Neal Wallace - When the Farm Gates Opened: The Impact of Rogernomics on Rural New Zealand

The faceless men in boiler suits atop ladders, working on telephone lines in a remote corner of Central Otago, were unusual enough to attract attention. There hadnt been any problems with the telephone service in the days leading up to the mens sudden appearance on the dead-end back-country road in April 1986. Suspicions over their actions were heightened when the Strath Taieri Hotel in nearby Middlemarch warned a family served by the line that their telephone conversations could be heard over the hotels television set.

Among those served by the phone line was Gill Shaw, one of the organisers of a pending farmer protest against the impact of economic reforms, planned for when Prime Minister David Lange was to open the refurbished Invermay Agricultural Research Centre near Dunedin later that month. Gill also noticed a sudden increase in noise on her telephone line; but the idea of linking that to the anonymous men up ladders, telephone conversations being heard over television sets and her organising of a protest all seemed too surreal in April 1986. We couldnt say anything or people would think we were paranoid, recalls fellow protest organiser Frances Copland.

Soon after the rally, normal telephone services resumed; but the incident served to highlight the apprehension, tension, consternation and anxiety that permeated government and rural communities as the most wide-ranging economic reforms in New Zealands history, colloquially known as Rogernomics, started to bite following the Lange-led Labour Partys landslide victory in the 1984 election. Looking back, the protest organisers believe the men were secret service agents, seeking intelligence ahead of the farmer protest.

Certainly rural New Zealand was battered and bruised by the almost overnight ending of price support and production subsidies. Hurting and angry, farmers felt the government had betrayed them. The mood was volatile and irrational, and there was a real fear the protest could turn ugly. Many despised Prime Minister David Lange and his reforming Finance Minister Roger Douglas. This was certainly a view shared by two of my brothers, who, like thousands of others, were finding their livelihoods squeezed as incomes were slashed by a third, land values were halved and expenses rose by a third, driven by interest rates of 18% and above, three times what they had previously been paying. The term Rogernomics would become farmer shorthand for a period of New Zealand history synonymous with pain, anguish and misery but also a period that would irreversibly alter farming and the structure and attitudes of rural New Zealand.