The Myth of Stagnation: How We Lost the Plot in the 1970s
Chapter 2 of ‘The Revolution that Nearly Was: How Aotearoa New Zealand’s progress was frustrated, and utopia mislaid’
WHAT now seems very much like the fire sale of the land banks, amid a wider shift toward a low-tax, low-investment state, was concretely rationalised, at the time, by the idea that a period of slow population growth that had taken hold in 1975 was here to stay.
At the very dawn of the Rogernomic era, the New Zealand Official Yearbook for 1985 argued that:
By world standards New Zealand’s population is small — 3.3 million at the end of 1984. New Zealand’s first million of population was recorded in 1908, 68 years after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. In 1952, 44 years later, the second million was reached, and the third million late in 1973. Recent predictions are that the fourth million will not be reached until well into the twenty-first century.
Though New Zealand’s rate of population growth had been rapid and indeed accelerating through to 1975, many pundits of the latter part of the 1970s and the 1980s were quick to claim that those days were gone and that New Zealand would, henceforth, join what one overseas expert, David Eversley, called the Western world’s forthcoming ‘Age of Stagnation’.
Nothing like the rapid growth of the years 1945 to 1975 was likely to be seen again in the West, Eversley contended, in an article cited with approval by the head of planning at the Auckland Regional Authority of the time, Malcolm Latham, in his own contribution to a 1977 collection of essays called Auckland at Full Stretch.
At around the same time, similar arguments were used to hammer the final nails into the coffin of the future-proofing, hydroelectrically-powered rapid rail scheme advocated by the long-serving Auckland City Mayor Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, a scheme popularly known as ‘Robbie’s Rapid Rail’.
With characteristic 1960s brio, but in ways that also reached back to the original vision of New Zealand’s hydroindustrialisers, Robbie’s Rapid Rail was advocated as a smokeless, futuristic answer to the prospects of gridlock, and growing dependency on foreigners for cars and oil, that otherwise beckoned once an Auckland of half a million in the early 1960s, and 750,000 in 1974, hit one and a half million a few decades hence.
As the sixties became the seventies, it seemed likely that Robbie’s vision would prevail. It had many ‘petrolheaded’ opponents: but on the other hand it dovetailed with New Zealand’s mostly progressive and environmentally oriented self-image.
However, in 1974, a coalition of environmental and planning-profession critics, including the government’s own Commission for the Environment, several environmental groups, and the professional journal Town Planning Quarterly, most unexpectedly came out in opposition to Robbie’s Rapid Rail. As a contemporary editorial in the September 1974 issue of Town Planning Quarterly, ‘Playing with Trains’, put it,
Now, with the appearance of the Commission for the Environment‘s audit of the [rapid rail] environmental impact study, criticism of the scheme is assuming a more open form. Auckland‘s population of 750,000, presently growing at the rate of 3 per cent per year, is approaching a quarter of New Zealand‘s population. There is increasing concern, at the national level, at this imbalance. The Commission properly draws the Cabinet‘s attention to its conclusion that: ―construction and operation of a rapid transit proposal in Auckland would make it much more difficult for the growth of the region to be controlled and for the growth to be distributed to other locations throughout the country. (at p. 5)
These critics stood in revolt at the implied endorsement of a further doubling in Auckland’s size, which they saw as either improbable or undesirable, even though the rail scheme was an attempt to channel this growth in the direction of what we would now call ‘green growth’, and thus urged that the project be cancelled.
As indeed it then duly was, although the prospect that Auckland might continue to grow past 1.5 million in any case, but on a basis of motorways and traffic congestion instead, does not seem to have been dissected with as much care as the vision that Mayor Robbie had placed on the table for his critics to feast upon.
Instead, the environmental critics of the 1970s appear to have assumed that if we did not invest in rapid rail Auckland would then stop growing. In this they perhaps displayed something of the spirit of King Canute’s courtiers or of the saying, ‘if only you would stop growing, you troublesome youth, I would not need to buy you longer trousers’.
The fact that many primate cities in small polities such as Australian states, Canadian provinces, and Denmark, were more dominant than Auckland was in New Zealand did not seem to have been canvassed either: though such a comparison would only have reinforced the idea that perhaps we should have been making sensible plans for Auckland’s future growth, instead of denying and starving it in the name of an idealised vision of small-town life and a far-flung regionalism.
