 
_NZ: From Post-Dominion to Global Player_

NZ: From Post-Dominion to Global Player

Miles Hayvice

Copyright 2014 by Miles Hayvice

Smashwords Edition

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# Introduction

This is the first instalment of a two-part miniseries focusing on modern New Zealand. This period covers the years 1968 to 1990, whilst the second book examines the years 1991 to 2012.

The forty-four years from 1968 to 2012 have involved some of New Zealand's most important economic, political and social changes, which irrevocably altered the dynamic of the country, and will further influence developments into the 2010s and beyond. This was a period of monumental division, redesign and re-definition of the "Shaky Isles", which would result in a new identity and way-of-life. Never before, in its 130-170-year history, and possibly never again would New Zealand experience such upheaval, questioning of its identity, its economic, societal and political norms than from 1968 to the Millennium and beyond. The shaping of a nation and creation of its identity almost always occurs in times of stress and upheaval, as has been the case with America, France and many other countries; In 1972 twenty of the previous twenty-three years' conservative National Party rule was terminated with the election of the NZ Labour Party, coinciding with the election of the Australian Labor Party, albeit lasting only three years. This was another common aspect of New Zealand-Australian politics - same-party rule simultaneously in each country since the early twentieth-century, not to be broken until the 1990s. Norman Kirk, the new Labour Prime Minister was to have a sweeping social and political agenda which was not to be realised, and New Zealand progressed more by its social, people and community revolution than its government could ever expect to achieve. Despite a fever for change, brought on by the late sixties hippie and social revolution, New Zealand was not ready for mass hysteria such as occurred in the US and Europe, and there was simply a disenchantment with a new Labour government that promised change, too much change, didn't deliver and couldn't manage the changing economy of the early seventies.

This changing economy was shifting at speeds never seen before, as witnessed by Britain all but abandoning its traditional markets in the Antipodes as it became part of the new EEU concurrently with the oil crisis of 1973, never-before seen levels of inflation and unemployment; even greater than during the Great Depression- "Stagflation"- plus a freeing-up of controls by the Government, such as New Zealand travellers being permitted to take unlimited quantities of funds and credits overseas, until then regulated at fixed amounts. Buying real estate or a car overseas was impossible prior to the 1980s for New Zealanders; this all changed, and now as well as having financial freedom at large, they had also become part of the global economy, which was a term not coined until the 1980s.

Under the prime-ministership of Robert Muldoon, from 1975 to mid-1984, the economy underwent another earth-change: from a large victory, mirroring the Australian repudiation of Gough Whitlam's Labor Government, a number of domestic events took place: The Treaty of Waitangi Act, 1975: this historic piece of legislation was passed by the New Zealand Parliament's House of Representatives by both government and Opposition, and promised the Maori community redress for any land and property ownership issues from the year 1975 onwards. This was to be furthered by an amendment by Parliament in 1985.

User-Pays and the price-freeze in 1982, which was supposed to last for one year, but continued until 1984, were complete failures from both political points-of-view: the wage, price and rent freeze was unsuccessful, and amazingly didn't stop inflation or interest rate rises, although the latter were however quite limited. Whether they were responsible for halts on the cost of living, it is questionable that they halted the general march of economic excesses and difficulties into the 1980s. Whilst low to middle income earners were restricted in what they could afford, there was no stopping property hikes, overseas travel increases or shares and bond prices. Despite a willing electorate, the late seventies and early eighties found the Muldoon years little to be admired or lauded; it was a case of New Zealand Labour didn't know how to govern, but National knew the stuff of government, but couldn't deliver.

The 1980s in New Zealand would see the nation's biggest shake-up in its history, socially, politically, and economically, especially the latter. Lange and Rogernomics were to be the words to be remembered in New Zealand and abroad long after the eighties, even at time of writing, in 2012, seven years after Lange's death and twenty-three years since standing down as Prime Minister, more people outside of New Zealand recognise his name than any other Prime Minister of NZ.

Commencing with "Sesqui 1990", the 1990s saw a further maturing of New Zealand and its globalisation. Since the Millennium the country has adopted a transnational way-of-life, whilst merging it with nationalistic Kiwi ideals. The new century, like the rest of the world has seen a mind-boggling adoption of technology, mostly in the form of computer, mobile phone, television and photography advancements. New Zealanders have been proud to be not only part of the formative stages of new technology, but significant proponents of it.

The reason why the first chapter 1968-70 is only a three-year period, whereas most contain five years, is that this was a time of such major societal and cultural change that I feel it deserved its own section. It also includes a reasonable-length discussion of one of New Zealand's most significant, but little-understood, disasters: the Wahine sinking.

I have chosen the forty-four-year period early 1968 to 2012 for two reasons. One is purely personal, namely that the first twenty years were the ones I was born and raised in New Zealand, until my parents decided to immigrate, with my sister, across the Tasman. These were my formative and most influential years also, and the changes in NZ culture and society shaped my life from then on. I have more knowledge and understanding of this area than any other.

The second and more pressing reason that I decided to compose a book about New Zealand history, and specifically chose these years is that the country experienced greater and more far-reaching social, economic, political change, which also fundamentally and irrevocably altered the landscape more than in any time in its previous 130-year history, more so than the Great Depression, World War Two, or the post-war boom (and conservatism) of the 1950s and early sixties. The involvement in Vietnam occurred during this period and indeed was to be a major contributing factor to societal changes and different values as it occurred during the period the book encompasses, but was just one factor as part of many, which will now be examined. I also recognise that there is a dearth of literature on modern-day New Zealand, although this is happily changing. Even though a small nation and one that is not prominent on the world stage, this country has a colourful and powerful history, and is therefore deserving of a serious discussion. Thank you for purchasing this book; I hope you find it enjoying and thought-provoking, and that I don't let you down!

Miles Cheifetz,

Sydney, March 2012.

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New Zealand: from Post-Dominion to Global Player

# A Social, Political and Economic History of New Zealand from 1968 to 2012

# Book One: 1968-1990

# Chapter 1: 1968-70

Wearing mini-skirts, flares, buffed-up hair, long hair and lamb-chop sideburns, New Zealand progressed, if not slowly, then surely, into the 1960s... 1968. These fashion statements represented a microcosm of radical social change, and these changes were simultaneous with the 'Mother Country', England. Auckland had started the movement, but Wellington was eager to follow, and Christchurch and Dunedin would soon copycat. Also occurring in the suburbs of the major centres was the phenomenon of the Beatles, who were King, Mick Jagger and Elvis, who were also royalty, and in some homes, also kings.

New Zealand was starting to lose its conservativeness and rock 'n' roll 1950s feel, and there were many in the community that would intensely dislike this change, not only from the older generations but also to some extent from the new baby-boomers.

The National Party of New Zealand had now been in power for sixteen of the last nineteen years, and as what many believed to be the "natural Party of government", it had what some believed to be the "royal assent" from Britain and was completely accepted by many New Zealanders as the party that was born-to-rule, in the Crown's "best ex-dominion", and although not as British and patriotic as Australia, probably more loyal and reserved. New Zealanders, however, were also more ready for significant change and possibly less rigid than their counterparts across the 'ditch'.

Speaking of Australia, this was the most British and conservative of countries towards the end of the decade, and New Zealand, was not. New Zealand was a proud outdoor-living, rugby-playing, obstreperous, fresh nation that, although not dissimilar to its trans-Tasman neighbour, was perhaps more fiercely independent.

On 10 April 1968 an unusual weather event occurred in Wellington, which created extremely high winds. This wind is a phenomenon peculiar to the capital, which occurs most days of the year, but on this particular day there was a conflagration of a tropical cyclone from the east of Papua New Guinea and a fierce winter storm from the West Coast of the South Island, originating in the Antarctic. Even on the windiest days in Wellington, and they were responsible for the nickname "Windy Wellington", even more so than Chicago, this day's winds seemed fiercer. In fact they would grow so fierce that gusts of 275 km/h would later be recorded. As it was a weekday morning there were men working in high-rise office blocks and skyscrapers and many wives and mums looking after the family home, a sizeable portion of the latter group after they had dropped off their kids to school. Many simply thought it a slightly wilder Wellington day than was usual, but no predictions in Wellington's recorded history would prove what was about to transpire.

Cyclone Giselle was heading sou' sou 'east from the Solomon Islands/Vanuatu region of the Melanesian tropics, and had already hit Northland, creating much damage and destruction. Simultaneously there was a frigid storm heading north from the West Coast of the South Island, originating in Antarctica, which collided with Giselle in Wellington, creating winds far in excess of what even Windy Wellington had ever experienced. This was now a mega storm and had, by mid-morning already ripped off the roofs of one-hundred houses in the capital. Worse was to come. As three ambulances and a truck were travelling to rescue injured people, they were blown onto their sides. The usual southerly gusts in Wellington, and often equally-strong northerly gusts were nothing new or unexpected for Wellington. Warm days, as well as cold days, would produce winds that were considered wild for other cities in New Zealand, but were hardly worth a mention in the capital. In fact, wind was normal for Wellington, but on this day it was far from normal. The deadly combination of the typical cold southerly gusts in tandem with the also-typically warm northerly gusts was about to create a debilitating disaster that would herald the worst weather event in Wellington history and the worst maritime event, and one of the worst national disasters in New Zealand history.

At 8:40 pm the night before, the Wahine interisland ferry, travelling from Lyttleton Harbour in Christchurch to Wellington had just departed on its regular journey. The Wahine (2) was one of three large ferry vessels owned by the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand which plied the Cook Strait between Wellington and the South Island, and was the largest ship of its kind when completed two years earlier, weighing 1844 tonnes. It was equivalent in size to a cruise liner, and could carry upwards of 800 passengers. The other two inter-island vessels in Union Steamship's fleet consisted of the Aramoana and the Aratika. On board were 734 passengers and crew. Even though storm warnings had been issued by the NZ Meteorological Office, rough seas were definitely not a new phenomenon in Cook Strait. Little could anyone know that the Wahine was about to sail into one of the worst storms ever recorded in New Zealand history? As the vessel reached Cook Strait the point of conflagration of tropical cyclone Giselle and the Antarctic storm occurred, and this combination of warm tropical air with frigid air produced an extremely violent and deadly turbulence. Captain Hector Gordon Robertson, aged fifty-seven was a master mariner with the NZ Steamship Company, and commanded seventeen ships over fourteen years until his appointment as Master of the Wahine on 31 October 1966. Throughout the 1950s he was master of a succession of cargo vessels and colliers most notably the 3,543 tonne Komata, first of a number of freighters built for the Union Steam Ship Company after World War Two for moving export cargoes to Australia. Captain Robertson was undoubtedly the first choice by Union Steamship for commander of the Wahine on 10 April 1968. Experienced as a seaman, and experienced as a sea liner master, even the real possibility of a storm situation didn't faze Robertson when he entered the bridge of the Wahine, and at 8:40pm on 9 April 1968 navigated from Christchurch to Wellington on this rougher than usual night.

Rest of the night and morning up until 5:50 am was fairly routine sailing, but at this time as he entered the narrow funnel entrance to Wellington Harbour the wind had increased to 50 knots (90 km/hr). Suddenly the wind speed raced up to 100 knots (180 km/hr), which was now dangerous for maritime operations and at shortly after 6am the Wahine's radar system failed. Simultaneously a massive wave smashed into the side of the hull and knocked many passengers off their feet. Now the vessel was being pushed gradually towards the notoriously-grievous Barrett's Reef, a sizable grouping of rocks protruding above the surface of the ocean and closer to the Seatoun side than the Pencarrow side. At 6:40am the ship reversed onto the Reef, and this knocked off the starboard propeller and stopped the port engine.

Now both engines were inoperable and Captain Robertson made order that all watertight doors be closed and the two anchors dropped. Passengers had now become aware of the grounding and Beacon Hill signal station was informed of the state of the ship. As the crew prepared lifeboats four of the compartments and the vehicle deck became flooded. As the Wahine continued to drift with its anchors dragging due to the immensely strong current, the first tug Tapuhi departed Queens Wharf in downtown Wellington. This was at 11:00am, and by 11:50 the tug had secured a line to the Wahine. However the line broke as attempts were made to tow the ship to safety. Further attempts to attach a line were futile. Deputy Harbourmaster, Captain Galloway, then risked his life by jumping from a dangerously pitching launch onto the starboard ladder of the Wahine. He made it.

