Until about 1980 we were a wonderful little country. Not perfect, but wonderful in retrospect. Moreover, we were internationally respected for our compassionate social systems in health, eduction and welfare which led the world.

We had no debts. Wise leadership made sure of that. To accomplish this, imports were carefully controlled as was sometimes the amount of money going out of the country. I remember how we all grumbled about those things, not of course knowing what the debt-ridden alternative could be.

Then along came two foolish?/manipulated?/crafty? politicians who ran us into serious debt, so that in 1984 there was an excuse to bring about a major revolution in this country. (The question marks are there because we will probably never know whether they were in effect a part of an international drive to destroy welfare states everywhere in the world.)

But there was nothing new about it. It was just the Old Wrong dressed up rather expensively with the aid of modern P.R., Saachi and Saachi, and consultants. For there is nothing new about laissez-faire, market forces, and doing one's own thing no matter what it does to others. We had it all for centuries.

The New Zealand debt, which was approximately 24 billion dollars in 1984, has now, twelve years on, been trebled, and is somewhere around 71 billion dollars. According to the sober and internationally respected London Economist, we now have the largest net foreign debt of any developed country in the world. It referred to our debt as "MASSIVE" and far worse even than third-world Mexico's. "New Zealand's heavy debt burden leaves it vulnerable to external shocks." (Listener, 29 June).

And it was this debt, so greatly enlarged now, which was the excuse for drastically altering our country.

CLEARLY WE HAVE BEEN DONE.

Moreover in the name of 'cost-cutting' most of our internationally renowned social systems carefully wrought in the previous fifty years or so, have been virtually destroyed, in terms of what they once were. Hospitals, post offices and schools have been drastically curtailed or closed down.

Also in the name of this debt, "We must sell off the people's assets." And sold off they have been, at bargain prices, with enormous payments going to interested 'brokers' whose names keep cropping up as the country is gradually sold off. What is more, the ensuing enormous profits of course go overseas. And whatever they have done to earn those enormous profits could have been done by New Zealanders with a little backing. In addition we would have had some control over those profits so that our needy would not have to face ever-increasing costs, within the context of an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, a gap that is among the highest in the world.

It is quite plain that our country is being run for the benefit of the wealthy, to the detriment of the poor and middle incomed. This is not what New Zealand was ever about.

To accomplish this revolution the people of New Zealand are constantly fed a diet of soothing lies which distort utterly the true state of the country now, and what it was in the past. The young know no better. They have been led to believe that the Welfare State was an evil thing that sapped our initiatives. So where did Sir Edmund Hillary, Kiri Te Kanawha, and a thousand others of international reputation come from? Down through the years of the Welfare State, little New Zealand produced more talented people per thousand than any other country in the world. It was because they were freed from the economic imperative which so dominates the lives of the young today. There is nothing like job insecurity, widespread throughout the land now, to 'sap one's initiative,' as well as in preventing one from speaking out.

The beginning of a partial solution to the horrors of New Zealand today lies in the ballot box. And it is my fervent hope that New Zealanders will wake up at this election (Oct. 1996), look around and see what has truly happened. For The New Right has accomplished nothing less than the destruction of our country as we knew it, and as most of us wanted it. In addition, we have lost New Zealand to the money lenders.

Toni Jeffreys PhD

AOTEAROA 
AUGUST 1996

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