Revised paper for The Stout Centre Research Centre conference on ‘Holyoake’s Lieutenants: 1960-1972′, 27-28 April, 2001. Parliament Buildings, published in Holyoake’s Lieutenants ed M. Clarke (Dunmore Press 2003)
Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money; Political Economy & History;
The term of the second National Government, from 1960 to 1972, can be split into almost exactly equal economic phases, changing at the end of 1966, when almost coincidentally the Minister of Finance also changed. The second from March 1967, was Rob Muldoon, well enough known and important enough to have a conference of his own in due course. From December 1960 to February 1967 the finance and economics lieutenant had been Harry Lake, an almost shadowy figure in the politically histories of New Zealand.
Harry Lake
Harry Robson Lake was born in 1911 in Christchurch, going to Christchurch West High School and Canterbury University College from which he graduated with a B.Com. In 1943 he established his own accountancy practice, and in 1950 became Treasurer of the Canterbury -Westland division of the National Party. He unsuccessfully stood for the Labour-safe Riccarton electorate in 1949, and in 1951 he won the Lyttleton seat from Terry McCombs, a seat which had been a Labour-McCombs family fiefdom for 38 years. He held it in 1954, but lost it to a younger Norman Kirk in 1957. Lake returned to parliament in 1960 for the National-safe Fendalton seat, which he held in 1963 and 1966.
Holyoake made him Minister of Finance in his 1960 ministry. Lake, then 49, was ranked seventh in cabinet, a relatively low status for a Minister of Finance. However the six above him had all been ministers in the 1950s, as had three below. He was marked as an upcoming young man.
Following the retirement for health reasons in 1960 of Jack Watts, who had been National’s Minister of Finance between 1954 and 1957, Holyoake had to choose between the more seasoned Tom Shand and Lake for the finance portfolio. Barry Gustafson reports that Lake was ‘one of Holyoake’s most trusted friends.’
Lake was Minister of Finance for 74 months, which also ranks him seventh (out of 37) in tenure behind Joseph Ward (172 months), Walter Nash (168 months), Rob Muldoon (160 months), Richard Seddon (120 months), Harry Atkinson (116 months), and Julius Vogel (79 months) and ahead of Bill Massey (60 months), Sydney Holland (59 months), Bill Birch (56 months) Roger Douglas (52 months), and Downie Stewart (47 months). He would be the least known off that pantheon.[1]
Harry Lake died of a heart attack in February 1967 aged just 55. This may explain part of his anonymity. If they had died at the same age Ward would have been Prime Minster for but five years, Muldoon for but one, Seddon for nine, Nash would have been Minister of Finance for two years, Holland will still have been in opposition, and Birch would have been back there. Only Seddon, Atkinson, Vogel, Douglas and Stewart had largely achieved their reputations by their fifty-sixth year, even fewer by their 53rd year when Lake had his first heart attack. He was the youngest Minister of Finance between Stewart and Muldoon. Lake may be anomalous because of his early death..
A second reason for Lake’s eclipse may be that he was not a flamboyant man. Of the above list of eleven, seven held the portfolio and premiership jointly, Nash was later prime minister, and Birch and Douglas might have been premiers in a less television-dominated age, Stewart if his health had let him.
The Lake Years[2]
Additionally, Holyoake is widely seen as the ‘real’ Minister of Finance. Of course it is not inappropriate for a prime minister to be closely involved in the finance portfolio. Lake presided with him over the last third of the early postwar boom which began in 1949 and ended in 1966. The boom was a period of average GDP growth of 4.3 percent p.a., consumer prices rose at 4.0 percent p.a. (the GDP prices deflation rate was lower than the OECD average), and registered unemployment was negligible (while the measure using the internationally accepted convention rate was probably usually below 2 percent, and rarely above 3 percent). Economic management remained problematic. It always does, because no matter how well an economy is doing, there is a demand for it to do better. Trying to drive a small open economy faster means compromising the balance of payments, as imports are sucked in, and that means overseas borrowing to fund them in excess what exports will finance.( In those days, under a fixed exchange rate, foreign borrowing was largely the job of the government. Given that export revenue was volatile, there was a constant need to adjust the economy through fiscal and monetary management.)