It was now 1:15pm and the storm had not abated; in fact winds were now in excess of 275 km/hr, equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane. As the ship listed heavily to starboard, order was given to abandon ship. Until now Captain Robertson, using his lengthy nautical experience and knowledge, had resisted this final step as he believed that being grounded anyway, it would be safer for passengers and crew to remain on board until conditions eased and a rescue attempt could be successfully undertaken. This would shortly be impossibility. There was now confusion and terror on board, with many passengers sliding across the heavily- sloped deck to reach the lifeboats. Some passengers had earlier used their lifejackets as pillows and didn't know how to put them on. Others didn't know where the starboard side was and erred by making their way with great difficulty to the high side where it is impossible to launch lifeboats. Out of the eight lifeboats only the four on the starboard side were able to be launched and they were filled too rapidly by frightened passengers. One was swamped on impact with the sea and all its occupants were tossed unceremoniously into the churning waters. Two lifeboats made it safely to Seatoun, one to Pencarrow, many jumped directly into the water, still others clambered into inflatable life rafts. Of these, a large number were pierced by the rocks of Barrett's Reef and others were flooded or capsized.

At approximately 2:30 pm, although grounded, the Wahine capsized in twelve metres of water, slightly east of Steeple Rock, and crashed violently to the ocean floor. By now the one lifeboat – the first of the survivors – had made it safely to nearby Seatoun Beach. The smaller Wellington to Picton ferry, Aramoana, now stood to pick up survivors, but hundreds were blown to the further Eastbourne/Pencarrow side, which in addition to being a much greater distance, was also more difficult for land rescuers, as the road was blocked by rocks and other storm debris. Two-hundred people made it to the Eastbourne (eastern) side of the harbour, but many others were drowned or dashed on the rocks. This was the area where most of the fifty-one deaths occurred. Of these, forty-nine drowned or were fatally injured, and two perished from exposure in the cold waters.

Captains Robertson and Galloway were the last to abandon ship.

Co-ordination of the rescue of the Wahine was hampered by several factors: even though it occurred only several hundred metres from New Zealand's second-largest city there was uncertainty over the vessel's fate, which delayed the rescue effort. At the same time there were hundreds of emergency calls by residents suffering damage to homes, blocked roads, car accidents, personal distress and these calls were stretching the city's finite emergency management resources. Slips blocking the Eastern Bays Road to Eastbourne were also severely hampering emergency land services. This created the almost farcical situation where only eight police officers could reach the Eastbourne landing zone. However another one-hundred officers and one-hundred-fifty civilians managed to reach the site to co-ordinate rescue efforts.

At 2:05 pm Chief Inspector George Twentyman of Police National Headquarters officially took charge of the Wahine rescue procedure. An experienced senior officer, he had also helped with another disaster sixteen years previously- the Tangiwai train tragedy on Christmas Eve, 1953. Myriad groups in different locations were created to co-ordinate the rescue effort, also enquiry centres and an assembly station at Wellington Railway Station. A mortuary and property section was also established. Unlike at Tangiwai, where no national civil defence organisation was in place, by 1968, this was no longer the case. Local authority (council), military and civilian volunteer assistance was now possible, and the Wellington harbour master took precedence over the sea rescue.

The Police Diving Squad, which was run by volunteers until Wahine, and consisted of ordinary citizens from Wellington the Hutt Valley, now performed inspections of the sunken vessels and gave evidence in the following court of inquiry. The radio log was retrieved, which even in calm waters, was a dangerous dive.

Thanks to Chief Inspector Twentyman, who with forethought knew that a court inquiry would be held, he maintained a comprehensive paper trail. This police debriefing set a precedent for New Zealand for national disasters. The court of inquiry, which convened in late June 1968, found that the capsizing was caused by the water build-up on the vehicle deck. The momentum of the water sloshing over the huge two-tiered deck that could accommodate up to two-hundred cars, tipped the boat over. Sudden passenger movement to lifeboats exacerbated this push. As to the timing of the order to abandon ship, an earlier call would have resulted in more deaths; a later call would not have reduced the number of drownings.

Even though Captain Robertson was criticised at the Inquiry for failing to report to shore that the deck was taking on water and the ship's draught increasing to 6.7 metres after grounding, the violent nature of the storm was held ultimately responsible for the tragic loss of life.

The Wahine disaster, although small by world standards, was one of New Zealand's top five disasters in 1968, and would come to be known as an important and defining event in the shaping of the modern country. Although overshadowed eleven years later by New Zealand's largest disaster, the airline crash in Antarctica, this was in New Zealand waters, and in the harbour of the second-largest city, the capital, and therefore was felt by every one of Wellington's 300,000 residents, whether they had relatives or friends involved or not. Conversely, although one of New Zealand's biggest disasters, relatively few New Zealanders are familiar with the catastrophe, aside from the knowledge that it in fact occurred; it was, and still is an intrigue to the vast majority. Even those in Wellington today mostly only know the bare facts of the tragedy and perhaps the total lives lost, but it is only a distant memory for those over fifty or a fragment of history for those younger. Add to the story the now infamous Barrett's Reef, which had always been an unsightly outcrop of rocks in eastern Wellington Harbour, spoiling the Cook's Strait approach for Eastern suburbs and beaches homes, but now had a more sinister tale. Wellington's vicious winds had also been known for over a century to mariners (as well as aviators). Ironically however this reef had been known to be a danger to shipping since before 1840, but no sailors had ever surmised that the combination of Wellington's well-known southerly gales and a vessel in the vicinity would be a disaster in-the-waiting. Perhaps (with hindsight), interisland vessels, commercial and private, may have chosen a more central course through this part of the Harbour. Perhaps not. Nevertheless this event will live on as Wellington's, and one of New Zealand's, largest natural disasters, and concurrently one of New Zealand's least-understood disasters.

On the northwest South Island, near Westport, in the town of Inangahua, an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale would leave three dead and seventy percent of dwellings uninhabitable. This occurred at 5:24 am on Friday 24 May. Although not the strength and level of destruction of the 1931 Napier earthquake, this was still one of New Zealand's strongest earth tremors. The location of Inangahua, which is not widely known amongst New Zealanders, let alone those overseas, is at the junction of the Inangahua and Buller Rivers, thirty kilometres north of Reefton and forty-five kilometres north of Westport, the latter being a major South Island city on the northwest coast.

The death toll of three was gratefully small, but not indicative of the natural disaster, as New Zealand had (and still has) a small, closely-knit population; the town of Inangahua and even Westport consisting of only several thousand residents, but this was still a massive earth movement. At the time New Zealanders were still recovering from the tragedy of the Wahine sinking, and although the most severe damage occurred in Inangahua, people throughout the West Coast of the South Island were affected. It was quickly declared a disaster area. Two persons were killed when a landslide struck a house, a third dying later in hospital from a car crash caused by the landslides. In the area, roads were cut off by landslides and other upheavals, which blocked the roads, buckled the railway lines and knapped the town. It would take two-and-a-half hours to re-establish communication with the outside world, but in the interim residents would have to hold tight in the stricken town.

More worry for the inhabitants of Inangahua was manifest in the Buller River being dammed by a gigantic landslip approximately six kilometres upstream, which threatened to flood the small town. Thanks to helicopters, which hadn't been invented forty years earlier in the Murchison earthquake, two residents were airlifted to safety, and then sent by bus to Murchison. In addition, unlike the Murchison earthquake of close to forty years before, helicopters could be utilised to airlift persons out of the disaster area. By 2:30 on the day of the earthquake close to two-hundred people had been evacuated and removed to Reefton.

Some data on this earthquake: despite the event in itself being sore, fifteen aftershocks over the next month added heartbreak to injury, with some measuring over five on the Richter scale. The next day there was heavy rainfall, which contributed to difficult road clearance, there were road blockages removing access to the town. New Zealand Police were by this time on the lookout for looters, pillagers and sightseers scouring vacant residences. Food and other supplies were sent from all over New Zealand and the official Inangahua Earthquake Disaster Relief Fund was constructed. Three weeks later the West Coast railway line was reopened, but the roads took longer to make available. As a minute farming, sawmilling and mining community on the West Coast, as stated above many New Zealanders had not even heard of Inangahua. Residents spoke of their beds being thrown upwards, entire houses being shunted skyward, and fences being handled by giants. At daybreak, Inangahua residents awoke to scenes not dissimilar to military bombardments such as in the then-active Vietnam War. Road access was cut off, electricity was cut off, and radio messages vaguely mentioned earth tremors occurring in the nation as a whole, but did not pinpoint West Coast, South Island in particular. It was utter chaos! In addition to the three deaths, there were another three deaths from a related helicopter crash, and there were fourteen injuries. Seventy percent of the town became uninhabitable. Fifty bridges were destroyed or damaged, one-hundred kilometres of railway track had become twisted and had to be replaced. Property damaged extended south to Christchurch, and north to New Plymouth in the North Island. Brick chimneys in a radius one-hundred fifty kilometres from the epicentre, and including homes in Inangahua, Reefton, Greymouth, Westport, Murchison and Granity, collapsed, some narrowly missing sleeping residents in their beds. Brick walls and brick veneers either completely collapsed or were severely cracked. The general evacuation was to Reefton, and the entire population of the town – about three-hundred persons – was ordered to evacuate. Inangahua was declared by Civil Defence and NZ Police a "no-go area" for one month after the event, although farmers were allowed to briefly return to tend to stock.

Simon Nathan, a Greymouth geologist at the time, commented in 2011 on the chaos as officials tried to cope with the disaster:

"Because there hadn't been a big earthquake for at least two decades no-one was quite sure how to react, and relationships between organisations were unclear. Emergency response is better organised these days." (See Flickr. 2011).

Inangahua farmers Warren and Ruth Inwood recall hanging onto their bed as it was tossed around the bedroom, as if the event was from a good book or film. This was a familiar memory of many other West Coasters as they were forcibly ejected from their beds at the early morning shocks:

"I thought it was the end of the world", Ms Inwood said later. (See Flickr. 2011).

At approximately 5 pm, about twelve hours after the quake, the Inwoods were part of a group of people ordered by Civil Defence NZ to walk out of Inangahua, towards nearby Reefton:

"There were about 50 of us and three torches. We were following the railway line and gingerly crossing slips. You'd negotiate a tricky part and pass the torch back to someone else so they could see where they were going. We could feel the aftershocks and we could hear the rumble of the hillsides slipping – some people found it pretty scary." (See Flickr. 2011).

1968 was the year of the Summer Olympics, Mexico City, Mexico. There were:

Fifty-nine Athletes

Seventeen Officials

One Gold medal for NZ

Two Bronze medals for NZ

Four Diplomas for NZ

The sport of rowing, which had always been substantial in New Zealand, originating through its fiercely-defended English origins, really became a defining factor in the sports environment of the Mexico Games. The coxed four won the gold medal. In the small-bore rifle shooting, Ian Ballinger won a bronze, and Mike Ryan scored a bronze medal in the marathon. Highlights were one gold, two bronze and four Diplomas. Gold medals were won by: Rowing: Dudley Storey, Dick Joyce, Warren Cole, Simon Dickie. In the bronze category: Athletics: Mike Ryan; Shooting: Ian Ballinger. In the Diploma category: Hockey: Selwyn Maister, Jan Borren, John Anslow, Bruce Judge; Rowing: Alistair Dryden, Robert Page, Mark Brownlee, John Gibbons; Swimming: Tui Shipston; Weightlifting: Don Oliver. There were many more outstanding athletes in the New Zealand team that won medals or performed in an outstanding way at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games.

Athletics, hockey and shooting were New Zealand's top events; these top athletes helped cement New Zealand in the 1960s as a newly-respected sporting nation, one that had been little-known by the Commonwealth and rest-of-world previously for its amazing talents in this department. New Zealand was to go onto success at future Olympic and Commonwealth meets and would come to be known as the best country in the world at the other great sport of rugby union.

Back home, The Southland Daily News, which had been acquired by its rival The Southland Times in 1967, ceased publication and was replaced by an evening edition of the Times. The paper was first published as Southern News and Foveaux Strait's Herald in 1861.

In arts and literature, Ruth Dallas wins the Robert Burns Fellowship. Born in 1919, her name was the pseudonym for New Zealand poet and children's author Ruth Minnie Mumford. Her poetry was influenced by William Wordsworth and the beautiful and rugged landscape of southern New Zealand. She was awarded the 1968 Robert Burns Fellowship by the University of Otago (Dunedin), which she utilised to launch a series of children's books that commenced with The Children in the Bush. In 1977, she was a joint winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. Later, as she started to go blind, she received A Blind Achievers' Award. In 1989, she was awarded a CBE. Dallas died in 2008 aged eighty-nine.

In 1968 in the New Zealand Music Awards the Loxene Golden Disc Award went to Allison Durbin for her song I Have Loved me a Man. This was the country's top honour in the area of new popular music and helped cement Durbin's further career.