It goes without saying that as with the fire sale of the land banks, a bonfire of all forms of sensible planning for the management of the more baked-in and essentially unstoppable forms of future growth and change, is one of the perils of ‘degrowth’ environmentalism at the naive end.
Of course, we must be evenhanded here. The assumption that a shift from internal combustion to electric cars will enable us to solve our eco-problems while at the same time making it possible for the present system to grow in business-as-usual terms (mildly tweaked) until every dwelling on earth contains a garage within which two privately-owned electric cars are parked, is open to an identical charge of naivete at the ‘green growth’ end: a point acknowledged even by many technological futurists, who point out that in a generally electrified and ‘smart’ future it is quite likely that carsharing will be the norm, thus crashing the market for automobiles, ironically enough.
It might be a bit of a cliche to say so, but ecological pragmatism surely lies in some sweet spot between the various extremes: of degrowth advocated in ways that have adverse implications for needed forms of planning and investment, and, on the other, exponential extrapolations of a status quo that may not remain the status quo for very much longer in any case.
Such sweet spots cannot be found by pitting such a generality as ‘small is beautiful’ against its antithesis, ‘make no little plans’, but only through deliberation specific to each site and each issue until a coherent vision of a chosen future is framed: deliberation both democratic and expert.
Getting back to the increasingly anti-growth Zeitgeist of New Zealand in the 1970s and 1980s, so different to that of the 1950s and 1960s as to be almost a reaction to it, we observe that in the book of his influential 1981 TV series Landmarks, the lately retired head of geography at Auckland University, Kenneth Cumberland, argued at many points that the rapid population growth that had driven so much planning and investment in the three postwar decades was now at an end: our urban population growth above all, and still more so that of Auckland. Here are a few examples, seemingly unchecked by any qualification to the effect that rapid growth might return, in the way that it had done after all previous episodes of stagnation:
But the feverish growth that Auckland has experienced since the motor car took over came to an end in the mid-1970s. Today the expansion goes on, but very much more slowly. (p. 266)
Even when the exodus from New Zealand has slowed, it is difficult to see a rapid or significant growth of population during most if not all of the rest of the century. (p. 271)
BY THE YEAR 2000 . . . urbanisation may well have reached, or passed, its peak already. Auckland planners’ worries about excessive expansion, as well as the South Island’s envy and fears of being robbed of its hydro-electric energy, are alike groundless. (p. 288)
Too costly to repair, the pride and joy of an Auckland motorist meets an inglorious end at the city dump. Future archaeologists may marvel at the material wastefulness of urban living and wonder why New Zealanders huddled in cities at all. / Urban motorways and downtown parking blocks will be increasingly deserted as automation and telecommunications remove the need for many people to attend offices and factories. (photo captions, p. 290)
The face of the land as the next century unfolds will be shaped and fashioned by no more than three-and-a-half-million New Zealanders. (p. 299)
Though the book went into more detail than the TV series, some of these attitudes made it onto the screen, Cumberland suggesting once again in the ninth episode of the series that Auckland, which at that time had a population of 781,000, or about 950,000 fewer than today, was not likely to get much bigger:
The irony is that the Aucklanders didn’t start to worry about the excessive growth of their city until the mid-1970s, but by then its spectacular growth had virtually come to an end.
In the final on-screen episode of Landmarks, episode 10, Cumberland looked forward to a future in which urban growth had finally ceased in favour of an electronically mediated dispersal, whereby Auckland’s Queen Street and Wellington’s Lambton Quay had become “deserted canyons,” and in which, no longer distracted by urbanisation, we could finally get back to rebuilding long-neglected rural virtues. In that episode, we are told that:
… however fantastic, however spectacular, some aspects of life in the 21st century may be, our sustenance, both as individuals and as a nation, will still be the land. [Idyllic farm scenes are at this point displayed for nearly forty seconds with music and no dialogue]. For as far ahead as I can see the basis of our economy will be pastoral farming. But it’ll be more intensive and more diverse. It’ll still depend basically, of course, on grass. . . .
(I have suggested that this influential series should be properly digitised; at the moment, we must be grateful to whoever has uploaded a blurry old VHS copy to YouTube.)
As a consequence of the return of rapid population growth, Auckland, which now has a population of 1.7 million, is more than twice as populous as it was in the days of Auckland at Full Stretch.
