Neoliberalism and Media Democracy: A Representative Anecdote from Post-Rogernomics New Zealand

Abstract

If the story of neoliberalism is typically narrated as an Anglo-Americancentric 1980s story focused on the political victories of Thatcher and Reagan, for dramatic effect, the story sometimes turns to Aotearoa New Zealand. New Zealand underwent one of the most extreme neoliberal experiments of the 1980s (Gray, 1998a), radically altering the character of a society historically defined by the values of the welfare state and “the social democratic ideal of [a] harmonious classless society” (Kelsey, 1997, p. 20). The country became a “laboratory” for the deployment of neoliberal theories, its small-scale, weak parliamentary structures and relative economic vulnerability providing “almost perfect political, economic and intellectual conditions in which to experiment” (p. 19). The New Zealand neoliberal story was, in its local vernacular, the story of “Rogernomics”, named after Roger Douglas, the Minister of Finance of the Labour Party government that came to power in 1984 and which was re-elected in 1987.