Nats only got into govt by endorsing many of the Clark Govt policies that they knew they wouldn’t change “in the first term”, while attempting to stay silent on what they really wanted.

Remember the Bill English tapes on privatization. The first term is ’set it up’ (see ACC) the second term ‘let the hammer fall’.

Actually some politicians become poster boys for a philosophy and then stick to it because of the advantage it provides (politically or speaking circuit).
Pre 80s, Rob Muldoon (one of the most able finance ministers worldwide – period) often argued for deregulation and sensible incentives for business to bloom. This was his foreign persona, but at home he argued that we should not be beholden to IMF policy and definitely should not deregulate and globalize our economy until after the worldwide crash he saw coming in the mid 80’s, otherwise we will get our best business swallowed into branch offices of foreign companies. Muldoon wrote this in 1979 (Hmmm).
Rodger Douglas on the other hand still argued for price controls and farm/business subsidies and protectionist policies going into the 84 election. Then he won and the IMF got hold of him.

To be fair to Bill English, he isn’t the only National MP in this position. Nick Smith’s approach to ACC really looks much the same the ideas in the late 90s. In fact, come to think of it, many government policies remind me of the 90s. It’s like the National party was defeated in 1999, but did not once during the following decade reconsider their policies. They just got angry that they weren’t on the treasury benches, and stayed angry.

This started in the 1980s with Reagan. Since then the US economy has gone in a spectacular decline, its current account deficit growth has become spectacular, government services like health and education are in crises and they are facing a GDP decline of 20%.
Why would NZ ever want to replicate that?

Isn’t it time we started cutting the ideological crap out of our lives?

You have my respect over that last comment bro, Realizing the mistakes of the 1980s is a really important priority for labour, reversing them is the next step.

‘Deregulation will usher in a new nirvana’… That boils so many nerves in my brain that if I started to talk I would forget about half of them by the time I had finished…

It’s like they have a solution to problems in the economy, and when the solution fails, they say ‘Oh it’s not that we were wrong we just didn’t do Enough of what we knew was right’, that National after the deregulations of the 1980s, and after all the crap that followed, their answer is to Deregulate even more? Use fiscal and monetary policies to balance the economy even less? Sell what scarce few state assets we actually have left?

It’s not that they have no brains, well maybe that too but, there is a real element of Stubbornness in national, they have a conservative mindset that they have always had deregulation as a policy and it just has to be right, and if it get’s our economy into the state it’s in now, it’s only that way because there wasn’t ENOUGH deregulation, because Labour doesn’t let them do enough, and it’s all Labours fault!

Deregulation will usher in a new nirvana – now that is even older than 2008! Try 1998!

Actually, I distinctly remember that in 1985/6 from the 4th Labour government. Specifically, it was about Telecom and, 30+ years later, we’re having to pay the profiteers billions of dollars that we can’t afford to get our telecommunications back up to scratch.

Who is really being “farmed” or “mined” here?

Answer, the poor old working stiff who tries their best to make ends meet and raise a family.

It does appear that Labour may, finally, be starting to realise that they really screwed things up in the 1980s.

David, that is what is so scary, if the nats had won in 2005, I feel that we (NZ) would be in the same financial state as Iceland, Ireland, Greece etc. etc.

If National had won in 2k5 the deficit would have ballooned out immediately on NACTs first tax cuts and then ballooned again as the beginnings of the GFC hit and then exploded as NACT cut taxes again to “drive growth”. The top 1% would have been fine though.

National haven’t got a clue as to how the economy works. All they have is a belief of how the economy works and that belief is based upon their own desires.