Yet Latham and Cumberland both seem to have imagined that the Auckland of the late 1970s was about as big as it was every going to get. They supposed that that Auckland was indeed at full stretch, whereas we now know that it was merely getting into its stride.
All the same, the return of rapid growth would be denied for years and even decades to come, in a manner that the commentator Bernard Hickey has dubbed our:
… post-1989 consensus that New Zealand had over-invested in infrastructure in the past and faced a flat to falling and ageing population where inefficient investment would be a bigger problem than under-investment.
A good example of this ‘post-1989 consensus’ is to be found in an official communiqué issued by several ministers in Helen Clark’s cabinet in 2003:
The population is unlikely to reach five million in the next 50 years. The New Zealand population is projected to grow to 4.4 million by 2021, grow further to 4.6 million by 2051 and fall back slightly to 4.2 million by 2101.
Two Growth Eras Compared
Neoliberals have long argued that high levels of state spending have had corrupt electoral motives, and that they have ‘crowded out’ private sector investment.
The first of these positions was forcefully argued by the former 1980s cabinet minister and academically trained historian Michael Bassett in his 1999 Stout Fellowship lecture ‘Politics versus the Economy, 1940–1975’, subsequently anthologised in Margaret Clark’s Three Labour Leaders (2001).
In that lecture, Bassett attributes the high state spending of the immediate postwar decades to an illegitimate and confiscating populism, which gave rise to an excess of political interference in an otherwise self-correcting market economy:
Ministers soon found that it took more than symbolic gestures to quell a generation of rising expectations. . . . The politics of rising expectations were getting completely out of hand. . . . The point to remember is that once the electorate had the taste of what could be achieved by a big spending government, it never let its politicians forget. . . . The problem was that believers in the Santa Claus state were not ready to forgo any of the presents they believed they were entitled to. Since the 1930s the voters had paid little heed to any economic difficulties facing the country; they always demanded action on promises.
There are of course criticisms that could be made of such an argument, which appears to paint the hungry thirties as the good old days. What of the undoubted successes of the three postwar decades of the mixed economy, of the Trente Gloireuses of a mostly Gaullist France, of the Federal German Wirtschaftswunder?
The successes of the Anglophone democracies in that era were less spectacular, but nonetheless very real as well, in the manner captured by Harold Macmillan’s famous line that the British people, twelve years after 1945, had “never had it so good.” Or for that matter the confidence of John F. Kennedy’s America, the America that chose “to go to the moon and do the other things,” other things that included the advancement of civil rights and waging a war on poverty, though that wider social agenda was soon to be sidetracked by a war in Vietnam.
It has always been a paradox of neoliberalism that it rests on the representation of the three decades after 1945 as decades of more or less unalloyed failure. And that people have believed this representation, perhaps after the fashion of the saying that if you repeat anything often enough, it will be believed.
Nor, as James Belich pointed out in his 2001 history of twentieth century New Zealand, Paradise Reforged, is it the case that New Zealand’s welfare state was excessively generous in the manner Bassett claimed, either. Though it used to invest heavily in the young, our welfare state has never extended to free dentistry or eyecare for most adults, although these things are fairly standard in Continental Western Europe and even, in theory, in Britain.
In any case, without rising expectations, how would progress be made?
But even more fundamentally, for our purposes, Bassett’s lecture makes no mention of postwar New Zealand’s rapid population growth through to 1975 and the objective investment needs that sprang from it, at all. As such, his argument could be accused of amounting to ‘Hamlet without the prince’.
Even scholarly critics of Rogernomics have been inclined to overlook the population question. For instance, Hugh Oliver’s otherwise very highly esteemed 1987 thesis The New Zealand Labour Party and the Rise of ‘Rogernomics’, 1981–1984, upon which the 1989 essay collection The Making of Rogernomics is based, also fails to mention the issue of population growth. Growth is mentioned no less than 77 times in Oliver’s thesis, but it is always wage growth, economic growth, and so on.
