Al Gore’s NZ model – part 1

Mont Pelerin Society founder Friedrich von Hayek was made a "Companion of Honour" (of which there are only 60 worldwide) by Queen Elizabeth II for his work in designing free trade economic warfare measures on behalf of the Crown, such as privatisation, deregulation, etc.

In the second half of 1996, the Citizen's
Electoral Council, the Australian associates of Lyndon LaRouche,
conducted a study of the "New Zealand model," already then touted
as the world's greatest success story of radical free trade.

“One of the "four poisons" which Vice
President Al Gore is spreading in his attempt to wipe modern
civilization from the face of the earth is "reinventing
government" -- that is, eliminating national sovereignty by
slashing, or privatizing government functions out of
existence.

Gore brags that his "National Partnership for
Reinventing Government," a 50 person task force he has headed
since 1993, has already eliminated 351,000 U.S. federal
government employees. Now he is going global.

On January 14-15, Gore and his task force will
sponsor (sponsored) a conference, "Global Forum on Reinventing
Government," at the U.S. state department, with 45 countries
participating. This will be (was) followed by a related
conference at State in February for 65 countries titled "The Vice
President's Conference on Fighting Corruption."

Both conferences will feature, as the model
for all governments, the package of reforms implemented by the
Commonwealth nation of New Zealand (population 3.4 million) over
the last 15 years. Gore's "Reinvention" task force, crows on its
website that it has developed a sweeping "corporate model" for
privatizing most government functions, "based on the New Zealand
experience for spinning-off revenue generating government
agencies." As one of Al Gore's task force members recently gushed
to a reporter: "If you know the New Zealand model, it is truly
awesome what they have accomplished. They said 'we have to
reinvent everything about this place' and they did."
They....revamped the entire government from top to bottom and its
running like a top; and the country is succeeding economically
and it is amazing!"

New Zealand indeed is a brilliant case study
of what the Anglophile lackey, Al Gore is doing to America and to
the world. While New Zealand's savage "free market" reforms by
far surpass even those of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair's
Britain, and have left the country in ruins, the reforms have
provided a fortune for those who designed them -- associates of
the Mont Pelerin Society -- the chief economic warfare unit of
the British Crown.

Gore's New Zealand model, is also beloved of
the IMF and World Bank which have paid New Zealand politicians to
fly all over the world to spread its free market poison,
including to Germany, to Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico,
Pakistan, Canada, Peru, Vietnam, South Africa, Singapore, and
Australia.

Based upon statistics supplied by New Zealand
government departments, (that is what was left of the
departments), amplified by visits to the country, and by hundreds
of hours of discussions with New Zealanders at all levels of
politics and government. LaRouche's associates published their
findings in the January-March 1997 issue of their quarterly
journal, the New Citizen. (These results were also summarized in
EIR, June 13 1997). Bearing in mind that things have become far,
far worse in New Zealand since then.

That study showed amongst other things that
:

• New Zealand had the highest youth suicide rate in the western world, a rate which had doubled since 1985, that rate has continued to climb, and, additionally some 28,000 young people have been fleeing the country each year.
• The living standard of the average New Zealander as measured in per household market basket consumption of physical goods, had plummeted and one out of every six New Zealanders was living under the poverty line, in a country where poverty, at least among New Zealanders of European descent, was virtually unknown before 1984.
• Unemployment and part time employment (under 20 hours per week), had soared to 32% in a country where unemployment was almost non-existent before 1984
• The country's foreign debt skyrocketed from NZ$16.359 billion in 1984, to more than $74 billion, despite the fact that debt cutting was the chief proclaimed motivation for carrying out the reforms.
• Businesses were failing at the fastest rate in the country's history, a rate which has since accelerated now that New Zealand has officially plunged into recession.

The study also showed two other phenomena to
be most characteristic of the "reforms": a level of corruption
which would make the proverbial "third world dictator" blush; and
savage cuts to health care, such that the New Zealand government
has begun systematically murdering its own citizens just as Nazi
Germany did -- by withholding urgent medical treatment.

In the 1330s, New Zealand's first Labour
government, responded to the Great Depression, by nationalizing
its Reserve Bank, creating a comprehensive welfare system, and
directing economic development for full employment. This
tradition continued under both major parties. Labour and
National, through the reign of National party prime minister
Robert Muldoon (1975-1984), who responded to the impact of a
weakening, post-1971 global economy upon his country, by
instituting a series of what he called "Think Big" infrastructure
projects.

Muldoon's defence of the New Zealand economy
enraged a small cabal of free market ideologues, who schemed to
overthrow him.

The cabal included key figures in the Reserve
Bank and Treasury, and a handful of businessmen and politicians.
The political vehicle for this group was the "new" Labour Party,
a bunch of counter-culture baby boomers who had taken over the
traditional Labour Party, and who were infected with the
anti-science, anti industry, anti nuclear, cultural rot which
spread globally, as part of the after shock of the 1962 Cuban
Missiles Crisis.

The principals in this "reform" cabal numbered
no more than 20 or so, and almost all were educated either
directly by the crown's Mont Pelerin Society, or by its sister
institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Bank.