It would be easy for Lake (or others involved in economic management) to claim – with hindsight – an unusually high degree of competence, but the early postwar boom was underpinned by exceptional terms of trade. Today they are comparable to the prewar period. Imagine if today’s export prices were a third higher (as they were relatively during the 1950s and 1960s boom) but import prices were the same. Of course there would be economic management difficulties, but life would be somewhat easier and more affluent. Holyoake implied as much when he implicitly compared Gordon with his own lot when he said ‘… some men are lucky in the times in which they have the opportunity to govern or help in the government of any country. I would think Gordon Coates was the most unfortunate of men in this respect. It was his task to carry the heat and the burden of the day [of] the worse economic slump … that the world experienced this century.’[3]
Holyoake was initially known for a ‘steady as she goes’ approach to the economy, presumably distinguishing his government from the sharp measures which Nordmeyer undertook in his 1958 budget.[4] Certainly Lake’s six budgets reflect a blandness. The 1961 one, the first and hence placing blame on an outgoing government, said that export prices were falling and ‘New Zealand was living well beyond its income’, although the current account deficit of 1960/1 was a mere 3.7 percent of GDP.[5] Monetary measures had reduced liquidity, and import licences had been extended from a 12 to 18 month period (with some supplements). The budget’s economic growth philosophy is summarised by ‘increases in production and productivity will be brought about not be redistributing the national income, but by investing more in productive equipment. It is no coincidence that throughout the world, the highest output – and income – is achieved by those workers who have the best equipment and largest amount of capital behind them. … The Budget marks the beginning of the Government’s programme to encourage a faster rate of investment, …’[6] This may sound unexceptional, but it is a classical view of economic growth, for there is no mention of allocative efficiency or of technological change, which are key elements of the neoclassical view and become important in the 1980s and after. That only developed in the academy in the 1950s, so it is not surprising that it had not reached policy by the early 1960s.
Again, and typical of all his budgets, Lake’s 1962 budget begins with the external account. The budget’s basic design was ‘to provide incentives for increased exports and to encourage a greater volume of investment in industry’, mentioning the ‘removing of unnecessary restrictions which foster inefficiency and hamper development, and … introducing savings and investment’ and claiming to have ‘provided the greatest possible reductions of taxes on income.’[7]
His third, 1963, budget has the sense of a valedictory, because the government could not sure it would be returned in the election later in the year, or the minister would retain his portfolio if it was. In addition it will be a part of the foundation of the election campaign. In any case there were set down eight elements which are a mixture of political platitude and rhetoric on the one hand, and economic principle and policy on the other. A slightly edited summary is:
1. … the government will continue to fulfill its obligations in a responsible manner, and not seek temporary political advantage at the expense of the long-term good of the country.
2. By reducing rates of taxation, this Budget implements the Governments policy of increasing the proportion of income left in the hands of people to spend as they see fit.
3. This budget provides incentives to increase production and productivity, and especially provides for the expansion of our exports.
4. It provides for an extension of those services, such as education, which are basic to the social, cultural and economic progress of the country.
5. Provision has been made for the less privileged members of the community to share in New Zealand’s increasing production and prosperity.
6. It recognises the need to increase expenditure on defence to share fairly with our allies the burden of mutual security.
7. This budget again expresses the Government’s determination to seek solutions to our various problems in cooperation with all the interested groups, and not to impose decisions on the basis of outmoded dogmas.
8. The budget represents the continuation of a coherent and consistent policy aimed at increasing the rate of economic growth.[8]
Consensus politics and consensus economics. Steady as she goes.
Both National and Lake returned to office (with Muldoon as his undersecretary with responsibilities for decimal coinage). However in 1964 Lake had his first heart attack, and while subsequently he remained diligent he was perhaps not so vigorous. His 1964 budget once more started off with the external situation, and gave even more emphasis to economic growth policy than the earlier ones. It offered more incentives to increase investment and production and increased government spending in some key areas: education, electricity and defence. It regrets, as does the 1965 budget, there is not more room for cuts in taxation. The 1966 budget repeats the sentiment, but is less valedictory than its 1963 equivalent. Nonetheless it offers one insight into the government’s economic framework.
… from the longer-term viewpoint our most valuable achievement has been the unprecedented growth in productive capacity in our farming and manufacturing industries. … We could have restrained investment spending to the point where our external transactions balanced without overseas borrowing. Some have advocated such policies. If we had accepted this advice the productive potential of the country would have been much less than it is today.[9]
Focussing on the broad framework of the budget ignores some major economic debates which were raging. The joining of the IMF and World Bank is discussed in the 1961 budget, and the industrialisation debate with its promontories of the Agricultural Development Conference of 1962 and the Export Development Conference of 1963 pervades the economic strategy, as in the references to production incentives and capacity.
