After leaving the Labour Party, Richard Prebble joined Act and became its leader in 1996. Photo / NZME
Richard Prebble (Opinion, May 20) was part of one of the most unique and strangest phenomena of modern history. In the '80s he, along with Roger Douglas, instigated a radical right-wing economic "coup" within one of the world's most left political parties, the New Zealand Labour Party.
It was unique
in the world, perhaps with the exception of the US Republican Party which devolved over a much longer period of time from the progressive party of Lincoln into the proto-fascism of Trump.
All nations accommodated some form of neoliberalism in the '80s-'90s. Flattening of taxes (so that the middle class bore an increasing burden), deregulation, privatisations and the stated destruction of unions were its backbone.
But few nations were so radical. Few were so destructive. According to Statistics NZ, from 1986 when Prebble, Douglas and the Business Roundtable began their radical right revolution, inequality immediately increased 22 per cent, later increasing to 30 per cent under John Key with Prebble's Act in government. Wages stagnated or declined with inflation, only rising marginally under a reformed Labour who revoked their '80s past. Only then did growth return.
Prebble/Act and the right-wing think tank The New Zealand Initiative are still using that scary, highly misleading phrase - "compulsory unionism" - a neoliberal euphemism whose policies were borrowed from US Republicans' "Right to Work" laws. Such deceptively nice-sounding language and policy were instated specifically to undermine unionism and lower wages. They worked.
