New Zealand's Fifth Labour Government (1999––2008): A New Partnership with Business and Society?

New Zealand's Fifth Labour Government (1999––2008): A New Partnership with Business and Society?

New Zealand's fifth Labour Government, in power from 1999 to 2008, offers a telling case study of a nominally social democratic party re-defining its relationship with business. On the basis that the government is, to a large extent, a linguistic activity, this article focuses on the Government...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Labour history (Canberra) 2010-05, Vol.98 (98), p.39-53
Main Author: Skilling, Peter
Format: Article
Language:eng
Subjects:
Business and politics
Capital
Collaboration
Discourse
Economic competition
Economic liberalism
Economic policy
Globalization
Government
Hegemony
History
Industrial policy
Labor
Labour parties
New Zealand
New Zealand Labour Party
Parliamentary system
Political actors
Political discourse
Political science
Social democracy
Social Democratic Parties and Business: An Historical Analysis
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:New Zealand's fifth Labour Government, in power from 1999 to 2008, offers a telling case study of a nominally social democratic party re-defining its relationship with business. On the basis that the government is, to a large extent, a linguistic activity, this article focuses on the Government's political discourse, contrasting it with those of the two previous Labour administrations (1972-75 and 1984-90). Drawing on a critical analysis of the three Governments'programmatic public statements, it describes how the fifth Labour Government addressed and constructed business interests in a new way. From 1999 to 2008, Labour presented economic globalisation as the fundamental challenge facing the country, and urged all New Zealanders to work together. Within a rhetoric of partnership, business was represented as a vital contributor towards a putatively shared national purpose in a way that denied the tensions between labour and capital allowed for under earlier local incarnations of social democracy.
ISSN:0023-6942
1839-3039
0023-6942