The economic consensus was not yet breaking up, even though as a result of Vietnam in particular, the political consensus was. But the economic debate was shifting. It was sharpened by a major external shock which was change the course of the New Zealand economy.
The December 1966 Shock[10]
On 14 December 1966, in the rooms of the Wool Exchange in Auckland, the Wool Commission found itself buying in bales of wool offered for auction. This arrangement had been devised in the early 1950s to provide a floor price for wool, evening out the troughs in the fluctuations for the commodity whose price was set mainly on the auction floor. Each year a floor price was set. When offers were below this level the Commission would bid – on occasions even make small purchases – to push up the price to above the set floor level. In the previous (1965/66) season the floor price for standard wool was set at 35 pence a pound, the Commission had bid on 5000 bales, ending up purchasing 256 of them, many of which were resold at auctions a little later. The involvement was minuscule, given the two million odd bales which were dealt within a season.
In the 1966/67 season (it began in July) the floor price had been set at 36 pence a pound, a little higher than the last season but still 5½ pence below the average for the previous season. The 36 pence level must have seemed safe, since it had been exceeded in nominal terms in every year since 1948/49. The last time it was at that level relative to import prices was back in the early 1930s. Prices proved weaker in the early part of the 1966/67 than in the previous season. In the first five months the Commission bought in 9,764 bales, more than it had in any full season since 1958/59 when it had bought in total 46,401 bales. But prices continued to deteriorate in December, and at the Auckland auction the average price was 35.3 pence, with the Commission buying in furiously. In December 1966 it bought in 34,567 bales, and as prices remained weak it bought in the full season a total of 645,786 bales, 35.7 per cent of the clip.
Within a week there was an emergency cabinet meeting. The vulnerability of a small open economy dependent upon a few commodity exports to a few markets became painfully evident, for in 1966 pastoral products – mainly commodity exports – were 91 per cent of export revenue in 1966. Although few realised it at the time, the 14th of December, 1966 was the end of the golden wether. Indeed, to judge from their reports, the New Zealand Planning Council in the 1970s still had not grasped the change. In fact the New Zealand economy was to begin to undergo the most extraordinary and rapid economic transformation. That story, largely ignored then and even today, belongs to the Muldoon conference. This paper concentrates on the initial adjustment.
Immediate Consequences of a Major Structural Change in the Terms of Trade
The immediate main economic problems of a major structural change in the terms of trade are the distribution problem, the production problem, and the transition problem. I begin with the distribution problem because it is the least understood and the politically most acute.
The Distribution Problem
Even if there is no change in the level and composition of production – we look at that issue shortly – a fall in the terms of trade results in the fall in effective spending power. Production remains the same, but the income it generates is less, because foreign purchasers are paying lower prices, in effect requiring greater outlays for their imports for any given volume of exports. In the case of the 1966 fall, which has been permanent except for the brief 1971-1972 commodity boom, the nation’s effective spending power – that is its real income – was cut by about 7 to 10 percent, which was about five to seven years growth in per capita incomes. In effect the growth that had occurred in Lake’s ministership was eliminated in a single permanent collapse in the price of wool.
That meant about $1.2b of wealth has to be written off – say $30b in today’s terms. That is the reduction in the values of real assets – land, farm equipment and buildings, livestock, the infrastructure that goes with it – and not just the fall in the value of financial paper such as shares. Since farmers borrow to fund their investments there are other wealth holders – bank shareholders and even their depositors – who have to take a hit too. A similar reduction would have to happen to some human capital – to the returns to labour, especially in the farm and farm processing industries.
Who is to take this cut in their real incomes and wealth? One answer is to let the burden fall as the market allocates. In practice that would have meant reductions of farmer incomes and the wealth of farmers and those who lend to farmers. However the farmers could quite properly point out that during the early postwar boom there had been a number of mechanisms which had shared the prosperity their products had generated across the entire economy – mechanisms like industry protection, the wage-fixing system, and the fiscal system. It was reasonable to argue that when the farm production was no longer as prosperous, then the reduction in prosperity should be shared too.
That was not the rhetoric of the day, but it was the analysis which underpinned it. Thus the distributional question of who shares the burden of reduced incomes because a political question, because the actions – or failure to act – by the government have a major influence on the incidence of reductions in real income. Not surprisingly, the institutional structures of industry protection, wage fixing, and government taxation and spending all became markedly modified after 1966.
