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This article examines the close relationship between the Australian and New Zealand business communities to ask whether the relationship is best characterized as simply e bi-lateral trading relationship, or whether there is evidence of the formation of a transnational business community. This article also seeks to explore the nature of Australia-New Zealand integration, and specifically the degree to which the relationship is interdependent or asymmetrical. Data are drawn from quantitative sources - including a dataset developed from the IBISWorld's Largest 2000 Enterprises in Australia and New Zealand. Who's Who in Australia, and Who's Who in Business in Australia - and qualitative sources, including interviews with business and policy elites. Our findings are that the relationship between the Australian and New Zealand business communities is much deeper than a bi-lateral trading relationship, but also falls short of forming one transnational community. We also find that the relationship is substantially asymmetrical in nature, raising concerns among a number of New Zealand business executives about New Zealand sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Zealand economy before the election of the Fourth Labour Government in 1984 is often portrayed as something not only highly regulated — but as something uniquely so amongst developed nations, with a stagnant economy declining in the post-war era and nearing collapse by the 1984 election — the Polish shipyard. We show that New Zealand was not overly-regulated by the standards of the time, with many of its policies reflecting development elsewhere; it was generally liberalising in the post-war era and its economic decline and supposed collapse have been considerably overstated. This invented history gave impetus to radical economic reform after 1984 by framing the apparently failed and bizarre past as forcing inevitable solutions. It is an important constraint on policy-making in New Zealand, allowing policy to develop only along certain “appropriate” paths. It provided cohesion for policy makers in the face of less than certain results and harnessed emotional and intellectual energy towards the free-market quest, while legitimating certain policy directions and de-legitimating others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to enhance the actor perspective on major policy reforms. It builds upon the literature on “policy entrepreneurs” and addresses its explanatory vagueness by specifying five hypotheses outlining the actions that proponents of major policy change need to take in order to be effective in forging departures from existing, path-dependent policies and to overcome entrenched opposition to reforms. These hypotheses on “reformist political leadership” (after Blondel) are applied to the four attempts to reform key aspects of macroeconomic policy in Australia under the first two Labor governments led by Robert J. Hawke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on interviews with 93 members of strategically located institutional elites and nominated influentials. It examines the sources of economic ideas in economic policy and studies a select number of key economic policy decisions made during the Labor governments of Hawke and Keating. It will argue that the economic liberalisation carried out during the Labor government reflected the influence of a range of individuals and institutions, depending on the economic decision in question, while a variety of domestic and internationally based institutions and individuals contributed ideas to economic policy-making. It will reject Pusey's (1991) belief that the central agencies (ie Treasury, the Department of Finance and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet) were necessarily the major influence in economic policy and show that other individuals and institutions, including cabinet and particular ministers, ministerial offices, the ACTU and other government departments, were also important. It will discuss further how economic policy is made in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]