Two major public consultations on unemployment in New Zealand in recent years have produced markedly different national responses in terms of the breadth and intensity of debate on the issue of unemployment. This article uses Nancy Fraser's (1989) model of the politics of need to argue that employment assistance policy was instrumental, in the 1970s and early 1980s, in encouraging the development of oppositional groups who fuelled the debate with their own politicised interpretation of the needs of unemployed people. A shift in policy in 1985, however, contributed to the closure of this debate by privileging an alternative interpretation of unemployed needs such that by the mid-1990s unemployment was no longer the burning issue it had been a decade previously.
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