Trailblazers: The New Zealand Story | movie | 2017 | Official Clip
Thirty years ago New Zealand was on the verge of economic collapse. Today, the country is a driving force in internation | dG1fU2RVamFzb2dnV2M
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00:00By 1990, Roger Douglas and the Labour Party had shaped the economic landscape here for
00:05six years.
00:07Changes had been difficult, and the Labour Party had fallen out of favor.
00:10After the 1990 election, the National Party came back into power.
00:16Another no-nonsense finance minister is appointed.
00:20She is Ruth Richardson.
00:21It's like a passing of the baton in a relay.
00:25I was able to do a sprint that he wasn't able to with the reforms.
00:31So in some sense, it was a one-two punch.
00:34In both cases, reforms moving in the direction of greater openness, greater transparency,
00:40greater government accountability, and better incentives for the private sector.
00:45So take our agricultural sector, and take the meat industry and the slaughterhouse.
00:52So you had a closed shop, and I say this as a feminist as much as a finance minister.
00:56You had a closed shop, the boys had all the good jobs, they stopped the women doing the
01:00jobs that really paid well.
01:01You had to belong to the union, and the union said, who worked where and for what wages.
01:07There were 25,000 people working in the railways, 25,000 people only needed to be 5,000 people.
01:15So when you disrupt 20,000 people who are in pretend work, how are they going to re-enter
01:21the workforce if you've got all these closed shop arrangements?
01:25All those things was a form of privilege that helped a few people who were employed in that
01:33industry but cost every other New Zealander, including the low income, a lot of money.
01:40In 1994, the job growth exploded.
01:45People were free to work.
01:48New Zealand, I think, got the combination right.
01:51They reformed the private sector, and they reformed the public sector, basically at the
01:56same time.
01:59New Zealand also started applying private sector accounting disciplines and transparency
02:03to the public sector.
02:04This is not the case in the vast majority of countries around the world.
02:08In fact, if private businesses were to report their financial books according to the same
02:12standards as government accounting, it would be deemed illegal in most countries.
02:18In New Zealand, government officials could no longer get away with a lower standard.