The tragic loss of the Wahine and the storm earlier in the year became the vehicle for top acclaim and a television award for the New Zealand Broadcasting Commission (NZBC) crew who covered the event. The NZBC was the forerunner of TVNZ, which commenced in 1975. The World Newsfilm Award was a relatively new and prestigious honour in 1968, also not being very well-known in New Zealand. The main reporters were Keith Aberdein and Bill Alexander. A quirk of the broadcast is that South Islanders could only watch the disaster unfold after a cameraman dashed up to Kaikoura and filmed a television set that could only receive a broadcast from Wellington – then returned to Christchurch so the footage could be broadcast. The broadcast can be viewed on the Webpage  http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/nzbc-classics---wahine-disaster-1968

Alternatively it may be viewed via YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTrHOe3cSNQ

The latter is a 10:17 minute video in grainy black-and-white, and includes the new anchor introducing the item, which was the only story of the evening, followed by footage of the ship partially submerged on the following day, and interviews with the following parties: survivors, friends and relatives of the survivors, Third Officer Varley from the Wellington Fire Brigade, Chief Superintendent J. A. Saunders , and F. K. Macfarlane who made a desperate attempt to shift the blame from the Union Steamship Company \- he was the spokesman for the company, his main defence being that the Wahine was already at sea when the storm conditions began and worsened and therefore the ship and crew were powerless.

In other sporting events of 1968, Jeff Julian won his second national title in the men's marathon, clocking 2:22:40 on 9 March in Whangarei, while the Indian Cricket Team visited New Zealand earlier that year. It was the India's first win away from home and the second test was New Zealand's first victory over India. The visit would assist in the friendly (and sometimes not-so-friendly) trans-national rivalry on the cricket green for well into the future.

On the 4th of June 1968 the nation's twenty-seventh Prime Minister, Walter Nash, from the Labour Party, peacefully passed away at the age of eighty-six. He had led NZ from 1956 to 1959 in only the second Labour government, and one that was the only one for a twenty-two year period between the late forties and early seventies. In 2008, Nash's great-grandson, Stuart Nash entered parliament as a List MP for Labour.

The year 1969 was a year of some major socio-political change in New Zealand; it was also the closing year of a decade of never-before-seen social, political and economic alterations globally. In fact the 1960s in New Zealand, as well as worldwide would forever be remembered as the time when life changed inexorably and irreversibly, preparing for a new world in the 1970s. No decade since has mirrored this societal evolution, although New Zealand experienced greater political and economic change in the 1980s. As the last year of this remarkable era, 1969 would also contain some surprises and unexpected events. The Australian Labor backbench MP Gareth Evans, who would go on to become Foreign Minister in the eighties, said in 1969 that Australia would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 1970s, and many would argue that this also applied to conservative, former-British New Zealand. The big difference between each country on either side of the "Ditch" is that it has always been easier for legislation to be passed in New Zealand, and therefore change in society, economy and the law. This has been the case especially since the abolition of the Legislative Council in 1951. Unlike Australia, New Zealand has had a unicameral parliament since then; it has never had a government made up of a coalition/alliance by European or Australian definition, i.e. a balanced mix of multiple parties (although a coalition of parties as in Jim Anderton's Alliance was a forceful Opposition presence in the nineties; there are no state interests as in Australia, US, Canada or India's federal system; and the much smaller national population admits change more easily. The relatively new MMP electoral system, modelled on European nations has altered this state of affairs since the Millennium however, and New Zealand governments no longer have a "free rein" when in office. The Opposition and minor parties may even hold a majority in certain cities or regions, via the List seats, and the latter may be considered to serve as a quasi-second House. In 1969 though, the electoral system was still Simple-majority ('First-past-the-post') and a party, National or Labour, would be accepted both politically and morally to pass bills that were reasonable in nature, even in the case of a relatively small majority such as occurred at the polls in that year. 1969 was a crushing blow to Labour and Norman Kirk, but it didn't hinder or slow down his goal to change government, or his party, or his tens of thousands of ordinary citizen believers who were now prepared to wait until 1972 for a peaceful revolution of sorts.

This year marked the end of the Maori Schools, but it coincided ironically with a new Maori activism and a revival of Maoritanga. Perhaps this was not so ironic, but more a reaction to the closure of the schools, which was seen at the time as a direct threat to Maori life, culture, customs and the teaching of indigenous youth of their background and centuries-old history. Māori activism from the late 1960s definitively led to better treatment from the government. Treaty of Waitangi settlements compensated tribes for some losses. However, until the 1985 amendment of the Waitangi Act to encompass claims going right back to the signing of the Treaty (1840), there was comparatively little leeway between the government and the Maori communities in terms of acceptance, equality and traditional land ownership. Maori activism\- a reasserting of the strength and character of the people, their lands, customs and marae\- occurred at the same time as the aggressive resurgence of the African-American community in the United States (Black Panthers, etc.) and the somewhat less-aggressive movement by Australian Aboriginal people. The activism by the Maori people comprised two distinct forces:

  1. Passive and pro-active activism in the form of peaceful protests, meetings with politicians, increased practice and understanding of customs, language and song; and

  2. Aggressive action, such as violent protests, rising crime levels and the establishment of bikie gangs such as the Wellington-based Mongrel Mob.

Revival in Maoritanga by young and old, country and city alike was greater than any period since European settlement, and it was a sign of major shifts in Maoridom into the seventies and beyond to the eighties. Instead of being New Zealanders or 'Englishmen' with an alternative background and culture to the mainstream, they were now embracing their culture as co-existing with their modern national culture; rather than being secondary it was now becoming equal-primary, and this would immensely help the revival in Maoritanga and provide an impetus for major change from an institutionalised 1950s-style British New Zealand identity, to a more real Maori-Polynesian-New Zealand identity.

A combination of rural displacement, a relative lack of educational, trade and professional qualifications amongst Maori workers created a "brown proletariat" in New Zealand's major centres (see King, 2003). This was seen to fuel a potentially dangerous ingredient in urban race relations. Professor J.G.A. Pocock wrote four years earlier:

"[We] may be going to have ghettoes – the current term for urban areas where a distinctly pigmented minority have to live with bad houses, bad schools and unrewarding jobs – and, when faced with such ghettoes, the Pakeha may find that he is more prejudiced than he likes to believe... whakama may cease to be the mere feeling of shyness and inadequacy which it is now, and become instead a truly bitter sense of rejection; ideologies of alienation and ambivalence may arise, and the voice of some Maori (or Islander) James Baldwin may someday be heard." (See King, 2003).

This sentiment was expressed in film a quarter-of-a-century later in the movie "Once Were Warriors".

The upbeat of Maoritanga and revival of traditional Maori culture – language, dance, music, cuisine (e.g. hangis) – was not only the product of late sixties indigenous revitalisation and overseas indigenous influences - but also the New Zealand and generalised Western phenomenon of urbanisation. Urbanisation, in addition, created the need to redefine aspects of Maoriness, such as how to hold hui in the city, the context of the extended family in the urban arena, or conduct of tangihanga in a city living room or garage. Also, what was the correct decorum for the Maori who were a generation or two removed from live iwi groupings? Tangata whenua were already immersed by urban expansion – for example, Ngati Whatua (Orakei- near Auckland), Tainui (Mangere, Auckland) or Ngati Toa in Porirua (Wellington) – were not willing to allow people from other tribal backgrounds to utilise existing marae. The two top tangata whenua in the country, which were already subsumed by urban expansion, were not accepting of Maori from other tribal backgrounds to utilise existing marae. Maori discovered that detribalisation could lead to multi-tribalism and a furthering of Maoriness from such projects as:

Te Una Waka at Epsom (Auckland), led by Whina Cooper,

Hoani Waititi (West Auckland), led by Pita Sharples, and

Maraeroa in Porirua East (North Wellington), led by Ned Nathan.

Maori urbanisation both strengthened and, at the same time, weakened the culture, but nonetheless assisted the activism and protest efforts of the late sixties/early seventies.

Maori had increasingly become a notable presence in the public service since the 1950s, and these same bureaucrats would be challenged from the late sixties, into the 1970s, by a group of mostly urban-based Maori dissidents, many of which had tertiary education backgrounds. These included important people such as Ranginui Walker and Patu Hohepa from the Auckland District Council, Sydney Mead of Victoria University, Wellington, and members of Tainui kahui ariki, protest groups Nga Tamatoa, Te Ahi Kaa, and individuals. These figures spoke out more aggressively for Maori rights than their predecessors, and achieved recognition for their efforts. The tide was turning in the fight for equality between Pakeha and Maori.

The Apollo 11 moon landing in September 1969 was an event watched by hundreds of millions around the globe, signalling a new era in space exploration and the power of mankind and technology, and New Zealand was part of this viewing audience. Coverage of the landing on videotape was flown from Sydney to Wellington by the RNZAF, and a microwave link was put together to allow its simultaneous broadcast throughout the country. It was truly a momentous occasion for all New Zealanders who watched it, and they would never forget the words of "One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind". The historic moon landing also created history in New Zealand, by being the first story on the first bulletin of the new Network News. On the 5th of November the first Network News bulletin of the New Zealand Broadcasting Commission (NZBC) was read at 7.35 pm by [a youthful] Dougal Stevenson, as well as Bill Todd and Philip Sherry, and was received simultaneously around the country. Both Stevenson and Sherry went on to have long-lasting careers in New Zealand television, through to the 1990s, Sherry remaining as a news anchor on TVNZ One Network News. This moon-landing broadcast is available to view at the following URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPM3t4mLYfY

The general voting age in 1969 was lowered from twenty-one to twenty. This parliamentary act would be superseded in 1974, when it would be further decreased to eighteen. Partly a response to the increasingly rapidly-maturing youth of the late sixties as compared to a decade earlier, this change was also a vote of confidence in young New Zealanders that reflected the social revolution of the sixties.

In 1969 a change in legislation allowed the number of seats in Parliament to vary in order to preserve the number of South Island seats. This increased the number of MPs from eighty to eighty-four. From now on, this number has risen regularly to keep up with population growth in the North Island. In the early days of the new colony, before Dominion – 1840 to 1911 – the South Island was at times a powerhouse of population growth; even more so than the North Island. Although Christchurch or Dunedin were never as large as Wellington or Auckland, growth was brisk, but this slowed down considerably in the twentieth century. This had a directly proportionate effect on the number of electorates, and by the 1960s the South Island was struggling to have a strong voice in Parliament. The change helped rectify this imbalance, and ensured that South Islanders would always be constituted in the House of Representatives.

The 1969 New Zealand Grand Prix was a race held at the Pukekohe Park Raceway, south of Auckland, on January 4, 1969. The race had twenty starters. It was the sixteenth New Zealand Grand Prix (GP), and doubled as the opening round of the 1969 Tasman Series. Chris Amon won his second NZGP, leading home Austrian star Jochen Rindt. The course was a permanent racing facility, length 2.82 km, distance was fifty-eight laps (164 km), and the weather was sunny. Pole position was won by Chris Amon (NZ), from Ferrari racing team, time was 58.2 seconds. Fastest lap was from Jochen Rindt, representing Austria for Lotus-Cosworth, in the time of 58.9. On the podium first was Amon, second Rindt, and third Piers Courage of England for Brabham-Cosworth. Every position from fifth onwards, save one, was won by a New Zealand driver. Points won were: Amon 9, Rindt 6, Courage 4, Bell 3, Geoghegan 2, and Lawrence 1. There was drama before the race had even commenced: as the field moved off for the warm-up lap the 2.5 Brabham-Climax of Bryan Faloon ignited in flames when an errant distributor spark set petrol alight from an overfilled tank. The fire was extinguished quickly but Faloon was a late scratching with non-threatening burns to his hands. Following that Rindt had an unserviceable rev counter replaced on the starting grid. As the minute board went up Gardner's Mildren-Alfa was pushed aside with fuel pump trouble. However the Grand Prix ended with success and as well as Kiwi Amon winning, most of the cars finishing were driven by New Zealanders. This Grand Prix was an important and historical race for the worldwide event as it marked the end of the slower cars and the beginning of the rocket-like vehicles of the Grand Prix races of the 1970s onwards.

On the 29th November 1969 a general election was held in New Zealand. This election would decide the government into the 1970s and the composition of the country's thirty-sixth Parliament. The election was a direct challenge to the long-term National Keith Holyoake-led party, which had been running the nation since 1960- for three consecutive terms- and whether, in this time of major social change, the Party would still be a driving force into the new decade. In fact, with the exception of the brief Labour rule of 1957-60, the "natural party of government" had held the upper hand now for two decades, and therefore was an imposing force to beat. On the other side of the coin, New Zealand, like Australia, had changed considerably since the early fifties: it was socially more progressive, more pro-active and the baby boomers and younger were not so keen to accept the socially conservative norms, i.e. the status quo. New Zealand Labour, for the first time in a generation, had a real chance of seizing power in 1969. Voter turnout was 89 percent, one of the largest to date. Perhaps the time was still not ripe for the Opposition as they lost, but only by the narrowest of margins. National won 45 seats and Labour 39, although due to the simple majority – "first past-the-post" system of voting – the real result was masked. In actuality National only won this election by 1 percent, or less than 14,000 votes – less than the population of a Dunedin suburb. The third party, Social Credit, which had only one seat in Parliament prior to the election, lost that constituency, but would remain a presence in NZ politics and Parliament through to the 1980s.

