s reforms were not Margaret Thatcher’s reforms, or the actions of a Mythosphere snake, they were by New Zealanders in a New Zealand government dealing with realities faced by the New Zealand of their time.

The personal experiences all panel members offered contributed to what Colin James called The Quiet Revolution. This revolution had been building since the 1960s. Part of it was an ongoing economic crisis created by the collapse in wool prices, oil prices rises and Britain joining the EU. It spawned party political turmoil with the New Zealand and Social Credit Parties. Whina Cooper’s land march in 1975 and protests in the next decade against the Springbok tour were part of this much wider discontent.

Of course there were also international influences. Marylin Waring was at the Booktown Festival to promote, The Political Years, where she describes bringing those intellectual currents to the New Zealand Parliament. And the neo-liberal rhetoric that infused the 1980s reforms originated in Europe and the US in the 1940s with key texts by Hayek and others were published in the 1950s and 60s.

Thinking about these international influence makes clear why The Myth is misleading. Waring’s campaign on access to abortion and other equity issues was based on campaigns in the US, UK and other parts of Europe in the 1960s and 70s. Neo-liberal ideas influenced British and American centre left governments in the 1970s. Far more interesting than the Mythosphere tale is why, years after the economic, political, social and intellectual environment had made a 1930s approach untenable, it took so long for our government to implement reform?

In this perspective is an answer to Liz Mellish’s challenge. It is similar to the one Tory Whanau, Wellington mayor, can offer to those (like me) who grumble about slow and expensive repairs to the water and sewage pipes in Wellington. Whanau, like the Lange government in the 1980s, is being blamed for the culpable inaction of predecessors.

In Whanau’s case Wellington Mayors from all parties (one of whom asked a question at the Booktown Festival event) spent three decades redirecting money away from pipe repairs to fund vanity projects. Likewise could the problems Mellish saw in the 1980s be the result of the Holyoake, Kirk and Muldoon governments’ negligence? That Prebble dealt with the economic equivalent of sewage from unmaintained pipes flowing down Wellington’s Victoria Street does not make him responsible for his predecessors’ negligence.

More important is what this means for current policy. The Myth is very much a thought terminating cliche in New Zealand policy discussions. If prior to the 1980s New Zealand was not Eden, could it be that proposals to return us to policies of that time - higher tax, government control of the economy, a larger public sector - would succeed in all the wrong ways? More misspending and a return to a more censorious laws, perhaps?

More challenging still, The Myth ignores ways the 1980s reforms were steps in longer term changes, for instance the centralisation and reduced accountability of the state since the late nineteenth century. Perhaps the ultimate failure of Prebble and his colleagues is not radical reduction of the state, but too much faith in changes implemented by Wellington based public servants?