Keywords: Growth & Innovation; Political Economy & History;

Those who debate the economy are challenged by theGrowth Culturereport of the Growth and Innovation Board .* The economic debate of the last four decades has largely been among the elite. This study asked what do New Zealanders think of economic growth?’

Paper for the “After Neoliberalism? New Forms of Governance in Aotearoa New Zealand” Symposium, Auckland University, December 13, 2004.

Keywords: Political Economy & History;

The policy clash in the 1980s and the 1990s was more complex than a Left-Right divide. At the very least it was tripartite. One group we might call the ‘conservatives’, many of who were on the Left, who wanted to defend the existing economic and social policies whose beginnings go back to the 1930s – making minor modifications from those which we associate with Muldoon. The concerns of the nostalgic Left has been more about human rights, foreign affairs and redistribution, than about economic policy, the main concern of this paper.

Notes prepared for an informal presentation (June 2004)

Keywords: Growth & Innovation; Political Economy & History;

The ‘Growth Culture’ report of the Growth and Innovation Advisory Board (on which I am on) raises major questions about the direction of economic policy. The survey had been commissioned to understand how the public could be involved more effectively in the economic growth strategy. However their responses firmly indicated that the large majority of the public had objectives which were different from those espoused by the nation’s economic leadership.

Notes for a chapter in a book Leadership and Political Change (June 2004)

Keywords: Political Economy & History;

My book, The Nationbuilders, described a particular phase in New Zealand’s economic and political history, between 1932 when Gordon Coates became Minister of Finance and the election of the Labour Government in 1984. It describes a group of (mainly) men embarking upon a strategy of developing an independent nation with its own economy and culture but engaging with the rest of the world. I told the story through their biographies, but it could have been told other ways, through historical sequence or policy themes for instance, or with more biographies, had there been the space.