The result of the 1969 election was nothing less than a cliff-hanger; however its significance may have been overstated in the years since. Although the end of sixties and the early seventies was a time of well-documented societal and economic change, the time had not yet arrived for a transformation in the way New Zealanders thought and acted. Change of this nature does not occur overnight, but is a consequence of built-up (and pent-up) feelings and viewpoints over a period of years, perhaps decades. The fact is that New Zealand followed and evocated changes from the powerhouses of America and Europe, in their own way, but these altering temperaments were many years in the making. The early seventies were the era when such altered views were to leave their mark; 1969 was not yet the time.

Norman Kirk was falsely understood to be the force behind a re-invigorated Labour Party, and this force on the part of Kirk and Labour was true to a limited extent, but it was insufficient for a change of government. Some observers and journalists believed that Kirk and Labour were overconfident, started the campaign too late, and did not win in Auckland. The largest city was significant as there had recently been an industrial dispute on the ship Wainui, which according to Kirk, cost Labour three Auckland seats. In addition, relations with the Federation of Labour and the unions were not optimal, and this state-of-affairs is considered essential between a social-democratic party at any time, but especially at the time of a national election: when the Australian Labor Party have lost ties with the ACTU or unions, it has always resulted in a bloodbath for that party at a state or federal election. Kirk's party achieved a more-than-modest swing of 2.8 percent of the popular vote, which was a considerable effort, and the New Zealand press lauded that effort, but it was not enough. As well as the almost-three-percent swing, the net gain was six seats. New Zealand was still a predominantly conservative nation and still, cliché or otherwise, tied to the apron strings of England. This state-of-affairs would not last though.

The electoral system of first-past-the-post (simple majority) would be seen from this year onwards as flawed, but it would take a further quarter-century for a new system to be introduced into New Zealand via a referendum at the time of the 1993 general election. This inherent flaw was apparent for three reasons:

  1. A government was formed by less than 14,000 votes;

  2. These 14,000 votes translated to as many as six seats; and

  3. The third party, Social Credit, received votes by one-in-eleven voters, but failed to secure a single seat in the new parliament.

Other factors to be seen as challenging in the 1969 election were the voting discrepancies between city and country, and the Maori seats, mostly in the South Island, which were all Labour. Some quarters would argue that the country was not keeping up with the cities in the changing political perceptions and demographics, but as a democracy, all votes are equally-important. Labour and Norman Kirk were criticised widely after the election as performing poorly, being over-confident, letting the Auckland industrial trouble influence the vote, but when all is said and done, Labour simply didn't have the impetus to force a change of government. The time had not yet arrived.

1969 was a deciding moment in New Zealand political history, and even though the Labour Party did not gain national government, it would continue to make leeway, and eventually win in the early seventies. Rather than discouraging the Opposition, the close loss provided an impetus that would grow, in tandem with the changing social points-of-view of New Zealanders. This left-of-centre attitudinal awareness and opinion was assisted by Maori, and also by the new arrivals from the South Pacific. Polynesian immigration was about to explode in the 1970s, and Auckland would very soon be known as the city that contains more South Pacific Islanders than any single city – or country - in the South Pacific.

The 1969 election in New Zealand was a significant point in the nation's history, not so much for the end result, but more so for the undisputed fact that there was a mood for fundamental change due to massive changes in society, politics and culture that were a flagstone of the decade, in New Zealand and worldwide. They would not be silenced; the early seventies would see these shifts explode onto the political arena.

By the year 1970, there was no questioning of the transformation that New Zealand had experienced, and was about to demonstrate in a massive way that many had not dared to imagine. Through Britain's economic siding with the Euro market, to America's new world-domination, to hippie, drugs and pop culture, especially women's lib, to the new (and frightening) airline hijackings and terrorism, to a global shift from colonialism to independence in more than just name, New Zealand would be shaken from its core foundations. Few in the country would realise at the turn of the decade just how much life was about to change, even those in the privileged seats of power in Wellington had any idea of what was to unfold. Although independent from Mother England since 1947, NZ was about to flower, and all the norms of the past 130 years would be questioned, examined and either maintained or thrown out. Whatever the outcome, there would be no turning back.

The Vietnam conflict, now entering its eighteenth year, would finally start to head towards an outcome: 15 January: Police and anti-Vietnam war protestors clash outside the Intercontinental Hotel in Auckland, where visiting U.S. Vice-president Spiro Agnew is staying. New Zealanders had believed in Johnson and Nixon's "Domino Effect" for years, but this scare tactic was becoming just that. Would Vietnam really alter the whole polity of Southeast Asia, or all of Asia, or bring the region into the Second World? Would the Communisation of Vietnam turn that country into a no-go zone? This was no longer the fifties with the mantra of the Yellow Peril from the north (especially an Australian prerogative but also present in strength in NZ), and many kiwis had a better knowledge and understanding of world events and politics than a generation earlier. The Auckland protesters were mostly of a young age-group, and this fact would be used by the Holyoake administration against them, to denigrate them, but in actuality they were a good representation of New Zealanders as a whole, perhaps not of the majority though. Albeit a forceful and aggressive presence outside Agnew's hotel, most Kiwis were of the opinion that the USA were correct in their (and New Zealand's) fight against the Viet Cong, and the latter were indeed a threat. The demonstrators were written off as a bunch of radical anti-authoritarian louts by the government, and quickly removed from the hotel frontage.

However, anti-Vietnam protests were growing rapidly in New Zealand. The Vietnam moratoriums were becoming regular, and the government ministers and MPs were privately reconsidering official policy. The Cold War and anti-communist mentality was starting to wear thin by the seventies; twenty to twenty-five years of government propaganda about the Red Tide had not eventuated and anyway, the tide had turned against the Reds: Russia, China, Cuba and Eastern Europe were communist, but appeared to have a weaker hold on the ideology than earlier in the Cold War. The Western world, and America and Britain, had the powerhouse status for the new decade, and would be seen as superior to the Soviet Union or China, even though the Soviet Union was also a superpower, and therefore still a fierce power to be reckoned with. New Zealand, siding with Britain and America as a key ally, would provide assistance to the US and the South Vietnamese Army without question, but there were many in Parliament (including in the National Party), as well as a sizeable, and growing chunk of the NZ population that would doubt its morality, legitimacy and simply whether it was a war that would be won at all (which it ultimately wasn't by either side). This notion was also a part of the early seventies culture and cognition in Australia and America.

Philippa Mein Smith suggests that "Protests in the Vietnam War revealed that the class divide in politics was undergoing realignment as the baby boomers grew up to join a New Left progressive middle class, keen to end the reign of the conservative establishment." (See Smith, 2005). Many may argue that this could almost be construed as churlish, as this generation, more than any generation before (and since) enjoyed the highest standard of living yet achieved. During the 1950s and into the late sixties New Zealanders, in line with those in Britain, Australia and America, enjoyed economic prosperity never experienced to date. The economy was booming, interest rates were low, inflation was low, people's savings were high, unemployment was virtually non-existent, job security was built-in, and concurrently, and in large part as a result, society was content. The standard of living was comparable, if not better, in New Zealand, to the 1890s. So why was there this enormous ideological shift by a big proportion of the baby-boomers generation, perhaps even a majority, to leftist/socialist feeling, and therefore a seismic brushing aside of conservatism and the National Government, which had if not created this quasi- utopia, then undoubtedly had a seminal role in it? The peace protesters contingent of this generation was seeking an exit from the structure and way-of-life of the Cold War, and the movement in New Zealand mirrored a new non-conservative, fluid style of beliefs and actions that was an antithesis of the previous twenty years. As well as splitting the country, Vietnam marked the end of consensus on foreign affairs, not seen to such as extent since perhaps the Boer War; perhaps never seen in its short history.

The protests in Auckland in January 1970 were only a single instance of the changing face of New Zealanders' attitudes and consciousness, at least of under-30s, but were indicative of a rising tide of cultural and societal feeling, which would not necessarily be translated to action. Most who opposed the War and embraced the new left politics were quiet husbands, wives, adult children, and although not voicing their concerns, nonetheless were a major part of the "revolution". The War gave rise to the first real large-scale and self-styled anti-war movement, which then engendered a national criticism of the country's singularly-consistent alliance-driven approach to war and foreign events. The New Oxford History suggests that "An important reason why the anti-war movement was eventually able to occupy the nationalist high ground in the debate about Vietnam was that growing numbers of New Zealanders came to agree that the communism in Southeast Asia did not pose a real threat to the country." (See Byrnes, 2009).

Unlike Australia, which is on Asia's doorstep, New Zealand is a nation that is many thousands of kilometres from even Indonesia and is much closer to Pacific Island nations (and Australia). New Zealand was not bombed during World War II and no aircraft or submarines posed any threat. Paradoxically the conservative, right-wing beliefs in New Zealand that it was firmly a constituent of the white, Western world, was also used by left-wing Vietnam protesters that the war was pointless and ill-founded, viz, NZ didn't belong in Vietnam.

"The Vietnam conflict threw into question any 'natural fit' between New Zealand identity and war-making. It coincided with a time of significant changes in cultural, social, racial and gender relations in New Zealand society and the challenging of numerous elements of national mythology. Debates about the Vietnam War brought to the fore competing visions concerning New Zealandness and participation in military alliances." (See Byrnes, 2009). Demonstrators in 1970 would utilise these competing visions to advance their cause. The effect of the Vietnam conflict was that unlike past wars where New Zealanders fought to pursue the British cause, this war actually served to diminish the American cause, which New Zealand had been a party to since the end of the Second World War. In fact Vietnam would accelerate broad national feeling against American administration and the Labour Party's manifesto towards the political rifts of the mid-1980s vis-a-vis the US, brought on by the banning of [US] nuclear ships and the near-termination of the ANZUS alliance. Some would argue that the origins of New Zealand's peace protests lay in the establishment of the 1968 Peace, Power and Politics Conference in Wellington, which was endemic of an increase in a nouveau generation in politics; a predominantly urban, well-educated and outward-looking one. The influence of the Vietnam protesters undoubtedly affected the foreign-policy decisions of New Zealand governments from then on, and there are those who make the argument that the Lange Government banning of nuclear vessels in 1984 was a direct flow-on of this late-sixties/early-seventies public opinion.

"Save Manapouri" Campaign was another historical protest in 1970 in New Zealand, which although based on a local event, unlike Vietnam, was notwithstanding of equal significance in New Zealand's late-twentieth-century social and political history. "The Save Manapouri campaign has been lauded as "the birth of the modern conservation movement" in New Zealand". (See Forest & Bird, 2008). Although its origins were way back in 1958, and the campaign concluded in 1972, 1970 is the year that is widely acknowledged when the protest movement had its largest impact. Originally a campaign to counter the proposal to construct a power station to provide power to supply power to an aluminium smelter in the deep south of New Zealand, it became a greater national issue in the latter 1960s when there was a proposal that the level of Lake Manapouri be raised 8.2 metres to harness the hydro-electric potential for the project. The 1970 mass protests have occasionally been dubbed the birth of the green movement in New Zealand. Conservation of Lake Manapouri was assured in 1972 when Kirk and Labour came to power, and policy has not been altered by any successive governments, National or Labour.

The archetypal campaign plans for Manapouri Power Station development in the 1950s involved raising Lake Manapouri by up to 30 metres, and merging Lakes Manapouri and Te Anau, but this was shelved in the 1960s for the more moderate approach, but one that was still considered disastrous by many Kiwis. Neville Peat, in his 1974 publication said of Manapouri, 1970:

"At its simplest, the issue was about whether Lake Manapouri should be raised by as much as 30 metres. But there was much more at stake than that. There were strong economic and engineering arguments opposing lake raising, and there were also legal and democratic issues underlying the whole debate. What captured the public's imagination across the country was the prospect that a lake as beautiful as Manapouri could be interfered with, despoiled and debased". (See Peat, 1994).

In 1970 265,000 New Zealanders signed the Save Manapouri petition, which was at the time close to ten percent of the population. However the Cabinet Committee on Manapouri and the subsequent Manapouri Commission of Enquiry both established that the National government had an obligation under the Manapouri-Te Anau Development Act, 1963, to guarantee electricity to the aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point, run by Comalco Corporation. The original six guardians of the lake were Alan Mark, Ronald McLean, Wilson Campbell, Les Hutchins, John Moore, and Jim McFarlane.

