Backgrounders

Vanguard Films

Vanguard Films is an independent film producer which has made many documentaries including some stunning exposés and analyses of the way the new right took over New Zealand politics in the 1980s and 1990s and rammed through its policies – and the disastrous effects on New Zealanders. Some of their most powerful films are now available free to view on line and to download. The following are available now; others may follow.”

To view Clip 1 of a documentary, just click on the picture. Click on the Menu icon at the top right of the picture to choose any of the other clips that make up the full video.”

Someone Else’s Country

Someone Else’s Country looks critically at the radical economic changes implemented by the 1984 Labour Government – where privatisation of state assets was part of a wider agenda that sought to remake New Zealand as a model free market state. The trickle-down ‘Rogernomics’ rhetoric warned of no gain without pain, and here the theory is counterpointed by the social effects (redundant workers, Post Office closures). Made by Alister Barry in 1996 when the effects were raw, the film draws extensively on archive footage and interviews with key “witnesses to history”.

A preview of the film is available here.

In A Land Of Plenty

The tagline runs: “The story of unemployment in New Zealand” and In A Land of Plenty is an exploration of just that; it takes as its starting point the consensus from The Depression onwards that Godzone economic policy should focus on achieving full employment, and explores how this was radically shifted by the 1984 Labour government. Director Alister Barry’s perspective is clear, as he trains a humanist lens on ‘Rogernomics’ to argue for the policy’s negative effects on society, “as a new poverty-stricken underclass developed.”

A preview of the film is available here.

Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa,
P.O. Box 2258
Christchurch.