Even as recently as 2020, in his book Not in Narrow Seas: The Economic History of Aotearoa New Zealand, Brian Easton, who edited The Making of Rogernomics back in 1989, has observed that:
At the time of writing, population policy is a dog that doesn’t bark. When will it start to do so? Population growth has been central to Aotearoa New Zealand’s evolution. Between 1769 and 2017 the population increased from about 100,000 to 4.7 million, or almost 50 per cent every quarter of a century — every generation. (pp. 636–637)
In other words, our two postwar periods of rapid population growth are typical periods of New Zealand demographic history, and the anomaly that is to be explained is why the most recent one has been met with retrenchment as the norm, as opposed to the ‘onwards and upwards’ that was the spirit of most of our previous political regimes since the foundation of a modern nation in 1840: a spirit sometimes referred to as ‘Vogelism’ after the principal champion of a high-investment state in colonial times, Sir Julius Vogel.
A Vogelism that, arguably, reached its high point in the centennial commemorations of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, at a time when the motto of the nation was ‘Onward’.
Less attention appears to have been paid, at that time, to the substance of the Treaty itself, than to the contrast between the wooden ships and wooden waka of only a century before and the 1940 of the Dominion Monarch, Sunderland flying boats, and cities that had already assumed their present form in their downtown areas and what would today be considered their inner suburbs. The familiar-looking Wellington, for example, of the 1941 commemorative film One Hundred Crowded Years and the Waterloo-Quay embarkation documentary of the same year, Country Lads.
It was in the same Vogelite spirit that Cox penned his essay ‘The Next Million’, and in the same spirit that his arguments were taken seriously. He was a senior public servant, after all.
That only a bit more than thirty years on from ‘The Next Million’, the Coxes of a later generation were to be made redundant, and a new mood of ‘thus far and no further’ was to triumph, is the anomaly that is yet to be explained or even confronted: all the more so given that there was to be a reversion to the mean of 50 percent per generation population growth , more or less, come the sesquicentennial in 1990.
There had of course been flat spots and reversals in the past, of which the greatest was the Exodus of the late 1880s and early 1890s, plus another flat spot in the years of the Great Depression of the 1930s, but these had always been attributed to the vagaries of world capitalism and industrial change, in which every slump only seemed to result in a gathering of forces for an even greater leap ahead: a point conceded even by such critics as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who in 1848, not long after the dawn of our own ‘one hundred crowded years’, looked back on one hundred crowded years of an earlier wave of industrial capitalism:
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
A few lines previously, the same authors wrote, still more famously, that it was characteristic of the century up to 1848 (to which we might add the best part of two centuries to follow!) that:
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . . . (emphasis added)
And so the world as it was before the Industrial Revolution has since given way to the world of the smartphone: a progressive development on the whole though not without certain regrettable aspects in the form of a loss of slow-paced tranquillity or of the aesthetic qualities of Baroque churches, cobblestones and candle-light, much smaller cities and more countryside, all captured to some extent in the elegiac tone of such films as Barry Lyndon and The Duellists.
In sum, to be modern was to be living through a sort of continuous revolution by which the horse-and-cart civilisation of 1748 was being forged into the utterly space-age civilisation of 2048.
We think of the Industrial Revolution, for that is what is meant, as something that happened 150 or 200 years ago. But in reality it is ongoing, and may well continue past 2048.
Dramatic increases in population, of 50 per cent in each generation in our case, have been an important aspect of this continuous Industrial Revolution, which we may also refer to as the Modern Revolution.
A revolution from which it is futile to flee or dream of stopping the clock. As Pericles said, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. So, likewise, the Modern Revolution.
Against all those who speak of stagnation and sameness and the sovereign individual consumer, a quote from a nineteenth-century Russian novelist comes closer to capturing the true essence of modern life. That is, of life lived amid “horror-provoking motion,” in which vast historical forces, from computerisation and the invention of antibiotics to relentless population growth, cause things, both good and bad, to just happen to people, like so many extras in an epic historical movie about the American Civil War or the Russian Revolution, which may themselves be thought of as eddies within the waterfall that is the wider Modern Revolution:
And is it not this way with you … ? Do you not hurtle forward — like some brisk, unovertakable troika? The trails beneath you plume with smoke, the bridges thunder, everything falls back and is left behind. A startled onlooker stops dead, struck by this divine miracle. Is this not a streak of lightning, thrown down from the heavens? What is the meaning of this horror-provoking motion? And what unfathomable, hitherto unseen, force is locked in these steeds? Ah steeds, steeds — steeds: do whirlwinds sit in your manes? … where are you hurtling? Give an answer. She doesn’t answer. (Nikolai Gogol, Vlad Vexler trans.)