The Save Manapouri Campaign, had its origins in the late sixties, but it was not until 1969 when the West Arm turbines commenced operation that it was revealed that legislation passed in 1960 gave the go-ahead for Manapouri Lake levels to be raised by up to eleven metres. This would allow for the generation of up to an additional two-hundred megawatts of electricity, and would cause the lifting of Lake Te Anau. At this juncture scientists and recreational users of the lake started to created environmental assessments, and the news was far from good. A full raising would inundate 160 km of shoreline and submerge 800 hectares of forest; continuous landslides would occur and there would be an introduction of tree branches and tree trunks into the lake. It would also be a major hazard for boaties, fishermen and swimmers. All Manapouri's beaches and 26 of its 35 islands would be destroyed, and this would be a consequence of a minimal two-metre raising! The ecology of the lake would be estimated destroyed and the unforgiving reduction in the flow of the Waiau River into Manapouri would enable silting of the riverbed and flooding of the adjacent farmland.

It was this public sentiment that helped launch the Save Manapouri Campaign in Invercargill in late 1969. It was not long before the movement had a head: Ron McLean – a well-known farming advocate and community leader – and he established nineteen branches (regional committees) nationally. Persons from all political and ideological backgrounds then became involved, which was unusual at face value, but on closer value it was less so, as New Zealanders of all persuasions wanted to involve themselves in how the country should utilise its natural resources. Important persons included "left-wingers": Sir Jack Harris and Dr Ian Prior, "right-ringers": McLean, Alan Mark, and members of the Forest and Bird Protection Society, the nation's longest-established conservation group, Farmers and Chamber of Commerce hardliners, trade unionists and students.

Both the National Government and the Opposition were taken by surprise by the Manapouri Movement. The Minister of Works and Energy argued that any amendment to the project would require re-negotiation with Comalco, and this was not a guaranteed thing. There was also a campaign of public meetings, newspaper advertisements and features, messages to conferences of National and Labour, and a large petition, formally mentioned, to the government.

Save Manapouri went from a grassroots protest movement to a national party-political divide. It became a deciding feature of the direction the country would take into the new decade, and whether National would hold onto power in 1972, or if it would assist the new-wave Labour switch.

"The greatest benefit arising from the Save Manapouri Campaign, however, may have been that it started a national debate on environmental issues, involving national and local body politicians, scientists, professional planners and members of the public." (See King, 2003).

The Manapouri protests of 1970 was of great benefit for New Zealand, in that it commenced a national debate on environmental issues, which involved both levels of government, as well as scientists, planners and the public. This spawned newspaper and magazine stories, professional papers and television reports. It also created legislation, such as:

  * Overhaul of water management in the Water and Soil Conservation Act

  * Attempted elimination of air pollution in the Clean Air Act

  * Protection of marine life in the Marine Reserves Act

These Acts of parliament were amongst the first in the world aimed at environmentalism/conservation of limited resources, and gave New Zealand a name before many other nations – both advanced and developing – as a clean, green nation. Decades later New Zealand would market itself to the world as "PureNZ", for tourism, rooted in the Save Manapouri Campaign.

Although "founded" in the 1960s (and even back to the fifties), 1970 is widely acknowledged in NZ as the year when Women's Lib 'began', but actually achieved more than just the vote. The "libbers" dated their cause to the 1880s (about a decade earlier than in Europe and America), but almost eighty years was to pass before they were taken seriously, and not just at token-status. The two decades of the 1950s and 1960s did not help; a new conservatism, partially assisted by the National Government, which held power during most of that period, cemented the role of women as housewives, caregivers to their children and generally assistants and servants to men. This was not only in New Zealand, but a global state-of-affairs. However, NZ was the first to grant universal suffrage as a direct result of the 1890s actions, and these seeds of change engineered so long before, ascended to the surface in 1970. It was not unanticipated that a culmination of sixties free values, women's liberation, ethnic tolerance, a movement to the left and the new decade produced the ripest factors for real and permanent change for the women of New Zealand. The time had finally arrived and this time it was irreversible. Ground that had been made in World War II, had been steadily eroded in the 1950s and sixties, but there was still a vociferous group by the late sixties in New Zealand that was advancing the women's cause. As it turned out, the neo-feminism, hippie/flower-power/drugs generation, left swing, Vietnam protest movement and general push for widespread socio-political change- in a word the counter-culture\- nationally rendered the women's lib far less powerful, but it assisted the movement. By 1970, New Zealand, as well as Britain, US, Australia and most western powers had a much more forceful half of the population; no peaceful revolution had before or after created such a massive newly-empowered social class. Women's lib in NZ additionally evolved from the American civil rights and anti-war movements. In that nation women felt that their cause was slipping whilst the fight to free other peoples was advancing steadily. They were relegated to making 'cuppas', typing and providing sexual comfort to men. It was under these circumstances in the late sixties when a cognitive operation of 'consciousness-raising' commenced to heighten an awareness of oppression and an engenderment of a feeling of solidarity with other women. In New Zealand in the early seventies the ground for the grassroots-based women's movement was fertile, as most women could see that they had second-class status in the following areas:

  * Rates of pay

  * Employment opportunities

  * Excessive and unreasonable domestic responsibilities

  * Education

Overseas literature was extremely important in assisting individual women to recognise and analyse the current problem and also in developing a belief that these oppressive circumstances could be altered permanently.

Kiwi women organised themselves into small, leaderless, "democratic" groups to help the conscious-raising process. It would give rise two years later, in 1972, to the group NOW- National Organisation for Women- a clever acronym and Wellington-based. As the women's movement progressed, an increasing number of women insisted that they didn't simply want more power in a male-dominated society, but rather a fundamental shift to a more feminist-society. This would allow the overthrow of male dominance values.

"Like the counter-culture, the main achievement of the women's movement was its role in changing the attitudes of mainstream New Zealand society, but in this case to sex roles, equality of opportunity and equal pay." (See King, 2003).

The libbers in 1970 were also assisted by the Labour Party, where many women carried the labour movement's values into party and parliamentary politics. The best example of this is the first women Prime Minister, Helen Clark (1999-2005), who had her rudimentary core beliefs and actions from this period in the labour and women's liberation movements.

New Zealand (NZL) sent a team of 65 competitors and 19 officials to the 1970 British Commonwealth Games, which were held in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Commonwealth Games of 1970 will be remembered for several firsts: it was the first time that metric distances and electronic photo-finish technology were employed at the Games, and the first time that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II attended in her capacity as head of the Commonwealth. Scots will further remember the Games for the Stewarts who won gold medals. Forty-two nations sent 1744 athletes to Edinburgh. Les Mills was the flag bearer at the opening ceremony, and Harry Kent at the closing ceremony. The medal tally was gold: 2, silver: 6, bronze: 6, making a total of fourteen medals. This was quite a good result for the nation in 1970, and was eleventh in the medal table. Both gold medals were won in cycling by Bruce Biddle and Kent; silver medals were won in athletics, lawn bowls and weightlifting. Les Mills won silver in the men's discus throw. New Zealand would go on to win medals in future Commonwealth and Olympic Games in these sports of cycling and athletics. Bronze were won by New Zealand also in athletics, as well as cycling, swimming, weightlifting and wrestling.

The Feltex Television Awards began in New Zealand in the year 1970, and was sponsored by Feltex Carpets Corporation. Feltex Carpets is an Australasian carpet manufacturer, originally established in the 1920s. As of writing the company has production plants in Melbourne, Australia and many locations in New Zealand. It also has offices in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. It produces more than 25 per cent of all carpet in New Zealand and Australia. Feltex also exports to customers throughout Southeast Asia, Japan, the USA, the Middle East and other world markets. One of the big newcomers to television in 1970 was Bruno Lawrence, who won the award for Best Actor. He would go on to be a big acting success in the 1970s and eighties, in iconic Kiwi films such as Sleeping Dogs, Spotswood, Smash Palace, Utu, and the Quiet Earth. The 1970 Awards were for shows made in 1969. In the category of Best Arts, producer was Bruce Thomson, and show was Green Gin Sunset. For the category of Best Light Entertainment, producer was Chris Thomson, show was The Alpha Plan. The category of Public Affairs was won by producer Des Monaghan, and piece was Gallery: Brian Edward's interview with Dr Christian Barnard. The Best Specialty Programme was produced by Derek Morton and title was Kid Set. Best Documentary was produced by Bill Saunders for Three Score Years and Then. Finally the Professional (TVPDA award) award went to David Gardner.

The Feltex Television Awards has showcased much of New Zealand's television film talent, and many talented producers and actors would not have been acknowledged without it.

In 1970 Radio Hauraki granted the very first commercial licence in New Zealand, breaking the government monopoly of the radio airwaves. Radio Hauraki specialises in album-oriented rock and classic rock, and is based in Auckland. The idea for the station was born in a Wellington pub in 1966, and in mid-March it was decided to broadcast on its particular frequency as it was well away from the NZBC and Australian stations. The idea to broadcast came to light as a result of the Auckland New Zealand Herald article on 9 April 1966. An on-air target date of 11am on 1 October 1966 was set. Radio Southern Cross was a possible rival to Hauraki at this time, but the threat did not materialise. In September 1966 broadcasting vessel Tiri was detained at dock by the government and prevented from taking to the sea. In November it set sail undetected and later in the month commenced transmission at 1480AM. On 11 November it would start transmissions from a part of the Harbour that would be its base for the next three-and-a-half years. It was badly damaged, especially the transmitter, in the storm of April 1968, which sunk the Wahine. It is now part of the Radio Network, which consists of six other radio stations. In order to break the government monopoly, Hauraki operated illegally from 1966-70. Although private commercial stations had operated from the beginnings of radio broadcasting, the national government had closed each one down, this state-of-affairs accelerating after World War II. To break the monopoly Hauraki was originally formed as a pirate station in the Hauraki Gulf. It was the only offshore station ever to broadcast in the southern hemisphere, in a famous and historic chronicle, that witnessed a loss of life. The Radio Hauraki crew had spent 1,111 days at sea and the final broadcast from the sea-based Hauraki "Pirates" was a documentary on the station's history, until the point, concluding at 10 pm when Tiri II changed tack and headed for Auckland, continuously playing Born Free. During this final voyage back to shore, announcer Rick Grant was lost overboard. He would become the face of the fight for private radio broadcasting. In 1990 Radio Hauraki was granted one of the first FM transmission licences, and is still one of New Zealand's premier stations in 2012.

In 1970 Edward Middleton won the Robert Burns Fellowship. The Robert Burns Fellowship, established in 1958 as a bicentennial celebration, is claimed to be New Zealand's premier literary residency. Past fellows contain many of the country's most notable writers. The list of past fellows includes many of New Zealand's most illustrious writers. The Fellowship was started by an anonymous group to be awarded annually to "writers of imaginative literature, including poetry, drama, fiction, autobiography, biography, essays or literary criticism." Position is based at the University of Otago, in Dunedin, and provides a year's salary, in addition to accommodation and office for a writer in the University. The usual tenure is one year, although in exceptional cases that has been extended to two. Named after Scotland's national poet Robert Burns, Dunedin has the highest proportion of persons of Scottish descent in New Zealand, and a founding father was Burns' nephew, Thomas Burns. In commemoration of the half-century anniversary of the fellowship a novel, Nurse to the imagination: fifty years of the Robert Burns Fellowship was launched in late 2008, simultaneously with the 2008 Dunedin Arts Festival.

1968-70 was indeed the culmination of 130 years of nouveau culture, lifestyle, way-of-thinking, country and people...a nation that was European in origin, but embraced a new way of thinking, a new and modern way-of-life, embraced rugby, cricket, the bush, the sea, sports and recreation in general, and a positive, optimistic New World. In 1970 the old ways were brushed aside, but not completely removed, and a newer generation was to emerge – the "X" Generation. This generation, born of the baby-boomers, was to be more extravert, more entrepreneurial, more embracing of the natural features New Zealand could offer, and more inclined towards broad social, political and demographic change. The days of National Party superiority, two-and-a-half children-families, the two-acre house with the white picket fence, and religious, gender, racial and sexual orientation intolerance were approaching the end. In short, the birth of the new decade spelt never-before-seen moral, social and psychological alteration of the young nation. The Xers, as they were to known, would be less introverted, more inclined to take risks, more inclined to fundamental change, and would also be often less successful and financially secure than their parents and grandparents. However the wheels of change would be set in action.

# Chapter 2: 1971-76

1971 was the year when Tino rangatiratanga or Self-Determination for the Maori community was really launched.

Ngati Kuri Trust gives the meaning of Tino Rangatiratanga:

"The word rangatiratanga comes from the word rangatira which is most often translated as chief. Rangatiratanga which refers to chieftainship approximates to oversight, responsibility, authority, control, sovereignty. It is a word used in the Lord's Prayer for kingdom, which is a word very close in meaning to sovereignty. The word tino is an intensive or superlative, meaning variously: very, full, total, absolute. So tino rangatiratanga approximates to total control, complete responsibility, full authority, absolute sovereignty."

