N.Z. good example?

Press, 1 May 1981, Page 3

N.Z. good example?

NZPA London The New Zealand and Australian Governments’ handling of their countries’ economies have been held up as examples Britain could follow instead of Mrs Thatcher's “nasty medicine" approach. The agriculture correspondent of the “Financial Times,” -, John Cherrington, writing in the newspaper, says, "It does seem to me that by their refusal to accept the stern disciplines of monetarism and other orthodox economic dogmas, the Governments of both Australia and New Zealand have ensured the fulfilment of the democratic maxim that government should be for the greatest good of the greatest number. “Will it last? No-one knows. But if it does it will make Mrs Thatcher’s economic experiment look silly.”

Mr Cherrington, who lived in New Zealand for some years and visited it recently, says that New Zealand and Australia share the same past and present problems as Britain but that the people “have not been made to suffer the hair-shirt policies with which we have been inflicted.

"In New Zealand the inflation rate is 16 per cent and to get over the little trouble of a weakening currency the Government has arranged for the New Zealand dollar to float, which it does downward at a rate of about 0.5 per cent monthly. Nobody much seems to worry.

"The stock exchange rose by 50 per cent last year. House prices are rising, and the centre of Wellington is one vast building site on the scale of the Heath-Barber boom. Unemployment is an

officially low 3 per cent thanks partly to the safety valve of emigration to Australia.

“Almost everyone has a material standard of living considerably better than his British contemporary. Sure, the cars are rather older, but then petrol is less than £1 a gallon."

Mr Cherrington says that Australia is in an even better position. “The cars are newer and petrol cheaper. Eightv-five

per cent of them ( Australians) live in suburban surroundings with no knowledge of the realities of the farming or the mining which support them.

“Unemployment is around 6 per cent and said to be falling. Unlike New Zealand there is a substantial base mainly for home consumption.”