Social Democracy and Contextual Unemployment: New Zealand Labour in 1990

This paper examines the spatial implications of social-democratic policy transformation. It does so by exploring the political consequences of residential contextual unemployment engendered by a Labour government which had once been dedicated to maintaining full employment. Faced with economic crisis, as Przeworski's model predicts [Capitalism and social democracy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1985)], New Zealand Labour, beginning in 1984, abandoned its traditional social-democratic statist policies, including the maintenance of full employment, and allowed unemployment to skyrocket under its stewardship. This meant subjecting its supporters to significant contextual cross-pressures, since many residential neighbourhoods became characterised by both high concentrations of Labour partisans, and by those recently unemployed by Labour's new market-liberal policies. Using original survey data merged with New Zealand census data, empirical findings show that residual partisan loyalties and a lack of a major party alternative constrained respondents' partisan disaffection, while channelling their disillusionment into both minor party voting and systemic, governmental criticisms - likely fuelling New Zealand's drive for electoral reform and a new system of proportional representation.     

Competition and co-operation in the semi-periphery: closer economic partnership and sectoral transformations in Chile and New Zealand

The signing of a strategic economic partnership (the Trans-Pacific SEP or P4) between Chile, New Zealand, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam in 2005 reveals the emergence of a new generation of trade agreements that seek to promote longer-term synergies and cooperation. This is in marked contrast with a purely competitive, market-based model of agreements whereby economies are opened up to oligopsonistic capital. The orientation is clearly more neostructural and strategic in construction, emphasizing the opportunities within the global economy of improved relations with similarly positioned economies within the semi-periphery. This article analyses both the basis for and implications of the P4 for Chile and New Zealand by looking at three sectors in which both countries are competitive in export markets: dairy, wine and fisheries. By assessing similarities and differences, and the ways in which competition or co-operation might be established, the potential impacts of the agreement can be posited. Within a global context of bilateral and multilateral commercial agreements, it is this type of agreement that perhaps best fits the needs of smaller economies in the periphery that seek to establish greater competitive space for their exports in core economies without engaging in a mutually destructive war of competition in similar sectors and products.     

Growing Apples and the 'Growing Pains' of Restructuring for New Zealand's Pipfruit Industry

Numerous urgent issues face New Zealand's pipfruit industry at the close of the decade. Oversupplied and competitive global markets, shifting policy environments, and industry ‘clawback’ place increasing pressures on pipfruit's single desk marketing system. This paper identifies the importance of interregional production dynamics and some policy challenges surrounding discourses of globalisation, sustainability and restructuring.     

Managed Temporary Labour Migration of Pacific Islanders to Australia and New Zealand in the Early Twenty-first Century

ABSTRACT

Circular migration was one of several enduring themes in Graeme Hugo’s highly productive research career. Although his specialist field was Asian population movement, during the 2000s he became increasingly interested in labour migration in the Pacific Islands. This paper reviews the development of two managed circular migration schemes targeting Pacific labour that emerged following the UN High-level Dialogue on International Migration and Development in 2006. New Zealand’s Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme and Australia’s Seasonal Worker Program (SWP) have attracted international attention as the kind of ‘best practice’ temporary labour migration schemes that Hugo had in mind when he emphasised the positive contributions that circular forms of mobility could make to development in both source and destination countries. The two schemes have transformed mobility between the participating countries and have played a major role in the negotiations over a free-trade agreement between Pacific Forum countries, including Australia and New Zealand. Although the schemes have been in operation for almost 10 years, this paper argues that they are not becoming ‘business as usual’; they embody complex systems of relationships between multiple stakeholders that require ongoing management to ensure that they do not become traps for low-skilled, low-paid ‘permanent’ temporary workers.     

New Zealand and Environmentalism: An Outsider's View

Abstract. This paper is a personal perspective on how New Zealand appears to have changed in its approach to environmental management in the twenty years since 1 first came to know and love the country.