Editor’s Letter – M2 Jul/Aug 2020 Issue
This might be a little bit random as we aren’t exactly a bastion of political opinion (to be honest, you can fill your boots in a few minutes via your social media platform or newspaper of choice, so we tend to leave it to the professionals), but I would like to take this opportunity to recommend a wonderful four-part documentary series that will provide some powerful context for today’s political environment. You won’t find it on Netflix, although to be fair I did find a dodgy copy on YouTube, as it’s by no means a new doco. Well, it’s actually from 1997 and focuses on the profound social and economic reforms in the 1980s and early 1990s. Before you start rolling your eyes, let me try another sell. Revolution stars Rob Muldoon, David Lange, Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble and Ruth Richardson, as well as some large scale infrastructure, the floating of the New Zealand dollar and the privatisation of a chunk of state-owned assets.
The fact that the foundation of the ACT party was forged out of an ’80s Labour government has intrigue in itself, of course, but I’m not sure that the many thousands of workers who found themselves thrust at great velocity out of the state’s embrace and curated economics into the free market, stopped to marvel at the nuances between Lange’s social focus and Douglas’ drive for productivity and efficiency. While this doco might not light up any Facebook feed these days, it covers a period of time that defines the way we all live and work today. Every single one of us. Regardless of demographic.
Politics today might almost run as a kind of UFC fight with bodyblow points scored and tallied by an audience galvanised by the impact of a global pandemic and the associated economic fallout (actually on a side note, you could easily take some pull quotes out of the ministerial speeches of the time and imagine that they are describing today, particularly those that try to balance social, health and economics, and also the sacrifice of some for the betterment of the entire country). And while it is easy to beat up on social media and the comments section of Stuff for being overly political at times, I think this should actually be celebrated because it shows that a lot of us are engaged with the people and the parties and the discussions that could shape the way we live for generations to come.
When I was doing some research on this series (yes, it’s the journalist thing to do), I actually came across a much better version to watch than the dodgy, obviously VHS-dubbed one that I spent four hours squinting through. The good version is hosted at nzonscreen.com, which is a wonderful archive of New Zealand film and TV. Their version of it is accompanied by a quote from the producer Marcia Russell, which I think is still worthy of highlighting 24 years after it was said: “We wanted to make Revolution because we believed that unless we re-run and re-examine our recent history, we are in constant danger of forgetting, and forgetting can render us passive about the present and slaves of the future.”