The Production Problem
To illustrate the distributional problem from a fall in the terms of trade, I assumed that the level and pattern of production remained the same. It does not, and that compounds the distributional problem. A fall in the terms of trade changes the relative profitability of the various economic activities. In the post-1966 era, pastoral farming became less profitable, and so the relative size of the pastoral farming sector diminished as farmers switched their resources into other farm activities – notably horticulture – and into activities outside the farm such as tourism, forestry, fishing, manufacturing in depth. That is also a political problem, since it changes the political balance and a party such as National with its strong connections with the pastoral farming has to rebalance itself too. Moreover, the political interests of the strong but diminishing sector will try to delay the relative diminution by using their political influence to generate policies favourable to themselves. Because those redistributive institutional mechanisms also affect the size of sectors, the production and distribution problems are intricately interwoven into the political fabric.
The Transition Problem
Thus far the analysis has assumed that the productive resources have moved smoothly and instantaneously from the old activities profitable under the pre-1967 terms of trade to the new activities profitable under the post-1966 relative prices. Of course they do not, so there is a transition problem. The economy goes into a temporary recession as resources – including labour – become unemployed in order to be redeployed. Production falls, and so does government revenue while there is upward pressure on spending. The government has to borrow more foreign exchange. So the transition problem is also a political economic problem as well as a technical economic one.
Briefly then, a substantial fall in the structural terms of trade involves strains on the market mechanisms as it adjusts the pattern of production, and some of this adjustment is pushed across to the political system, which also becomes greatly stressed. The easy compromise is to assume the relative price collapse is only temporary – a view still held by some in the late 1970s – and subsidise the struggling industries.
The production transition lasted until around 1978. The distribution transition probably lasted until the late 1980s, if we treat the double-digit inflation as a mechanism by which the real income and wealth reductions were made, although that assessment is complicated by some other economic changes such as the introduction of New Zealand Superannuation in 1976. However, the rest of this paper looks at the immediate transition period through to the 1969 election.
The Political Response
Lake did not have the opportunity to deal with the terms of trade collapse. He died just two months after in February 1967. Holyoake replaced him with Muldoon. Apparently he first offered the job to John Marshall who declined. He did not offer it to Tom Shand, repeating his 1960 decision, even though Shand appeared then to have better qualifications than Lake, and in 1967 to have more seniority. Whatever the reservations Holyoake had in 1960, by 1967 they may have been compounded by Shand’s view, expressed in a letter to Holyoake in June 1966 – and no doubt verbally to others – that the 1966 budget had been too expansionary, a view with which Treasury and Lake apparently agreed. Muldoon may have done too, but did not express himself so forcefully and was rewarded with the portfolio.
Barry Gustafson’s biography, His Way, presents a different image of Robert David Muldoon in his first ministerial years, from that which he is remembered today.[11] He is much more tentative, much consultative, than we recall him later – not surprisingly for he was the youngest (at 45) and the most junior member of cabinet, despite his very senior portfolio. One perhaps could draw parallels between Lake and Muldoon for they were both accountants in private practice. However, they present a very different demeanour. In fact Muldoon’s abrasiveness probably reflected his times. He had become the bete noir of the left for his public advocacy of involvement in Vietnam, when the foreign policy consensus was ending in the early to mid 1960s, and he became Minister of Finance when the divisions over economic policy were widening.
There was an attempt to maintain a consensus by the National Development Conference of 1968 . The approach was powerful during the war, but then the economy was expanding rapidly at about 7 percent p.a. while there had been national agreement to the priority of the war objectives. The policy tradition goes back at least to 1928, when Coates, instigated the National Industrial Conference. But the political tensions inherent in the distributional problems were glossed over, and while the facade of consensus was preserved, the tensions were apparent at other venues.
Muldoon thus became Minister of Finance right at the beginning of an exceptionally turbulent period of the New Zealand economy, when it was far from clear how permanent it would be or what structural actions should be taken. He said in his first, 1967, budget ‘I have complete confidence these difficulties will be temporary … [a] confidence [which] stem[med] from the underlying strength of the New Zealand economy, based on its productive capacity built up over the years and the skill and vigour of our people.’ One suspects the next sentences were a caution for Treasury. ‘No one can yet say how long the present situation will last. That will depend on many factors.’[12]
A little self reflection – not one of Muldoon’s stronger attributes – would have suggested that already he had taken stronger measures than at any time under Lake, with his first mini-budget in May, and stiff measures to control government spending in June. By November 1967 Muldoon had devalued the exchange rate, not simply the 14.3 per cent to parallel the sterling devaluation, but by an extra 5.15 percent, aligning the New Zealand dollar with the Australian one. The production consequences of the fiscal changes were to shift resources from the public to the private sector (which was not very popular among those dependent upon the public sector), while the devaluation shifted resources from the internal economy to the external economy. The consequence, including that of some of the fiscal measures, was to raise domestic prices, which would lead to the higher rates of inflation of the next few years.
