Jane Kelsey,
Pluto Press, London 1996, £14.99
Kelsey describes how a handful of bureaucrats in the New Zealand state, backed by some of the big New Zealand companies, seized control of economic policy in New Zealand and imposed on it a bizarre amalgam of the IMF restructuring programme traditionally imposed on the Third World, traditional neo-liberal notions of free markets, and Mrs Thatcher’s lasting memorial, selling off public assets are bargain prices.
The oddity of what they did can’t be exaggerated. IMF restructuring programmes traditionally have been implemented at gun-point, imposed by the US-dominated IMF on developing countries with the ever-present threat of political action – from economic sanctions, through CIA subversion up to full-blown coup – in the background. They have to be imposed by force because they are simply schemes whereby the imperialist powers (until recently usually America) extract wealth from the Third World. Loan-sharking or extortion would describe them.(1) In New Zealand, a bunch of true believers imposed this catastrophic nonsense on their own country.
This was allowed to happen because the politicians in the Labour government, which let this process begin, didn’t know enough about economics (as was true in the UK at the same time); because the opposition to these plans was divided (as was true in the UK); because the New Zealand Left was preoccupied with feminism and the nuclear-free issue (as was true in the UK); because the unions flunked it (as was true in the UK); and because the media, who don’t know anything about economics and believe what businessmen and their tame economists tell them, bought the package (as was true in the UK), and then systematically marginalised the opposition to it.
The result has been entirely predictable; less economic activity and/or depression, unemployment; massive redistribution from poor to rich, from manufacturing to money-lenders; massive rip-offs; destruction of unions, welfare state and health service; export of NZ capital, purchasing of NZ companies and former government assets by foreign capital.
Because Kelsey is a law professor, and not a political analyst, she is much more interested in what was done (policies) than who done them (people) There are thus relatively few names given here, and relatively little analysis of the politics of the period. The analysis that is presented is occasionally difficult to follow, because, written primarily for a New Zealand audience, when names are given of politicians and businessmen and civil servants, Kelsey assumes that the reader knows who they are. This is just an editing fault; more biographical details should have been added prior to UK publication.
Not particularly interested in the ‘Who dunnit?’, Kelsey says nothing about the parapolitical dimension. There is nothing, for example, on the major effort by the US to combat the anti-ANZUS, anti-nuclear movements in the Labour Party and NZ trade unions, which was the context in which the economic zealots were operating.(2) One of the overt parts of this program was the freebie visits to the United States organised by the then USIA.(3) From the list of NZ personnel who went on these USIA junkets between 1981 and 1986, 14, mostly politicians, appear in the not very extensive index to Kelsey’s book, but Kelsey doesn’t mention this programme. How important this and the other propaganda operations carried out by CIA and State Department fronts are, I don’t know. But it all helps.
In a way it would be reassuring to know that the US had machinated all this, but the impression Kelsey gives – which is why the book is so depressing – is that this catastrophe was inflicted on New Zealand by zealots rather than agents. The former (British) Labour MP, Bryan Gould, who was born in New Zealand, described meeting them in 1987:
‘I recall a stimulating evening over dinner with [Labour Finance Minister] Roger Douglas and a group of “young Turks” from the Treasury. They had all the conviction of religious zealots. They were convinced they had discovered the Holy Grail and were seemingly unaware that their prescriptions had been tried and largely abandoned elsewhere.'(4)
Gould has now bailed out of UK politics in despair at the development of (British) New Labour and is a university vice-chancellor in New Zealand.
Notes
- Cheryl Payer’s The Debt Trap; the IMF and the Third World, (Penguin 1974) is still the best short-ish account I know.
- On this generally, see Paul Landais-Stamp and Paul Rogers, Rocking the Boat (Berg, Oxford and New York, 1989). For a brief account, focused on the intelligence connections, see Robin Ramsay, ‘How the US tries to subvert Lange’, END Journal No. 26, February 1987.
- Between 1983 and ’86 seventeen employees of TVNZ went. NZ Sunday Times, 30 November 1986.
- Bryan Gould, Goodbye to All That, (Macmillan, London, 1995) p. 202.