The most fundamental and enduring aspect of neoliberalisation is its economic agenda, predicated on low inflation, globalised free trade, support for business and a rebalancing of the worker-employer relationship. This chapter uses New Zealand Election Survey (NZES) and other relevant data to consider how public attitudes towards employment shifted in line with this economic transformation, which was facilitated by a fragile economic context in the 1970s and 1980s. A breakdown of the compulsory conciliation and arbitration system increased industrial conflict but trade union bargaining power weakened as unemployment grew significantly for the first time in decades and international trade was threatened by the oil shocks and the United Kingdom's (UK) 1973 admission to the European Community. The economy was left weak by Prime Minister Robert Muldoon’s answer: abolish compulsory unionism and allow limited financial and trade deregulation while increasing export subsidies, freezing wages, prices and rents and embarking on a massive infrastructure investment programme. Moreover, Muldoon's refusal to devalue the New Zealand dollar after notification of an early election led to a foreign currency crisis, allowing the new Labour administration to frame ‘government intervention’ as part of the problem it needed to fix (Walsh and Brosnan, 1999; Roper, 2005; Starke, 2008).

Chapter Three provided an overview of the rapid, radical neoliberal reforms that transformed New Zealand's economy from 1984, diminishing the social right to employment and decent wages in visible and traceable ways. No longer considering job supply a government responsibility, the 4th Labour government abandoned the goal of full employment, cut import controls and agricultural subsidies and privatised many public sector assets. The NZES does not include questions on every aspect of social citizenship affected by such reforms, but the first section of this chapter uses those available to explore how such changes interacted with New Zealand views on the government's responsibility to provide jobs and on import and wage controls.

The National government's 1991 Employment Contracts Act completed the economic reforms and risked the very existence of unions as effective organisations promoting decent wages and conditions (Vowles and Aimer, 1993). Responding to public concern about the low wages that resulted, the Labour-coalition government’s focus on ‘making work pay’ from 1999 brought regular minimum wage increases and the Working for Families In-Work Tax Credit for low and middle income earners from 2005 (Roper, 2005; Cotterell, 2009).