This was, of course, also redistributional outcomes, which became even more intense in the Arbitration Court in 1968. General Wage Orders had been established after the war as a means, broadly, of compensating wages for prices increases. The previous GWO had been in December 1966. Consumer prices had risen about 6.7 percent in the next year and, with the prospect of further rises, the FOL had put in a claim for 7.6 percent in December 1967. Unbeknown to the FOL in March 1967 there had been discussions between Shand as Minister of Labour with his Secretary of Labour, Noel Woods, and the new Judge of the Arbitration Court, Archibald Blair, to ensure that the effect of the Economic Stabilisation Regulations, under which the GWO was awarded, did not negate the effect of the government’s policy measures. Pat Walsh comments ‘[t]he amendment was not made. Blair had indicated that he was not ill-disposed towards taking the government’s measures into account in making a GWO and it seems that the government decided it would rely on Blair to act appropriately.’[13]
Walsh adds dryly ‘the government’s faith in Blair, if faith it was, was fully vindicated a year later.’ [14] In June 1968 the Court (Blair and the employers’ advocate agreeing, the union advocate dissenting) found that ‘in present economic conditions a general wage order should not be made.’[15] There was widespread outrage in the union movement. Some employers broke ranks and voluntarily gave their workers a 5 percent cost of living bonus. A second application was made jointly by the FOL with the Employers Federation, and just over a month later the majority of the Court, with Blair dissenting, awarded a 5 percent increase (by which time prices had risen just under 10 percent).
I have not detailed the public and political turmoil over the period between the two judgements – Walsh does that well enough – but mention should be made that Shand negotiated with the employers and unions that the regulations should be amended to make changes in retail prices the primary criterion for the Court to consider in a GWO application. To his dismay, the Cabinet rejected the proposal. The resistance was lead by Muldoon supported by Deputy Prime Minister John Marshall who chaired the meeting in the absence of Holyoake. Muldoon and the Treasury were of course concerned with the impact of the Court on the Budget, announced in mid-July, but additionally ‘the probability is that we would build up trouble for the future by giving special emphasis to one or other set of criteria which will have to continue to apply in future years in situations which we will not have to now foresee.’[16] The economists’ point is that by binding two prices together – minimum wages and the consumer price index – the economy would lose a degree of flexibility it might need in a future crisis.
What Muldoon did not foresee was that the nil wage order ended the domination of the Arbitration Court in wage-setting. It would be many years – decades – before a satisfactory alternative was found. At the heart of the Court’s approach was that in the prosperity and moderate growth of the early postwar period the fruits of prosperity could be shared reasonably evenly, but once that phase ended, the distribution problem became sharing the burden of a structural downturn. The Court had no authority to do this, and the institutional mechanism had to be replaced by a new one.
The Arbitration Court strategy – especially insofar as the wage path was implicitly indexed to consumer prices – required that most wage earners be not exposed to competition from overseas suppliers, since otherwise they might price themselves out of the market. That protection was in the first instance via import licencing, but also involved tariffs, subsidies, and a host of other interventions (which were not finally removed until the end of the 1980s). Although the rhetoric of the protection debate was the production problem – which sectors should expand faster than others – the reality is that the gains in aggregate production are small following a change in the protection regime – in the short run anyway. On the other hand there can be very substantial impact on the income distribution, as a result of quite small changes in the protection regime. Thus the passion from the interest groups, while nominally about increasing the average level of welfare, is in fact about increasing their share when welfare is, on the whole, fixed.
There is no full account of the protection debate, whose passion was not always combined with analytic rigour, and often using economic models which were notable for their simple mindedness, except insofar as they suppress assumptions which are not in the presenters favour.
It entered public policy as a result of the NDC. In the 1969 budget Muldoon reported as follows:
“One of the significant achievements of the National Development Conference was the agreement reached on the difficult problem of protection fro the manufacturing sector. The Conference unanimously made the following recommendation on this subject which because of its importance I will quote in full:
“The manufacturing sector should be accorded a level of protection sufficient to promote steady industrial development, increasing manufacturing exports and full employment. This level of protection however, should be such as to encourage competition, efficiency, and reasonable prices to other sectors and to consumers and should also have regard to the need to give the consumer choice and variety. It is accordingly recommended that the system of protection should be flexible, that import licensing should be replaced by tariffs as the main measure of protection and that this transition should be carried out in accordance with a clearly defied programme and within a reasonable time. It is recognised however that there are cases where other protective measures including import licensing may be more appropriate than a tariff.
