New Rights New Zealand: Myths, Moralities and Markets.

• Author: Cheyne, Christine
• Position: Book review

NEW RIGHTS NEW ZEALAND: MYTHS, MORALITIES AND MARKETS: By DOLORES JANIEWSKI and PAUL MORRIS AUCKLAND UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005

New Rights New Zealand is an intriguing addition to the literature on the economic and social reforms of the late 1980s and 1990s. Janiewski and Morris are professors of, respectively, history and religious studies. This book presents the findings of a research project entitled "Marketing morality: The campaign to remoralise NZ, 1984-1999" for which they received a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund grant. Not all readers of this journal will be aware that the aim of the Marsden Fund is to support research that incorporates originality, insight and research excellence. A further goal of the Marsden Fund is to foster the development of research skills and, to this end, projects are encouraged to support postgraduate research. Janiewski and Morris' research incorporated work done by a Master's student that is the basis of Chapter 10.

The authors set out to investigate New Zealand's ideological encounter with the New Right. The distinctive and novel feature of this particular examination of the neo-liberalism of the 1980s and 1990s is its concern to highlight the moral dimension, which they consider has often been neglected in analyses of the same economic and social phenomenon. Other analyses, they argue, typically focus on elections, Treasury influence and public policies. And while intriguing in that this research does present some new material and fresh insights, there are also some weaknesses with the analysis of the New Right that detract from its contribution to scholarship on the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s.

On the one hand, Janiewski and Morris identify similarities between New Zealand's New Right and the New Right in other countries in the 1970s, particularly the United States, Britain and Australia. On the other, they argue that there are pre-existing economic, political and ideological differences that result in distinctive forms of the New Right. In addition, other oppositional social movements that often emerged alongside the New Right have shaped the form taken by the New Right. Janiewski and Morris refer to these other movements somewhat confusingly as new rights. Indeed, they refer to an analysis of United States newspapers in the 1960s that revealed that the term "New Right" was used in relation to the growing demand for equality for African Americans, women, people with disabilities and other similarly disempowered groups (pp.36-37).

Given that the term "New Rights" appears in the title of the...