Like you are doing now?
>neoliberal playbook
Hardly. They've made almost no changes to the policies of the previous government, which increased the size of the public service by around 25%. They haven't even dropped it back by 20%!
The rest of your comment is very conspiratorial and repeats the sort of trite anti-capitalist sentiments that you see on places like /r/NewZealand. Hardly fitting for a tech forum like this one.
>Sir Fay and Sir Richwhite
You reveal yourself. No native New Zealand/Commonwealth/British English speaker would refer to someone as 'Sir [last name]'. There is no such person as 'Sir Fay' (he's 'Sir Michael Fay' or 'Sir Michael') and there's certainly no such person as 'Sir Richwhite' because David Richwhite didn't receive a knighthood.
As far as I can tell from their wikipedia pages, Sir Michael Fay lives in New Zealand and David Richwhite lives in London. Hardly tax havens. They own an island near Whitianga which they're doing conservation work on.
>(As you can tell, I have some strong feelings on this. Because I lived through it. Was it all bad? No. It gave us one of the most efficient agricultural sectors in the world. Was it mostly bad? Well, inequality surged upwards in conjunction with neoliberal policies. So, yes.)
Yes let's please go back to carless days once a week and having to apply to the government to be able to import foreign magazines. Let's go back to assembling Japanese cars in New Zealand because of stupid tariffs. Let's go back to making things here again, inefficiently, so there is no consumer choice, unless you like choosing between one or two domestic assemblers of goods really made overseas anyway.
Let's go back to not having state-owned enterprises but having them all be run as government departments within the civil service. What a great system that was, very efficient.
New Zealand is far better off because of those reforms. It has made everyone much richer. We are less equal than we were, but so what? Would you rather we were all equally poor or that we were all richer but some were richer than others?
>Oh, and the NZ government had to pay for the release of one of their children when they were detained driving through Iran for their Instagram account about how everyone is kind. Ah, neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is when embassies help their citizens... or something?