Seen from this point of view, democracy and planning are defensive responses to the greatest social danger of the Modern Revolution. Namely, the danger of what Hamer called “superfluousness and precariousness” in an increasingly urban setting. Of a ‘lonely crowd’ of city-dwellers simply ending up surplus to political or economic requirements that lag behind urban population growth. They are, from that point of view, very necessary defences.
The dangerous qualities of modernity were explicitly acknowledged, indeed common knowledge, in the World War II era and the decades immediately thereafter. As William Beveridge wrote in his 1942 report on the contours of the future British welfare state, Social Insurance and Allied Services,
A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.
To reiterate, perhaps the chief social danger imposed by modernity and its continuous revolution, in this country, came from the 50 per cent per generation rate at which our population kept increasing, most of the time.
Nonetheless, it seems that the period of slow population growth that this country experienced from 1975 until the beginning of the 1990s led advocates and critics alike to forget — this time — why we had invested so much in measures to square the circle of population explosion and social security, and taxed so heavily to fund these investments, across the preceding decades of ‘Politics versus the Economy’.
And to overlook the high likelihood that we might have to very shortly start doing so again, in view of the short-lived nature of every previous demographic slump in what was still a ‘young’ nation, a land of settler colonialism with a half-developed economy.
There had, of course, been slumps in our progress before. But it seems that the ‘age of stagnation’ thesis was unusually persuasive in the flat spot of the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps because it coincided with environmental concerns that expressed themselves in the titles of such works as The Limits to Growth and E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.
And because such ideas also resonated with the temporarily, academically, fashionable concept of postmodernism or postmodernity, forged in the same decade of the 1970s, whereby, once again, it was proposed on the basis of little evidence that our Modern Revolution had come to an end and that from now on we would only be marking time; that we had somehow invented everything there was to invent and that from now on we would live in a world of recycled ideas.
(Such ideas tended to be more fashionable, the less one actually knew about science and technology and their potential to surprise us with things as yet undreamed-of.)
It was of course ironic that these ‘estrangements from modernity’, to borrow the sociologist Frank Furedi’s terminology, came hard on the heels of the Swinging Sixties: perhaps the most self-consciously modernising decade in all of recorded history!
No sooner had Neil Armstrong taken one small step, than the pundits were proclaiming the end of the age of the Modern Revolution. It is all quite bizarre in hindsight; and one can make that point without minimising the gravity of certain environmental problems, for example.
Indeed, if anything, the backlash against technological modernity made some of these environmental problems worse. France, which in the 1970s embraced nuclear energy as the key to its future economic growth, currently emits less than four tonnes of carbon dioxide per capita per annum, while the United States, where the anti-nuclear movement triumphed, emits almost thirteen tonnes on the same metric. It was, similarly, as we have seen, zero-growth environmentalists who hammered the last nail into the coffin of Auckland rapid rail in the same decade.
But if politicians and pundits alike were so easily distracted or deceived into thinking that we had come to the end of the Modern Revolution at the end of the 1960s (!), even to the point of imagining against all the evidence that Auckland was not going to keep getting bigger, nor New Zealand gaining another 50 per cent in population per generation, on average, in the way that it had done since the days of wooden ships and their famous navigators, what then of the beneficiaries of Rogernomic- and post-Rogernomic-era privatisations?
What of all those hardbitten private-sector real estate developers? The sort who were fond of joking, like Alan Gibbs, that they had banned the use of the word ‘fair’ at the dinner table?
Were they really so quick to overlook the very long-term trends on which their livelihoods depended?
Or were they happy to place a momentarily contrarian — but historically sound — bet against a widespread but faddish belief in long-term stagnation?
It was no wonder that Goldsmith praised these entrepreneurs for their sense of timing.
Note: For more on episodes of stagnation and growth resurgence in New Zealand’s history, which like that of most frontiers or ex-frontiers has had its fair share of boom and bust — with neither, so far, lasting forever— see Brian Easton’s 2011 paper, ‘Five Great Stagnations’.
I have lately returned to Medium publication, after mostly limiting myself to comments and building up a store of new content, to be published over the weeks to come (readers may also wish to refer to ‘Powered by Aotearoa’, which came out last September.)
