Jane Kelsey: At The Crossroads

By WAYNE BRITTENDEN

When 19th-century Manchester liberalism was imposed on New Zealand more than a century later, it was packaged as Rogernomics.

As Denmark's recently elected neo-liberal government sets about similarly demolishing its Keynesian economy to conform to the dictates of global market forces, it's being sold to a sceptical public as "the Danish Way".

Terms such as "best value" and Margaret Thatcher's "There is no alternative" (TINA) can now be heard in a host of European welfare states in the throes of becoming farewell states. But New Zealand, as a full-throttle, free-market flagship, went so much further. In the international economic striptease, we're down to a sagging G-string.

Through her writings and lectures on the international circuit, Jane Kelsey has portrayed the New Zealand model as one to avoid.

Her earlier works mostly chronicled the economic and political events and their immense social cost. Her visionary new book, At the Crossroads, is a more upbeat collection of three meticulously researched and passionately argued essays.

Many on the left despair that economic power has transcended political power to the point where the nation states' margin for manoeuvre is shrinking daily. Kelsey, however, argues that global capital has a far less secure future than it seemed a decade ago. Her "Wobbly Bicycle" essay throws scorn on those advocating a breakneck pace to keep the faltering free-trade bicycle upright when there are other more universally rewarding roads to navigate.

For Kelsey, that road certainly isn't the Third Way. She devotes her second essay to this perpetuation of neo-liberalism through the "Trojan horse" of social democracy.

Her despair over the lack of intelligent, critical political debate has probably intensified since Peter Dunne's TV worm wriggled approvingly for both an increase in teachers, and no increase in taxes.

The third essay, "A Requiem For TINA", argues that we're not yet in the cage of globalisation with the key tossed away. Among the many challenging possibilities she discusses is the Tobin Tax, a means of curbing speculative investment flows that is presently being considered in several progressive European think tanks.

We're expected to enthuse over our brave new economic world where high inflation is becoming a thing of the past. But so, too, are universal healthcare, job security and state pensions. At the Crossroads is important reading for those who don't accept the inevitability of the prevailing orthodoxy. It is essential reading for those who do.

* Published by Bridget Williams Books, $34.95

* Wayne Brittenden is a London-based journalist.