This document goes on to say more politically that:

"The term tino rangatiratanga was used in the Declaration of Independence of 1835 which recognised Nu Tireni (New Zealand) to be a sovereign and independent nation where power and authority rested with the rangatira. The English version of that declaration stated that "all sovereign power and authority resided entirely and exclusively" in the rangatira."

(See Ngati Kuri Trust, 2011).

Tino rangatiratanga in 1971 was also closely alligned with Nga Tamatoa; literally: "the [Young] Warriors", which was a Maori activist group formed in 1970, and functioned from throughout the 1970s, and subsisted to fight for Maori rights, land and culture as well as to confront injustices committed by the New Zealand Government, particularly violations of the Treaty of Waitangi. Nga Tamatoa was the end-result of a University of Auckland conference in 1971, which was organised by the well-known historian and academic, Ranginui Walker. Its make-up was mostly urban and university-schooled, mostly Auckland and Wellington Maori, who were fed up with the government confiscation of lands and the deterioration in usage of the language. It was strongly inspired by other indigenous and minority liberationist groups of the time, such as the Black Panthers in the US, Australian Aborigines and Pacific Islands independence movements. The group had several notable figures, such as actress Rawiri Paratene. The modus operandi of Nga Tamatoa was to ensure full ratification of the Treaty of Waitangi; to keep the 130-year-old agreement in the public arena. Some may argue that the massive $1 bn. return of lands in 1990 by the National Bolger Government was at least in part due to the efforts of Nga Tamatoa throughout the 1970s.

Concurrently with Tino rangatiratanga and Nga Tamatoa, the Te kohanga reo push was occurring. This latter term means language and culture nests in schools, to be manifest in major changes to the national curriculum. Nga Tamatoa was instrumental the following year by way of a 30,000-strong petition to have Maori language taught in schools. Many years later, in 1987, Te kohanga Maori – the Maori language – was officially recognised by an act of parliament. There are now two official languages in New Zealand; English and Maori. Te kohanga Maori was in 1971, though, just an idea by the indigenous community, but one that was fiercely supported by most Maori, as it was obvious that without real grassroots action, both Maori language and culture was showing tangible signs of dying out both quickly and silently. There was also support by Pakeha and school boards, as well as muted encouragement by the New Zealand Government, via the Ministry of Education, for such a proposal.

On Waitangi Day, 1971, Nga Tamatoa put their ideas into practice with the staging of demonstrations towards the government's lack-of-action on the Treaty. Increasingly the group would label the Treaty as a fraud, culminating in the Maori cognition by the 1980s that they were tricked during the signing, and that the whole thing should be ripped up. It achieved few results, except to galvanise the Maori community and Nga Tamatoa towards more action in the near future. Indeed this was to be the case on Waitangi Days 1973 and 1974. Although wound up by 1980, Nga Tamatoa's influence continued to be felt during the legislative changes to the Treaty in the mid-1980s and 1990s.

After Britain's third and successful application to join the EEC (European Economic Community) in 1969, an agreement between New Zealand and Britain was secured -in 1971. This agreement related to New Zealand's butter, cheese and lamb trades, and was a special arrangement (the Luxembourg Agreement). Although for a finite period, and requiring frequent revisitation over the coming years, it gave NZ time to diversify after Britain became a full EEC member in 1973. The Luxembourg Agreement of 1973 reduced Britain's share of New Zealand's butter and cheese quite substantially: in 1970 Britain purchased over ninety per cent of New Zealand's butter exports; after 1971 it was around seventy per cent. In 1970 Britain bought seventy-five per cent of New Zealand's cheese quota; by 1976 it was a mere fifty-one per cent. These quantities were reduced after 1977 to approximately thirty-five and twenty-five per cent respectively. From a high of forty-eight per cent in 1938, to forty-three per cent in 1960, and thirty per cent in 1970, British imports to New Zealand fell further after the 1971-73 EEC consequences. When Britain entered the EEC in 1973 all bilateral agreements between New Zealand and Britain had to be terminated.

Therefore, even though New Zealand secured butter, cheese and lamb trades with the UK in 1971, due to the Luxembourg agreement, the writing was on the wall; New Zealand must now commence a long-term development of trade partnerships with other countries. Britain, although having been a very-long-running partner because of it mother-country status, and in fact virtually the only partner with New Zealand up till World War Two, was now looking to its neighbours and European partners, and not to its former colonies and dominions. The 1970s were a new era for Britain, and it was not altogether a bad thing for New Zealand and the Antipodes. Now NZ could focus on its trans-Tasman relationship, as well as its many Pacific neighbours, and even forge new commercial relationships with countries not seriously-considered, such as those in Asia, Europe, USA and even those nations previously considered even less viable such as the Middle-East, Africa and Latin America.

In 1971 Tiwai Point aluminium smelter opened. It is located at the entrance to Bluff Harbour, at the extreme southern point of mainland New Zealand. Although Invercargill is recognised as New Zealand's southernmost city, Bluff is the southernmost locale, at the entrance to Foveaux Strait. Bluff Harbour is a spit which extends from the western end of the Awarua Plain, and lies between Awarua Bay to the north and Foveaux Strait to the south. Tiwai Point is currently one of the twenty largest aluminium smelters in the world and as of writing provides NZ$3.7 billion worth of economic benefit to the New Zealand economy. Tiwai produces the world's highest purity primary aluminium, and is sold mostly to Japan. In 1971 used 610 megawatts of electricity, mostly supplied by the hydroelectric Manapouri Power Station, which was completed earlier in the year. Manapouri, which was the subject of earlier discussion in this book, was eventually completed, despite the Save Manapouri Campaign, and Tiwai would probably not have been possible without its raising. The sensed reliability of power from Manapouri played a very important role in the choice of constructing the aluminium smelter in Southland. Both the power plant and the smelter were built as a joint project. Manapouri is the largest electricity consumer in New Zealand and utilises about one-third of the full power of the South Island and about fifteen per cent of national power.

In its 2003 website, Rio Tinto, the owner of Tiwai Point Smelter, provides the main reasons why Tiwai was chosen as the location for the operation in 1971:

  * "The availability of continuous, substantial quantities of hydro electricity from the Manapouri Power Scheme, which is part of New Zealand's national electricity grid;

  * Close to the deep water harbour of Bluff;

  * Well established infrastructure offered by the City of Invercargill in terms of smelter housing needs, services and supplies; and

  * Favourable environmental and climatic conditions that exist at Tiwai Point."

(see Rio Tinto Aluminium, 2011).

The completion of the Manapouri Power Station in September 1971, despite the large protests of the previous three years, and especially in 1970, paved the way for Tiwai Point. Without it obviously the project could not have gone ahead and New Zealand would not be capable of producing the quantities of aluminium for domestic use and for export that it is now capable of. The station is housed 180 metres underground at West Point arm of the Lake, in the Fiordland National Park, in Southland. It is different to other hydro power stations as it lacks a high dam; it uses the natural 183-metre-height differential between Lake Manapouri and the ocean at Deep Cove in Doubtful Sound to generate electricity. Construction of the dam involved four separate projects from 1963-71:

  1. The 'tailrace' tunnel from Deep Cove, through the mountains, to the power house in West Arm (10km)

  2. Construction of the power station

  3. The link of the two sites of construction – the Wilmot Pass Road, completed in 1965

  4. Transmission lines sent cross-country from West Arm to Bluff (160km)

Warkworth satellite communications ground station, in Northland, sixty-four kilometres north of Auckland (and ninety-four kilometres south of Whangarei), was completed and geared up for transmissions on 17 July 1971. The small town was chosen for the site due to the land foundation being strong enough to handle the mammoth weight of the antenna and pedestal, also because it was sheltered from excessive wind speeds, was within 160 kilometres of Auckland where the international toll exchange is located, was free from microwave frequency-emitting noises, and it was near a suitable town to accommodate the employees and their families. It was originally owned by the New Zealand Post Office, and is now owned by Telecom NZ. High-quality telephone, data, telex, telegraph and television circuits had high demand in 1971, also add to that the coming colour television system, and a communications satellite system such as Warkworth was envisioned as the best answer. The system was proven to be the right choice eighteen months hence when over a billion people worldwide and more than one million New Zealanders tuned in to the world's first-ever satellite broadcast in January 1973; the Elvis Presley "Aloha from Hawaii" concert, in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. The system of PAL, over NTSC, which is the American system, and is more well-known for video (VHS/DVD) formats, was chosen. From the end of Thompson Road a general view of the system is possible, and a plaque and tree were planted in honour of the visit of NEC'S (Nippon Electrical Company) Dr Koboyashi, are to the right of the road, near the perimeter fence.

The British Lions tour to New Zealand of 1971 was a great success to the UK. Although the first two matches were held in Australia, where they won one and lost one, the New Zealand matches and tests were hugely successful. In fact after forty years they are still the only Lions side to have won a test series in NZ. A game invented and in England, spread to the Antipodean colonies of Australia, New Zealand and also South Africa, but was quickly localised and challenged in these new countries. England has struggled with them ever since and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries mostly lost to them. The captain of the tour was John Dawes, Coach Carwyn James and manager Doug Smith. Possibly as a result of their Grand Slam Five Nations Championship success in 1971, which had included more players than any other home nation to the touring team, the Lions believed mentally that they were to win against the All Blacks.

Gerald Davies explained,

"...somewhere along the line it becomes a mental thing...We grew in confidence; we came to believe it was possible to beat the All Blacks." (See Thomas, 2011).

Whilst this line of thinking paid off for the Lions in the first test at Carisbrook Park in Dunedin (9-3), they weren't so lucky at the second test in Christchurch, with the All Blacks pounding those 22-11. At Athletic Park, Wellington, the Lions did not make the same error they had in Christchurch, and this resulted in a resounding success for them of 13-3. The Lions scored two converted tries and a drop goal, whilst the All Blacks only managed a try. After the third test the Lions led the series 2-1, and this therefore translated to an All-Black win in Auckland to tie the series. During a tight match in the fourth and final match, where at one stage it was equal at 11-11 before Lions fullback JPR Williams attempted a drop goal, the end-result was a draw and the Lions won the series.

On 25 October 1971 a 108-year era ended in New Zealand. It was the era of regular service steam locomotives and ended with the final trip of a J-Class train on New Zealand Railways' (NZR) overnight Christchurch to Dunedin express. Primarily steam-powered from 1863, it wasn't until 1923 when some electric locomotives started to be operated, and 1936 when petrol- or diesel-motored cars were introduced. However diesel railcars didn't gain momentum until the 1950s when mainline diesel-electric locomotives arrived on the scene. This was the event that spelled the end of steam-powered rail in New Zealand. This 'dieselisation' of North Island NZR was complete by the end of the sixties. The reason why steam power took longer to phase out in the South Island was that cars on the Friday and Sunday night expresses between Christchurch and Dunedin required heating during winter. This was solved by the initiation of train heating vans attached to diesel-hauled expresses. Early in 1971 however NZR re-introduced a steam engine for a tourism service, the Kingston Flyer, which travelled daily between Lumsden and Kingston on Lake Wakatipu, on the South Island. In the 2000s there have been a group of rail heritage organisations and museums running steam-hauled excursions around the nation, and TranzScenic operates 'Steam Engine Saturdays' on the North Island's main trunk line. These Saturdays utilise a preserved tank engine W794 on the Overlander, between Fielding and Taihape in the central North Island.

In 1972 the Equal Pay Act was passed, and its aim is stated in the title:

"An Act to make provision for the removal and prevention of discrimination, based on the sex of the employees, in the rates of remuneration of males and females in paid employment, and for matters incidental thereto."

The legislation was seen as a success and a vindication by the NZ feminist movement, which had been working for years for some form of equality in the workplace. In 1967 the National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women (NACEW) was established as part of the Labour Department Act (1954). One of their early actions was to form a Committee of Inquiry into the Implementation of Equal Pay in New Zealand, which was to admit the private sector. The recommendation of the Committee in 1971 was that every remuneration rate should be targeted for equal pay by means of an equal pay act. This would lawfully prohibit discrimination in rates of pay by gender. It also made the comment that there were a limited range of occupations by women, such as domestic workers, teachers, nurses, office workers, sales personnel, etc. The 1971 Committee report made a comparison between this limited range of women's occupations and the outdated social attitudes about the value of female labour.

In October the Act was passed, extending the principle of pay towards the private sector as well as the public one, and it was to be carried out over the next five years. It was monitored by a number of government reports, such as the Progress of Equal Pay in New Zealand (1975) and Equal Pay Implementation in New Zealand (1979). The second one cited the role of the Human Rights Commission. By 1978 the minimum rate of pay was standardised for both genders. The following year equal payments of both unemployment and sickness benefits were put into law. In 1983 the New Zealand government ratified the 1951 ILO Convention, and has since become a signatory to myriad other international agreements.

