The capstone achievement of the Savage-led ‘social security’ reform was a genuinely ‘universal’ superannuation that caught the imagination of middle New Zealand; the world’s first explicit demogrant, a ‘universal basic income’ for all older New Zealanders.
The central characters in each book represent, for me at least, the ‘most important’ New Zealanders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; namely Ngāti Toa chief, Te Rangihaeata, and our most-loved Australian immigrant, Michael Joseph Savage.
Negative interest rates – as in Europe and Japan – stabilise the debt accumulation process that gave us, for example, the 2008 global financial crisis.