Towards Welfare that Works in New Zealand by David Green.
First published in New Zealand Books Issue 23, June 1996, as “The Bankruptcy of the New Fundamentalism”. Republished in Under Review: A Selection from New Zealand Books 1991-1996 (ed Lauris Edmond, Harry Ricketts & Bill Sewell) p.179-184.

Keywords: Social Policy;

In Making a Difference, Ruth Richardson says that she was “more likely than Jim [Bolger] to talk about the [1991] benefit cuts in moralistic terms.” Leaving aside the fragging of her prime minister, which seems to be one of the main purposes of her auto-hagiography, there is an interest in what the ex-minister of finance meant by “moralistic terms”. I think she means, for Richardson finds it easier to claim the high ground than to climb it, that dependency on the state is wrong, although the fog descends as we try to unravel what she thinks is right. In practice she was not so much on a hilltop, but on a wharf surrounded by people struggling in the water almost afloat by state owned lifebuoys. Her strategy is to withdraw the public buoyancy. She seems delighted to see a handful of the survivors learning to swim, while the sinking rest are ignored. This morality, which costs the moralist nothing, is complicated by policies which make it more difficult to climb onto the wharf: fearsomely high effective marginal tax rates on the poor (which the moralist’s policies raised), and rising unemployment (for there were 10 percent more unemployed when she left office than when she began it, plus higher disguised unemployment).

Revised version of Address in the University of Auckland Winter Lecture Series, 20 June 1995, published in Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, Issue 7, December 1996, p. 17-28.[1]

The modern welfare state developed in most rich countries in the post-war era. It was a response to three major trauma. First, there was the interwar depression, in which the brutality of unconstrained capitalism generated a response of a kinder, gentler way of organizing society. Second the war itself led to upheaval in many European countries. The welfare state was seen as a means of integrating the people back into the nations struggling with the chaos of their recent past, in order to generate a degree of social cohesiveness. Third, but by no means least, industrial society was sweeping away the old forms of community provision.

Address to the 1994 St Andrews Trust for the Study of Religion and Society, What Future the Family?, November 3, 1994.

Keywords Social Policy

During the nineteenth century, three political economies – ways of organizing the economy and society – competed for New Zealand.(1) The Maori political economy, although initially successful as the indigenous people took up the challenge of the new opportunities from European contact, faded in the later part of the century as the Maori population and ownership of resources declined from war, disease, alienation of land, and loss of rangatiratanga. I shall have little more to say about the Maori, for theirs is a story which deserves more space and competence than I have here.