The New Zealand Herald

Good old days

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Yet another old dog wants to take us back to the glory days pre-Rogernomic­s (Kerry Craig, Monday’s letters). They probably don’t remember, or never knew, that if you wanted to import a new product from overseas you had to make a lengthy submission to the Wellington bureaucrac­y in order to establish that the same or similar product could not be made here.

I well remember Robert Muldoon proposing we should dump the controls. The first people on the Wellington flights the next day were the fearless, free, competitiv­e, private-enterprisi­ng manufactur­ers and importers cramming through the Beehive doors to tell him why that was totally unthinkabl­e.

Muldoon’s failure was that he accepted this tripe and wanted to gradually reduce regulation­s so that businesses would have time to adjust. Roger Douglas correctly foresaw that the only way was to do away with all the regulatory harness in one glorious swoop one Budget night.

So to the old dogs: You wouldn’t now have the range of good Scotch whisky under the old rules. No import licences for that. To the young: Forget the iPhones and all the other electronic toys. I’m sure Bell Radio and TV Ltd could have made something close enough. The size of a shoebox, maybe, and three times the price of any Apple product. But, hey, they were the good old days. Not.

David Morris, Hillsborou­gh.

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