Back to the 80's...

When it comes to politics, only the Greens and ACT are radicals. All the other parties - to different degrees - want to keep the status quo. And much of the current government economic policy is the result of the work of Sir Roger Douglas.

So, it came to me as a surprise that ACT are promoting their links to Sir Roger. But after reflecting on the decision to bring back Sir Roger, it dawned on me that ACT has a major problem.

Since 1995 New Zealand has steered away from radical reform and kept the status quo - just fiddling around the edges a bit. And in the past twelve years New Zealand has done okay - not fabulous, or good, but well enough that there is no widespread political or public support for change.

ACT needs to jump start a groundswell for change - and bringing back the arguements over the 1980s is probably a strategy that will work. Few can argue that the programme that Douglas promoted was better than the status quo. And it's not a difficult arguement that New Zealand is slowly slipping back into it's Keynesian type economic policy that dominated from the 1950s to 1984.

But at the same time, it's a big risk - the upheaval in the 1980s was damaging to a lot of people. Lots of employees in state trading companies lost their jobs, lots of protected industries closed. And when a worldwide speculative boom ended, New Zealand had it's worst recession since the 'slump' of the early 1930s - far worse than experienced elsewhere in the world.

But at this time, ACT doesn't have much choice but to take risks - it's lost a lot of voters to National and hasn't won them back. A lot of potential ACT voters have left these shores for Australia and beyond. And it's never a popular policy to remind people that the Government can't give you something for nothing - it's had to take it from someone else who earned it.