‘Inexperience, theory a fatal combination’

Press, 14 September 1988, Page 7

‘Inexperience, theory a fatal combination’

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington The future of New Zealand will be bleak until it gets a Government that believes in hands-on economic management, according to Sir Robert Muldoon. The former National Prime Minister and Minister of Finance was speaking to the Hastings Rotary Club yesterday. Faulty theory and inexperience in Government had been a fatal combination in the last four years. There had been a total failure by the Govern-

ment to move to cushion the impact on tens of thousands of New Zealanders of what was now long-term or permanent unemployment, Sir Robert said. New Zealand was seeing middle-aged unemployment for the first time since the Depression of the 1930’5. Those middle-aged unemployed who had lost jobs which they had confidently and properly believed would be theirs until retirement would, in many cases, never get another job because if jobs became available, they would go

to younger applicants. In many cases, essential export industries in New Zealand had been destroyed, or at least seriously damaged, he said. This was because the Labour Government had not recognised the special character of the New Zealand economy. New Zealand was not a huge, mixed economy with a reasonable balance of all kinds of activity, Sir Robert said. It was a highly specialised economy dependent on a relatively narrow range of export products.