“The Government accepts this recommendation as the basis of its policy.”[16]
The next paragraph discusses the possibility of a standard level of protection, and promises further study. But in case one thought this was an enthusiastic adoption of the recommendation, the final paragraph of the section concluded ‘[i]n the following sections, I shall announce a number of substantial incentives and concessions which are designed to assist the development of particular industries’.[17] No, there was no real commitment, not even to end import licensing in a reasonable time. In fact it took around twenty years, by a government which was an anathema to Muldoon.
By now the Minister’s budget speeches were almost twice the length of Lake’s day, listing in detail the various concessions and interventions to be introduced or rolled over. The central principles of the 1963 budget of ‘the continuation of a coherent and consistent policy aimed at increasing the rate of economic growth’[18] would no doubt be claimed but would be less evident partly because the receding classical growth paradigm, but also because the stability of the early postwar boom had ended. As for the claim that the Government was ‘determin[ed] to seek solutions to our various problems in cooperation with all the interested groups, and not to impose decisions on the basis of outmoded dogmas.’[19] It continued to try, as evidenced by the commitment to the National Development Conference. But the conditions for consensus had collapsed too.
Muldoon went into the 1969 election as one of Holyoake’s most respected lieutenants. Others – Gooseman, Hanan, Lake, McAlpine, and Shand – had fallen by the way. Muldoon campaigned so successfully, that his cabinet ranking was upgraded from twentieth to fifth (behind Marshall, Shelton and Talboys). He was now, in effect, a general, reporting directly to and working closely with the Field Marshal Holyoake. He had been fortunate to be given the finance portfolio at such a young age, but it was his misfortune that the economic times were far more difficult than those his predecessor faced.
Endnotes
1. The statistics in this paragraph and the next are derived from J. O. Wilson New Zealand Parliamentary Record: 1840-1984 (Government Printer, 1985), and where necessary updated.
2. The economic analysis in this article largely follows B.H. Easton In Stormy Seas (University of Otago Press, 1997).
3. Interview with J. C. Barr (Alexander Turnbull Oral History Archive, 1973).
4. The Treasury was then in the interregnum between the reigns of Bernard Ashwin, who retired in 1955 and Henry Lang who took over in 1968, although he was influential before then. The three Treasury Secretaries between are usually thought to be competent rather than outstanding.
5. H. Lake, The Financial Statement (In Committee of Supply, 20 June 1961), Parliamentary Paper B6. p.1. a.k.a. “the 1961 Budget”.
6. Op. cit. p.25.
7. H. Lake, The Financial Statement(In Committee of Supply, 28 June 1962), Parliamentary Paper B6. pp.24-25. a.k.a. “the 1962 Budget”.
8. H. Lake, The Financial Statement (In Committee of Supply, 11 July, 1963), Parliamentary Paper B6. p.26. a.k.a. “the 1966 Budget”.
9. H. Lake, The Financial Statement(In Committee of Supply, 16 June, 1966), Parliamentary Paper B6. p.25. a.k.a. “the 1966 Budget”.
10. For further details see Easton (1997) Chapter 5.
12. B. Gustafson His Way: A Biography of Robert Muldoon (Auckland University Press, 2000) Chapter 8 passim.
13. R .D. Muldoon, The Financial Statement (In Committee of Supply, 22 June, 1967) Parliamentary Paper B6. p.1. a.k.a “the 1967 Budget”.
14. P. Walsh, “An ‘Unholy Alliance’: The !968 Nil Wage Order,” New Zealand Journal of History, Vol 28, No 2, October 1994, p.181.
15. Op. cit. p.181.
16. Awards, 68 (1968) p.1281.
17. R .D. Muldoon, The Financial Statement (House of Representatives, 18 July 1968) Parliamentary Paper B6. p.33 a.k.a “the 1968 Budget”.
18. R .D. Muldoon, The Financial Statement (House of Representatives, 26 June 1969) Parliamentary Paper B6. p.25 a.k.a “the 1968 Budget”.
19. Op. cit. p.26.
20. See endnote 8.
21. See endnote 8.