The 1972 Equal Pay Act has not easy to enforce though: this concept was only interpreted rather conservatively by the Arbitration Court and received lesser levels of scrutiny by the Department of Labour. It was challenged in 1986 by the Clerical Workers Union, which argued that employers should be led to negotiate a claim for equal pay for equal value, but that was dismissed.

Fifteen years later it was revealed that women were earning twenty-two per cent less than men and a seminar for 'Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value' was held at Victoria University the following year where the seeds of a national pay equity campaign evolved. This seminar saw the founding of the Coalition of Equal Value Equal Pay (CEVEP).

Since the abolition of award system in New Zealand in 1991, the Employment Relations Law Reform Bill proposes to repeal the Equal Pact Act and substitute it with a dissimilar and possibly more functional equal pay provision. This will most likely be limited to like work rather than work of equal value, though.

By 1972 New Zealand was following the other First (industrialised) World nations in the Northern Hemisphere in massively increased legal and illegal (narcotic) drug use, such as prescription medicines/pills, and narcotics such as: marijuana, LSD, heroin, cocaine, and also a marked increase in alcohol dependency. In terms of legal drug use, there were one-hundred-and-six million doses of tranquilisers and fifty-two million doses of antidepressants taken in New Zealand in that year alone. Illegal drug use was immeasurable; levels not experienced before. The latter was due to the 1960s change in society's way-of-thinking and acting, and also a result of new pressures in the 1970s, of a kind that envisaged a "New World". Overseas events like Woodstock were highly influential in domestic trends and the "free love"/hippy movement were still in motion. However, unlike the US and Europe drug use in New Zealand had not become a massive social and policing problem, nor a major concern to politicians and government, yet it was still an undesirable progression of the early seventies.

1972 saw the introduction into New Zealand politics of the Value Party, what is considered the world's first environmental party, and forerunner to the Green Party of Aotearoa. Originating at the Victoria University in Wellington, it was started by many of the personalities who later built the Greens Party, such as its first leader, Tony Brunt. A number of the Party manifestos painted a progressive, almost-utopian blueprint for the future of New Zealand, as a semi-socialist, ecologically-sustainable party. Of course this was anything but reality, but it was founded on ideals, and it appealed to those idealistic people on the "New Left". These were people who didn't wish to go all the way of the Soviet Union or China, but were dissatisfied with the more centrist ideology and mainstream agenda of the Labour Party. Values was regarded as the first social renewal party with key aspects of respect to Mother Nature, and right from its inception it fundamentally proposed alternative policy, rather than the traditional Oppositionist modus-operandi that was a part of New Zealand parliaments since the nineteenth century. In 1972 Values was a new party, but had already contested the general election that year. It achieved a small amount of the popular vote (around 1-2 per cent), and this increased in later elections, but it was never enough to win seats in parliament, due to First-Past-the-Post. However it did manage to win candidates in local government, the first being Helen Smith of Titahi Bay, who got on to the Porirua City Council the following year. As well as green ideals, other major policies of the new Values Party were an end to nuclear power, disarmament, zero population growth, zero economic growth, drug reform and homosexual law reform. In later years the first and last two were to become reality under a Labour administration (1984-87).

The establishment in 1972 of consular relations between New Zealand and Chile meant that embassies were opened in Wellington and Santiago. First diplomatic relations were founded in 1945 after World War Two and in the context of the creation of the UN, of which both nations are founding members. The establishment of the Chilean embassy in Wellington in 1972 was to provide a tool for deepening these bilateral relations and has since been successful from both a trade and a cultural standpoint. Over the last forty years, since the embassies' inception, there have been many visits between the two countries by Chilean presidents, New Zealand prime ministers, both country's senior ministers, trade delegations and visits by heads of important industries and corporations. Commerce and investment are currently significant areas of interest between the two nations, as well as exchange of information in political areas such as social issues. There is also presently an emphasis on the creation of joint ventures, educational systems and cultural expressions.

One of the most significant political events in New Zealand in 1972 was the ending of long conservative rule and the beginning of a new, albeit brief, hegemony by social-democratic Labour, in line with the major social and cultural change of the early 1970s. Although not in the political wilderness for as long as the Australian Labor Party (twenty-two years), National had been in office continuously since 1960. However if one were to discount the aberration of the three-year Labour government of 1957 to 1960, then New Zealand Labour also had an equally-long period in the dark. It was not the landslide some had predicted, but New Zealanders were ready for a change; it was as much a rebellion against the status quo as much as a vote for Labour. Additional factors which helped Norman Kirk sweep to power were the brief economic boom in 1972 with its "programme for prosperity" and generous social reforms in line with earlier Labour government philosophies such as during Seddon and during the late fifties. On 25 November 1.6 million people were registered to vote and there was a turnout of 89.1 per cent. Labour defeated National by a substantial fifty-five seats to thirty-two. No minor parties or independents were elected and this became only the third Labour government. Kirk had been leader since 1965 and therefore had lost two previous elections. His seat was Sydenham. Almost as soon as Labour was elected external pressures began to have a negative effect on the new government. The entry of Britain into the EEC caused limits to be set on New Zealand's meat, butter and cheese exports. Even though new markets opened up, such as elsewhere in Europe, Latin America and Asia, and new exports such as Chinese gooseberry (kiwifruit), wine, berries, fish, timber, venison and deer velvet took off, it still wasn't enough to replace the loss to Britain. The oil crisis by OPEC in 1973-74 was not expected by the government, and saw oil price rises of two-hundred per cent. The world recession this triggered had immediate flow-on effects to New Zealand. Energy issues rose to the forefront and searches began for new offshore local gas and oilfields.

Kirk, in keeping with Labour principles wanted to have a more moral foreign policy and a far more independent position for New Zealand, less subservient to Britain and the United States. Just before being elected, in 1972 several private yachts sailed to the French Polynesian nuclear testing zone. On board one of them was Labour MP Matiu Rata. Once in government Kirk made opposition to nuclear testing one of its cornerstones in foreign policy. In the early seventies this became one of New Zealand's defining pillars of its emerging independence and Kirk was not afraid to make his stand against the United States and Britain; the first prime minister of New Zealand to do so since the end of the Second World War. This made some people uncomfortable, even in the parliamentary Party, and was firmly rejected by the conservative side of politics. Kirk and Whitlam in Australia sided to take their protest against French Pacific nuclear testing to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Holland, but the French ignored the resulting injunction. To the French's and international community's surprise the prime minister sent out the frigate Otago to the testing area, with Cabinet Minister Fraser Coleman on board. Coleman said:

"We are a small nation but we will not abjectly surrender to injustice... [The Otago is] a silent accusing witness with the power to bring alive the conscience of the world." (See Smith & Callan, 1999, p. 201).

In January 1973 the world's first satellite broadcast took place, and was watched by an estimated one billion people, of which several hundred thousand were in New Zealand. It was Elvis Presley's Aloha from Hawaii concert, broadcast by NBC and showed The King at the peak of his career. This historic television broadcast was another phase in the globalisation of communications and the world becoming a smaller place, in line with the recent advent of the Boeing 747 in particular and other "jumbo" (wide-bodied) jets. New Zealand, as a small, fairly insignificant nation on the world stage, situated in the bottom southeast corner of the earth, was as much a winner from satellite broadcasting as any other country. This new medium would go on to be used for telephones, faxes and much later computer and mobile technology.

The New Zealand-Britain "mother-child" relationship was well and truly over in 1973 when the latter entered the European Economic Community (EEC). This has already been discussed in this chapter, so there is no need for further elaboration.

The year 1973 saw New Zealand's population reach three million. From hitting one million people in the mid-1920s, and two million by 1952, the population increase had been fairly stable at around 2-2.5 per cent since World War Two. It then fell in 1965, and didn't get back to the two per cent mark until the early seventies. From 1972 to 1974 the natural increase was 2.1 to 2.2 per cent, before falling continuously throughout the rest of the decade to negative figures. (See Statistics New Zealand, 2011). The population increase to 1973 was not just a result of natural increase from the baby-boomer years and the new "X" generation, but also due to immigration from countries such as the United Kingdom, Europe, Fiji, Samoa and other Pacific Island nations such as the semi-autonomous Cook Islands.

The Domestic Purposes Benefit (DPB) was introduced by Kirk in 1974. It was a means to rectify the failings of the Destitute Persons Act 1910 and the Domestic Proceedings Act 1968, where a woman may experience difficulties in receiving maintenance from the father of her children. Such difficulties required the mother to go to court to get the maintenance agreement or order enforced or in the case where an unmarried mother had to obtain an acknowledgement of paternity from the father or a declaration of paternity from the court, to be entitled to seek the maintenance. The DPB Act "provided State financial support for single mothers, irrespective of whether the father was contributing to maintenance payments." (See Law Commission Report, 2000).

A criticism of the DPB was that it was being blamed for a shortage of babies for adoption, but it is unclear whether that was founded. There was a reduction in the number of births outside of marriage in the years 1971 to 1976, as well as a softening of community attitudes towards illegitimate children and their mothers, and this latter point was also due to the passing of the Status of Children Act 1969.

In 1973 the New Zealand yacht Fri (pronounced "free") was the lead vessel in a flotilla of yachts which sailed to Mururoa in French Tahiti, to protest against the continued French nuclear testing. It was preceded by another protest yacht the year earlier, the Vega, captained by David McTaggart, who was allegedly beaten severely by French army commandos and made the international news. This event re-launched the New Zealand (and Australian) nuclear protests of 1972 and 1973, and prompted the voyage of the Fri. On 23 March 1973 the vessel sailed from New Zealand and upon arrival at Mururoa Atoll commenced a fifty-three-day vigil within the test exclusion zone, just outside the Atoll and alongside another flotilla-member, the Spirit of Peace. To back up the protests by the yachts and the demonstrators back in New Zealand, the Kirk government sent two of the Navy frigates, HMNZS Canterbury and the Otago, into the test zone. The frigates were unmolested, probably due to their intimidating size and as they were official government ships, but the Fri was not so lucky, and French commandos stormed the vessel, as well as arresting the crew and impounding the yacht. The French atmospheric nuclear tests had begun in 1966 and continued unabated in 1973. It was not until over twenty years hence, in 1996, that they wound up the operation. In that thirty-three year period they conducted over two-hundred nuclear tests at Mururoa and Fangataufa Atolls, of which forty were atmospheric. There are claims that several hundred Polynesians have died of cancer or are living with cancer from the 1970s through to the present day, although this is unsubstantiated. (See Szabo, 1991).

In 1973 New Zealand's terms of trade had deteriorated so much that it was at a crisis point. If there was any single event that ended the post-World War Two prosperity and long period of economic growth, then it was most definitely the first oil shock. By the time of the second shock at the decade's end, the country had experienced six years of struggles and simply added to the pressures into the eighties. But in 1973, before the event, an entire generation of New Zealanders had known nothing but good times riding on the back of industry and commerce, and of course the proverbial "sheep's back". First Kirk, then Bill Rowling, and Muldoon all blamed the economic woes on the first oil crisis, which was truthful to some extent, if not convenient. The oil shock did indeed create a massive increase in the cost of imports: it initially increased the wholesale price of oil by four times (second shock increased those prices tenfold (see Belich, 2001, p. 430).The combination with very high inflation and the wholesale price translating to a retail price increase was also responsible for the terms of trade deterioration. However, Belich suggests that the 1973 oil crisis was not fundamentally the reason for the massive economic downturn of the rest of the decade; rather it was also because of Britain's movement away from trade with New Zealand (it was sixty to seventy per cent of exports and imports prior to this year), the afore-mentioned inflation, and the general 'decolonisation' of New Zealand. At this time the newly-discovered phenomenon was taking hold in New Zealand as well as other Western powers where high inflation merged with high unemployment: stagflation. This was a new dilemma and therefore one that New Zealand politicians were at a loss on how to tackle.

The oil crisis of 1973 produced a drop in the nation's economic performance and a very real perception that the standard of living was falling. From a high of the having the highest standard of living in the world at the end of the nineteenth century, it was actually falling below the averages of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Between 1973 and 1980 New Zealand dropped from being in the top five to nineteenth (see Mein Smith, 2005, p. 202), but of especial concern was that its neighbour and "big cousin", Australia, was doing better in terms of average real incomes, a country that New Zealand had previously managed to keep up with and often trump in this vital statistic. One may mark the oil hike of 1973 as the time when New Zealand lost the battle for economic supremacy and general prosperity; it has never been managed to reach the top twenty countries in vital indicators since.

