Every cohort has something that makes them unique and sets their experience apart from people who came before them. For my generation it was the experience of unemployment. Overnight the idea that women could do anything, that you could choose a career, that you could afford to leave home – these ideas for one in four of us became problematic because we were unemployed before we’d ever been properly employed.
What did it do to New Zealand? Whole towns shut down as businesses folded. Banks left places where there was nobody to lend to and the only job of tellers was handing out cash on tuesdays and thursdays to people on the dole and the dbp.
There was a stigma about being unemployed. It worked well. Politicians kept up a steady rhetoric about poeple needing to prove they were looking for work. New Zealand had suddenly become a place with backsliders and bludgers. If you had a job it was an easy line to believe – your hard earned tax dollars were going on young people more interested in surfing and smoking and sitting out.
That was the 90s. High interest rates and share market crashes, divorces and devolution, employment contracts act and work schemes. The trickle down effect they told us meant eventually we’d all feel good from Rogernomics. But very few kiwis did.
My stories are about that time. Stuff I saw and stuff I imagined.