Peter MacDonald
Why is 1991’s failed ideology being revived in 2025?
Someone at TVNZ must’ve fiddled with a time machine, because Ruth Richardson has just stepped out of 1991 and landed in 2025: same outfit, same speeches and same cold economic dogma.
It’s like a bad episode of Doctor Who, where the monster isn’t a Dalek, but a former finance minister hellbent on reviving austerity, blaming pensioners and selling off the state again. Except this time, the enemy isn’t just fictional. She’s 74, still drawing a golden MP pension and demanding everyone else wait longer for theirs.
Her appearance on Q+A, backed by the so-called Taxpayers’ Union (a lobby group for corporate privilege dressed up as fiscal concern), was not just surreal: it was insulting. After three decades of economic hardship caused by the very reforms she pioneered, she’s back, telling New Zealanders to brace for more cuts, more sacrifice and more asset sales.
Never mind the failed PPP model devastating councils across the country. Never mind the billion-dollar consultant gravy train. No, it’s the pensioners and public spending she wants to gut.
Oblivious to the wreckage, Ruth Richardson’s ideology is still haunting New Zealand
Ruth Richardson proudly defends her 1991 “Mother of All Budgets” and continues to preach the gospel of austerity, blind to the wreckage her ideology left behind. Like Roger Douglas before her, she helped usher in a dogmatic free-market model where Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) became the new religion and the taxpayer became the sacrificial lamb.
Now, decades later, we’re seeing the cost of those so-called reforms and it’s not theoretical. It’s on the rates bill landing in every Dunedin letterbox.
The PPP-for-profit model sold to us as modernisation has bankrupted the moral economy of local government. Councils were stripped of in-house departments and forced to contract out basic services to bloated, monopolistic private firms that charge gold for doing silver work. The result? Skyrocketing debt, declining service quality and a permanent transfer of wealth from ratepayers to contractors and consultants.
Take the Dunedin City Council, now saddled with 1.6 billion dollars in debt, a direct result of contracting out nearly every major works program. The only thing keeping the ship afloat is the fact that Dunedin is one of the few councils (along with Auckland) that can afford to pay one million dollars a week in interest and even that’s only possible thanks to brutal rate hikes:
- 27 per cent increase over 2023–2024
- Another 10 per cent projected in 2025–2026
- With no end in sight for the next decade and beyond
Let’s call this what it is: open slather on the Dunedin ratepayer.
And yet, the same ideologues who created this mess now have the gall to blame pensioners, call for more cuts and demand we sell off our last few remaining public assets, like power companies, Landcorp and TVNZ to ‘fix the books’.
But the books are only broken because the system was rigged to break them.
The PPP model was never about delivering value: it was designed to extract profit from public need. It hollowed out the state, dismantled the public sector and handed contracts to private firms whose rates are decided before a shovel hits the ground. These firms don’t work for themselves or for each other. They work off the taxpayer, at the taxpayer’s expense.
So instead of raising the retirement age, we should be raising the tax take on PPP contractors, consultants and the bloated gravy train they ride in on. Because if we’re serious about saving money, we should start with the real corporate welfare bludgers, not pensioners who built this country.
What we actually need:
- Bring core council services back in-house
- End the consultant and PPP outsourcing rort
- Tax the private operators extracting public wealth
- Defend the dignity of citizens, not the profits of contractors.
If Ruth Richardson wants to talk about morality, she should first explain the moral failure of engineering a system where wealth is hoarded at the top while communities collapse under debt and ratepayers are crushed by the cost of living.
She had her era. It failed.
Let’s not relive the nightmare: let’s fix the mess.
