Lange raps rich and their actions

Press, 2 August 1989, Page 8

Lange raps rich and their actions

Wellington reporter

The Prime Minister, Mr Lange, attacked the wealthy and their behaviour since the sharemarket crash in a post-Budget address to the Post Office Union conference in Wellington yesterday. , “We are not in politics to bow and scrape to money market dealers,” he said. “We are here to represent ordinary New Zealanders.

"I have long been tired of being lectured by millionaires about the need to slash Government services to ordinary New Zealanders. “The aftermath of the sharemarket crash took me a step further than that.

“It showed that many who relentlessly advocate the downside of the free market for working people will not accept it themselves.”

Directors of companies who had made deals expecting the sharemarket boom to last had often found ways to “bail out of their fixed commitment,” said Mr Lange.

The crash had “highlighted the essential social irresponsibility of unrestricted free markets.”

“When the collapse came, the apostles of total economic freedom dived

into workers’ superannuation funds. They bankrupted restaurants with lavish Christmas parties they knew they couldn’t pay for. “You have probably seen on television the principals of some collapsed companies turning up at special meetings telling ordinary New Zealanders they’ve done their money and then speeding away in chauf-feur-driven limousines and corporate jets," Mr Lange said. The 1989 Budget was the first time the Government had been able to move into the social policy field, after five hard years of economic restructuring, he said. Acknowledging that more than 3000 postal workers had lost their jobs in corporatisation, Mr Lange said the pay-off was in sight with a sustainable economic recovery now under way. “The Budget foreshadows the most significant social policy reforms for 50 years,” he said. “It shows the way forward to a re-establish-ment of real security for New Zealanders.

If the reforms come to full fruition in the early 19905, New Zealanders will look back to the 1989 Budget as a Budget fit to rank with 1938.”