Recycling the family silver?

As election year looms, National is looking for ways to pay for its inevitable promises.

- Danyl McLauchlan

At a recent public event in Wellington, cabinet minister Chris Bishop condemned the legacy of the third National government, explaining to the predominantly younger audience that, “Muldoon was a socialist. Did you know that between 1982 and 1984 it was illegal to raise the price of supermarket goods?” He shook his head, clearly distraught that his beloved National Party had committed such monstrous crimes against the market. But a frisson ran through the crowd. A price freeze on groceries? Imagine! Muldoon sounded awesome.

Being a socialist is briefly fashionable again, mostly due to New York City’s election of Zohran Mamdani, who endorses democratic socialism - an ideology aimed at abolishing capitalism through peaceful means rather than the pyramids of skulls associated with the revolutionary left.

In a recent interview with RNZ’s Guyon Espiner, Labour leader Chris Hipkins conceded he was happy being labelled a socialist — although he elaborated that his conception of socialism was “a genuinely competitive economy”, which sounds a lot like freemarket capitalism.

These labels drift; they're often a form of marketing rather than ideology. Has Mamdani figured out a way to solve the calculation and coordination problems of a modern economy without using prices, or has he just realised you can win elections by promising people free stuff?

National is, allegedly, the party of free markets, but Bishop was correct: in the 1970s and early 80s it was operationally socialist. In recent decades it has felt more like the party of plutocracy - government for the wealthy, by the wealthy.