These included :

• Roger Douglas, the cabal's chief politician, who became the all powerful Finance Minister after Muldoon's overthrow, and after whom the reforms became known as "Rogernomics";
• Roderick Deane, the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank, who had been an Alternative Executive Director of the IMF from 1974-1977;
• Roger Kerr, a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, and the chief architect of the Treasury's "Economics II" program, later known as "Rogernomics":
• Doug Andrew, a member of Kerr's Treasury group, and a former World Bank staffer who helped tutor Douglas in economics;
• Alan Gibbs, a member of the Mont Pelerin society, and the aminence grise behind his close friend Douglas;
• Bob Jones, property speculator and political activist, and;
• Ron Trotter, chief executive of Fletcher Challenge, the country's second largest corporation, and chairman of the all powerful Mont Pelerin front, the New Zealand Business Roundtable.

Cabal member Bob Jones, formed a new party,
which as intended, split the "conservative" vote and drove
Muldoon from power in mid-1984. Even before that, Douglas as
Labour's shadow finance minister, "accidentally" leaked a
document which signalled his intent to devalue the New Zealand
dollar, provoking a run which forced Muldoon to devalue it by
20%. The devaluation provided tens or hundreds of millions in
profits to insiders who had speculated against their own currency
-- a pattern of looting which has characterized the "reforms"
from then on.

As soon as "new" Labour took office, it
implemented the script written by Treasury official, Roger Kerr,
one of the four New Zealand members of the Mont Pelerin
Society:

1. The float of the New Zealand dollar;
2. The abolition of interest rate and exchange controls;
3. A massive tax reform for the rich;
4. The abolition of tariffs;
5. The abolition of other protective measures for agriculture and industry.
6. The privatization of huge sectors of the state including health care, airlines, railways, energy, and ports among others.

As part of its New Zealand expose, the New
Citizen published an interview with Lord Harris of High Cross,
who was for many years the secretary of the Mont Pelerin Society,
and the long time head of its chief think-tank the Institute of
Economic affairs in London. Asked about Mont Pelerin's input into
New Zealand's reforms, Harris sketched the key role its four New
Zealand members had played, concluding: "You see, its relatively
small numbers of people. I say this rather nervously, because it
sounds a bit conspiratorial. But it wasn't at all!" Harris also
noted that Mont Pelerin and its Institute of Economic Affairs,
designed Thatcher's economic program, for which Harris and
several of his associates were knighted including, most
importantly, Mont Pelerin founder Friedrich von Hayek, whom Queen
Elizabeth dubbed a "Companion of Honour," one of only 60 such
companions worldwide.

Mont Pelerin's history speaks for itself. In
1944, von Hayek authored a raving tract against nation states
titled The Road to Serfdom, in which he lamented that the just
concluding war had strengthened nation states, which he said must
be broken up into "smaller peoples" to be ruled by one world
empire at the top: An international authority which effectively
limits the powers of the state over the individual, will be one
of the best safeguards of peace." he wrote in 1947.

Friedrich von Hayek gathered a number of his
associates, many of whom, like himself, were from the old
European nobility (and, some of whom in fact had supported
Hitler), on the slopes of Mount Pelerin, Switzerland, to found a
new society. The society he said would implement the aims of his
book through the "free market" economics of Adam Smith, David
Ricardo, Jeremy Bentham, and other British "Liberal
economists."

The new society soon moved to London where
throughout the 1950s, the chief financier of its campaigns for
free market economics, was City magnate, Harley Drayton, who
managed the private fortune of the Queen.

This then, was the political and financial
muscle arrayed behind Mont Pelerin's mere four members in New
Zealand: multimillionaire Alan Gibbs, the friend, aminence grise
and economics teacher of Roger Douglas; Roger Kerr, the Treasury
bureaucrat who wrote the reforms, and who later became executive
director of Mont Pelerin's main New Zealand front group, the
Business Roundtable; National Party MP Ruth Richardson who
replaced Douglas as finance minister when an enraged electorate
drove Douglas and his Labor Party from power in 1990; and Simon
Upton, who as National Party Health Minister, in 1990, initiated
the savage health care reforms that are now decimating the
population.

Al Gore, through his work, for Prince Philip's
Transparency International, has been crusading against
"corruption." Perhaps then, he should examine the New Zealand
model he is promoting, in particular, the country's most powerful
private lobby, the Business Roundtable, now run by Mont Pelerin
member Roger Kerr, which has been the chief lobbying force for
the reforms since Douglas took power.

The Roundtable is an awesome force in New
Zealand. As the Roundtable Herald November 12 1986 observed of
its board members, "Among them, these 32 men help to control 76%
of the country's newspaper circulation, the bulk of the private
radio stations, the biggest bank, the biggest exporters of meat
and horticultural produce, the biggest forestry companies, the
two biggest supermarket chains, both brewery companies, and a
sizeable chunk of the rest of the manufacturing, finance, and
other sectors."

Used with permission Graham Reid
www.nex.net.au/users/reidgck/MONT-PEL.HTM