Bruce Jesson Lecture – Wednesday: 'Recreating Full Employment' – Prof Paul Dalziel

Wednesday, October 26, 6.30pm, Maidment Theatre, Alfred Street, The University of Auckland Bruce Jesson Lecture: Recreating full employment - Professor Paul Dalziel, AERU, Lincoln University. Bruce Jesson’s last book Only Their Purpose is Mad tracked the destructive impacts of what he termed “the open slather approach to economic reform”.

Twenty years after the reforms, New Zealand still lives with the legacy of that period in the form of unemployment and poverty. The government’s response is to blame the social welfare system and to propose policy reforms that will take us along the same failed path of the 1990s.

Bruce Jesson finished his book by arguing that “the challenge facing New Zealand is to redefine the role of the nation in the modern global economy”.

He called for nation-building understood as “creating a cohesive society that can act internationally with some sense of purpose”. This lecture will address Jesson’s challenge. It aims to set out a concrete programme for nation-building built on strategies to recreate full employment.

Paul Dalziel has been Professor of Economics at Lincoln University since 2002 and currently works full-time in the AERU research centre. His first research publication was an article on the 1984 Economic Summit Conference that began New Zealand’s decade of economic reforms. Since then he has produced more than 200 research publications on aspects of New Zealand economic and social policy.

Paul is part of a multi-disciplinary research team involved in a five-year research programme on education employment linkages in New Zealand. He is President of the Australia and New Zealand Regional Science Association International and a Council member of its parent organisation, RSAI. In 2010, he was a member of the Welfare Justice group that acted as an alternative forum to the government’s Welfare Working Group. Facebook event http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=152010331552087

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