In this study, historian and former politician Michael Bassett, explores how and why the state became such an active and interventionist player in New Zealand life, developing, subsidizing and regulating the economy, and increasingly protecting citizens from the cradle to the grave. It looks in detail at the many schemes in which a paternalistic government became involved, especially the extensive social programmes taken for granted by the people but from the 1960s increasingly difficult to sustain economically. Bassett makes heavy use of departmental archives and concludes that the continuing process of intervention had to be halted.