I suppose some might regard it as an interesting form of revenge upon over-garrulous taxi drivers, to return their thoughts on the new government with an alarming disquisition on the quality of the male orgasm One might certainly get to one’s destination more quickly. But there’s been little growth lately and even less consensus. The neo-liberals in New Zealand have failed.People want to recover social solidarity and mutual concern. Tony Blair and colleagues do not have to travel to the other side of the globe to take on the lesson – it was surely one of the principal reasons why people voted for them on May 1.. So far it hasn’t been easy for me to follow the Family Planning Association’s weekend injunction to talk about sex at least once a day.

My partner is at her mother’s (no, things are fine, thank you), and I don’t really like to go up to complete strangers, to neighbours, or to people at work and begin to tell them about my sexual fantasies. The most obvious is that people feel betrayed by governments that have pushed change too far and too fast. People said to me: we voted Labour in the Eighties and we got right-wing radicalism; we voted conservative in the Nineties and we got right-wing radicalism; something is wrong with the political system.What the public wants more than anything is a long period of pragmatic administration; no more shocks, no more experiments – but a lot more social spending and a lot less of the cynicism that recently prompted Prime Minister Bolger to say he would rather give $500 to the city mission than his own social welfare department.Sir Roger Douglas used to argue in the patronising way of Thatcherites that consensus would develop after the hard decisions had delivered growth, prosperity and lower taxes. The result was a coalition between National and a new party, New Zealand First, a mixture of Maori representatives and “none of the above”. Six months on, the coalition is in the dumps, New Zealand First’s rating is negligible and polls show voters want yet another referendum, this time to reject PR and restore first past the post.Kiwis have not lost their stolidity – such volatility needs an explanation. The trick is to match low inflation and jobs and growth, and New Zealand has nothing to teach us or anyone else here.Meanwhile, New Zealand politics and society are in a mess. Anxious about Opposition pledges on proportional representation, Prime Minister Jim Bolger committed the National Party to a referendum on PR; the country said yes and the first elections on the new franchise were held last autumn.

But now the boom is over and only a true believer would claim the New Zealand economy has been left in permanently fine fettle. Inflation has been brought down; but that is a common or garden achievement these days. Economic growth soared as New Zealand adapted to new patterns of trade with Japan and other Asian neighbours The exchange rate fell, encouraging exports. What the revolutionaries did not add was that their version of Reaganomics would make New Zealand a much less equal society and now also a less safe one. They did not care to foresee that the reforms would create a new class of high-rolling consultants and business executives for whom greed was good and some of the most attractive features of a pastoral, egalitarian society would be lost forever.In the early Nineties, the promise of material prosperity looked as if it were being realised. “Users ought to pay,” they cry, not realising or caring that New Zealand’s extensive network of rural roads is what keeps the country in one piece, socially speaking.The radicals’ promise was clear: cut government and the economy would be free to soar, carrying the people into a new heaven of material prosperity where they alone would choose what to spend on their health, social security and so forth.

Within a decade the radical right had succeeded in abolishing the New Zealand welfare state – in the face of consistent public support for its principles Governments changed but the radical right remains in power. It is still a potent presence, now working on proposals to set up toll booths (or their electronic equivalent) on rural roads. Here was a broadly tolerant and secular nation getting true religion in a bad way.There is no denying the political success of the revolutionaries, led by Sir Roger Douglas and staffed by a group of civil servants in the Treasury, with outposts in Business Roundtable and other lobbying organisations. Here was a country priding itself on British-style pragmatism surrendering to theory.

World economic conditions in the Seventies and Eighties meant that New Zealand would have to do more than produce dairy products, wool, sheep meat and sportsmen; and one way or another it would have had to sort out a public finance mess bequeathed by (National Party) Prime Minister Robert Muldoon.What was distinctive – and odd – about New Zealand was the doctrinal certitude of the politicians and officials who carried out the changes. Privatisation steamed ahead, services were contracted out and a Fiscal Responsibility Act was introduced to bear down permanently on tax and spending. The NZ state now consumes 34 per cent of national product, a figure British Tories still dream of – the British state is still worth around 41 per cent.For the neo-conservatives what New Zealand did made the country an antipodean paradise. One reason is that Kiwis actually trust state provision, especially over the long haul. They don’t trust the grand promises of their right-of-centre politicians that private is necessarily better.Moral for Blairites: make sure the people trust you before putting forward long-term programmes of financial change.New Zealand is a small country with only 3.5 million people Unlike Australia it was settled by free men and women. Given its common heritage and parliamentary tradition, it is a place where people ought to trust their government. Yet in the Eighties it experienced an episode of radical top-down institutional reform.