New Zealand Politics 1984-1993

On July 6 1984, the fourth Labour government were elected into parliament after defeating the National party in a snap election. 1984 can be regarded as a major turning point in New Zealand political history in the sense that significant political changes affected the whole of the New Zealand society, economy and political structure. New Zealand government's experimented with radical Neoliberal policy programmes to achieve economic and social progress during this period. The essay shall discuss the central features of the process of policy change over the period of 1984 to 1993 in New Zealand. These reforms were among the most sweeping in scope and scale within any industrialised democracy. There are a significant number of historical and institutional similarities between Australia and New Zealand which make them a fertile ground for comparative analysis. This essay shall compare industrial relations reform in Australia and New Zealand during the 1980s and 1990s, integrating both institutionalist and interest-based approaches.

Within comparative politics there are two main approaches to the impact of economic change on national policy patterns. The first, new institutionalism has been very influential in comparative industrial relations. The second, which focuses on the role of interests, has also been significant in New Zealand and Australian politics.

The concept of institutionalism is central to the analysis of the reform episode that took place in New Zealand. Institutions are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction (North,1990:3). Zucker defines Institutionalism as a fundamentally cognitive process (1983:25). In comparison, Immergut argues that the theoretical core of the new institutionalism is the view that there is a tendency for certain arrangements in social life to persist over institutions and for these institutional arrangements to affect not just strategic actions