90. In the Public Eye - Dancing Cossacks, Angels on Pinheads and Rogernomes; The Archaeology of a Box (7)

 

[For the origin of this series of blogs see 71.The Archaeology of a Box: Introduction, 10th November 2013]

 

Among the file of papers in the box are some newspaper cuttings from the Auckland Star, 1981 and 1989, and the New Zealand Herald, 1989. (I have always disliked the Herald's up-my-nose photograph!)

 

1981 was an election year, as is 2014. The Cold War was still going strong and in the first of these articles (Auckland Star, 23 March 1981) I wrote that the year 'opened to the music of the balalaika as the Cossacks of the National Party's 1975 election campaign goose-stepped across our TV screens.' This was the famous/infamous ad campaign depicting the Labour Party as the puppet of Soviet inspired socialism and of communists in New Zealand trade unions.

 

I still like the conclusion to my June 16th 1981 article on strike statistics:

 

 

 

The Focus article in The Auckland Star (June 21, 1989) is an edited extract from the paper I presented to the University's Winter Lecture Series that year. In it I wrote that 'the unregulated market will not and cannot produce equity' and that 'there is plenty of historical evidence to suggest that it will not even produce an efficient resource allocation'. Later in the piece I took issue with Rogernomics:

 

 
 

 

Here endeth the lesson from my 1989 pulpit.