In 1969, limited television networking was introduced with live news broadcasts, though New Zealand had to wait until 1973 before the whole country was fully networked. November 1973 also saw the introduction of colour television, in time for the Christchurch Commonwealth Games, in January 1974. A totally different experience to black and white, it brought the 'box' to life and brought New Zealand in line with America, which had started colour broadcasts in 1965. The broadcaster was still the old NZBC, (TVNZ not until 1975) and the system chosen was PAL, which stands for Phase Alternating Line. Aside from the Americas which use NTSC, most of the rest of the world uses the PAL system. By the late seventies most New Zealanders had converted to the new type of television. In television technology, with the exception of Teletext, colour viewing would remain the only real improvement until the advent of pay TV in the 1990s, and then of Plasma and LCD flat-panel televisions and digital TV /interactive TV in the early twenty-first century.

By early 1974 Polynesian immigration was higher than ever. It had become the single largest group of immigrants and for most, Auckland, and in particular South Auckland – Manukau City, Otara, Manurewa, Papatoetoe, etc. - was the destination of choice. Auckland was fast approaching the centre of the largest grouping of South Pacific Islanders outside the islands themselves; a fact from the next decade, and the immigration was creating a new subculture in New Zealand. For the first time ever it was becoming less and less common to hear only English on the streets and in shopping centres, and Samoan and other Polynesian words were becoming part of the lexicon of youth and their street slang.

The tenth Commonwealth Games (formerly Empire Games) was held in Christchurch on 22 January 1974 for two weeks, and was opened by the Duke of Edinburgh. There were a total of 1,278 athletes and 372 team officials from thirty-eight nations, and 40,000 tourists attended. The Games were nicknamed the "Friendly Games" and the nightly weightlifting was a must-see for many Kiwis. One of the British weightlifting competitors, Precious McKenzie, who was considered the smallest lifter, made New Zealand his home some years later. Dick Taylor became the winner of New Zealand's first gold medal, crossing the finish line of the 10,000 metres with his arms raised in triumph. One of the greatest events of the Games was a tussle for the 1,500 metres finals, between New Zealand's own John Walker and Tanzania's Filbert Bayl. John Walker was beaten by Bayl by three-tenths of a second (!), but both created new world records: Bayl in 3:32:2 and Walker in 3:32:5. Walker held mid-1970s records for both the old mile and the 2,000 metres. Another surprise was on the first day of competition where Richard Taylor won gold for New Zealand in the ten thousand metres. The final medal tally put New Zealand in fourth place with nine gold, eight silver and eighteen bronze (See Smith & Callan, 1999, p. 202). The Games created a temporary, but real, upswing in the mood of the nation, after the economic quagmire the country had sunk into, the social problems of Vietnam protests, antinuclear protests and general dissatisfaction.

Music is an integral part of any nation's social and cultural history, and it is the playback of a particular song that often makes a person reminisce about a certain year or era. In 1974 that song was "Join Together", written by Steve Allen and performed with the NZ Maori Theatre Trust.

"The 10th Commonwealth Games... was an odd coupling of 1970s cosmic harmony and cut-throat competition. The song that caught the mood of this Woodstock in tracksuits was Steve Allen's hummable, even uplifting, anthem 'Join together'." (See Ministry for Culture & Heritage, 2008).

Steve Allen, whose real name was Alan Stevenson, wrote the song in 1973, and by his own admission, bashed it out in half an hour. He later said, "As with all good songs, it fell into place. The words were predetermined; it was just a case of finding a simple tune to string them together." Created at EMI studios in Wellington in the winter of 1973 its backing track was created by a single guitarist, bassist and drummer, plus Allen on keyboard. The fuller feel came later when he collaborated with the seven vocalists of the NZ Maori Theatre Trust. His song came first in the Studio One competition for the theme song for the Games, and he won $300 (about $14,000 today). Prior to the Games it hit number two on the NZBC's Pop-o-Meter Top Twenty, but failed to trump Helen Reddy's "Delta Dawn". The song was played by Allen and a massed choir in front of 35,000 spectators and many more worldwide via television at the Opening Ceremony. He later recalled that he was "...stuck in the middle of an awful lot of people, a long march and being pretty chuffed to be singing my own material." (See Ministry of Culture & Heritage, 2008). The Friendly Games were claimed to be a little bit too friendly, similar to the 1973 Ngaruawahia Pop Festival, where there was a fair bit of late-night communing between athletes in the Athletes' Village. But after all it was the era of peace and free love. In 1978 Allen complained that the song became so popular it defined him in the eyes of the general public, and conversely caused all his other musical work to be overlooked. Much later he apologised for that comment, saying that he was quoted out of context, but maintained that it was good to be remembered for "Join Together", but would have been nice to be remembered for his other works as well. (See Ministry for Culture & Heritage, 2008).

The Maori word "Ohu" means literally communal or group volunteer work, and the Kirk Ohu scheme in 1973 was a project designed to help groups to live and work communally on rural land, such as the kibbutz movement in post-1948 Israel. It has been said to be the closest government-sanctioned thing to institutionalisation of the counter-culture movement. Even though not successful in the long-term, the ohus were a radical and well-meaning policy of the Labour government, and experienced a measure of success in the short-term. In addition to greater productivity of the rural workforce, the scheme helped alleviate alcoholism and recreational drug use, in particular marijuana. In addition to people leaving the cities to work on ohus, it also became attractive to the spiritual aspirations of people pursuing an alternative style of life. It was an official land settlement scheme where the users leased crown lands. The policy was announced to an ohu working party by Minister of Lands Matiu Rata, and was explained in future monetarist terms. He mentioned the over-emphasis on the GNP, "...perpetual greed, speculation, profiteering, unethical practices and the cult of individualism..." (See Smith & Callan, 1999, p. 200). In keeping with left-wing Labour ideology Norman Kirk had hoped that it would act as an antidote to the materialism of modern 1970s society, although by the time it was enacted as government policy many of those in the community whom it was aimed at had already been living an alternative, hippie-style culture. It ultimately failed as it was impracticable and an undesirable return to living in a long-gone era of no conveniences. The November 1974 issue of Mushroom Magazine summed up why the ohus were to be doomed in the very near future:

"If the plumbing is unserviceable: avoid using it altogether... washing up is more pleasant outside at a bench with a removable basin... [there was] shitting-in-squat and composting excreta for at least six months with other vegetable and animal matter... The Lady in the household has powerful conditioning to overcome..." (See Smith & Callan, 1999, p. 200).

In 1974 the voting age was reduced to eighteen. During most of New Zealand's history, voting has been restricted to the over-21s, but at a couple of times just after World War I and during World War II there was a temporary franchise change, mostly to allow serving military personnel to vote, regardless of age or not being a current resident. In 1969 the voting age was legislatively reduced to twenty, and then the change in 1974. Whether the reason for the 1974 change or not, it was done in an atmosphere of frenzied student interest in politics due to the protests over Vietnam. On 21 June 2007 Green Party MP Sue Bradford introduced a bill into parliament that would lower the age further to sixteen, which although radical, had been proposed in some European parliaments (but failed). Waiting until the consideration of Members' Bills session, a little over one month later, Bradford abandoned the idea, citing "adverse public opinion". A similar bill in the state lower house of Australian Capital Territory (ACT), was also proposed in 2007, and was also defeated.

Norman Kirk, prior to being elected as prime minister, always had a weight problem, similar to David Lange several years later. Unlike Lange, who resorted to surgical measures to reduce some bulk (he had a stomach stapling procedure in 1984), Kirk managed to slim down somewhat by natural means by 1972. During his gruelling time as PM Kirk maintained an intense schedule and had little holiday time. His weight gradually rose as did his blood pressure. By the end of 1973 he was experiencing heart problems, but he recovered. His doctor advised a reduction of workload but either through necessity of being prime minister, or by choice, he didn't follow that advice. By August 1974 he was forced to enter hospital. On 31 August Kirk died of heart problems. He was only fifty-one. On 6 September 1974 a state funeral was held in Wellington. The mourners formed a queue which stretched down Parliament Building's front steps and across Parliament grounds, as people waited to pay respects while his body lay in state. The entire country was in shock, and even those who didn't vote for him in 1972 or didn't agree with his administration of two years, were still saddened by his passing. Interment of his body occurred in his hometown, Waimate. Quoted in Smith & Callan, C. K. Stead wrote a poem about "Big Norm":

"Maurice, I dreamed of you last night. You wore

A black track suit, red striped. Saying goodbye

We fought back the tears. I woke thinking you dead.

Here in the North manuka is flecked with flowers,

Willows bent in stream-beds are edged with green,

But the tall-striding poplars seem no more

Than ghostly sketches of their summer glory,

Beyound the dunes blue of the sky out-reaches

The blue of ocean where the spirits of our dead

Stream northward to their home. Under flame trees

By Ahipara golf course someone's transistor tells me

The news again, and down on the hard sand

In letters large enough to match the man

The children have scrawled it: BIG NORM IS DEAD."

C. K. Stead

(Quoted in Smith & Callan, 1999, p. 206).

Almost immediately after Kirk's death the Labour caucus appointed his successor, Bill Rowling, as the new Prime Minister of New Zealand (first few days it was Kirk's deputy, Hugh Watt, serving as acting PM). His real name was Wallace Edward Rowling, and he was in the Parliament since 1962. His elevation to the frontbench after the 1972 could be seen as a major promotion as he had no prior ministerial experience. His two years as Finance Minister was overall acceptable, although sometimes rather turbulent as he had some difficult economic challenges due to Kirk's programme of reform.

During his year as Prime Minister he was often attacked by the much more vociferous and political Leader of the Opposition, Muldoon, and many in the party and Labour supporters eventually labelled him as being weak and ineffectual. His rationale was that he did not want to stoop to the levels of the National Party, which he characterised as confrontational and aggressive. It is not surprising that he lost the election in 1975 on this particular front, much the same as the similarly-deposed Don Brash lost the National leadership in 2006. However it was not the only reason; the Labour Party was by 1975 seen as too radical for New Zealanders in the 1970s, much as in Australia in the same years. (Both Labour parties changed considerably by the early eighties to become more centrist, even over the centre to the right, such as with Lange and his Australian counterpart, Hawke.) Rowling went on to serve as Leader of the Opposition for a long eight years; both 1978 and 1981 were votes of confidence in him as the Party almost won back government in percentage terms, but this did not translate to a majority of seats. He was finally dumped by the Party in favour of Lange in 1983.

The famous (infamous?) Maori Land March from Te Hapua in Northland to Wellington was if not one of the country's largest Maori protests, then possibly its most well-known and long-remembered one. Proposed by John Rangihau, it was a protest against not only the failure to return confiscated lands, but also against its continuing confiscation. Signalling a fundamental change in Maori relations with the state and the Pakeha majority, it was the ushering in a new 1970s era of "Maori Renaissance". It continued to gain strength throughout the late 1970s. The official speaker was Dame Whina Cooper of Te Roopu o te Matakite, and as the March passed over the Auckland Harbour Bridge, through Auckland, onto Hamilton and Te Kuiti it grew from less than a couple of hundred to several thousand. It picked up 50,000 temporarily en-route, which is a significant number remembering that the entire population of New Zealand was only three million. By the time it arrived in Wellington it was 5,000-strong. In Wellington they handed the Government a Memorial of Rights with 60,000 signatures and requested a guarantee of not a single acre more be lost. The Labour government refused to make any firm commitments. The March disbanded at that stage, but some remained in the Parliament grounds for some time, including Cooper. A documentary team interviewed some and made a film. Other influential persons involved in the Land March were Eva Rickard and Tama Poata and Donna Awatere. Years later, in 1998, Awatere recalls the March. She stated that it was not supported by the Maori community when proposed, and that some were afraid that there would be backlashes and arrests by the government if it was to be carried out. She said they had been "warned":

"By the time we got to Warkworth the mood was changing: marae started to receive us and support us. And then suddenly they came in their thousands and then their tens of thousands. When we got to the Auckland Harbour Bridge there were so many of us, walking in time, that the bridge began to sway, and I was scared we would bring the whole thing down. As we marched to Wellington no marae was big enough to hold us. We walked for weeks, and the day we walked into Wellington we had a larger crowd than I had ever seen. The country was behind us." (See Smith & Callan, 1999, p. 212).

There was some success for the March as that year the Treaty of Waitangi's new Waitangi Tribunal amended the legislation so that claims from 1975 would be granted. The Tribunal was founded in that year, but some would surmise that it didn't really 'come to life' until 1981, under the chairmanship of Justice Edward T. (Taihakurei) Durie, the first person of Maori descent to be appointed a judge of the Maori Land Court. This was a big win for Maori, and one that would only be the start of better things to come, culminating in the 1990 Bolger return of lands (and waterways) worth $1 billion. However these were early days and anything was welcome. Bill Rowling, about to be defeated by the National Party and Muldoon, was still the Prime Minister and he presided over the Tribunal, and was proud of it (not that it helped the election outcome for Labour). Professor King says that "Perhaps the single measure with the most pervasive influence, though not greatly commented on at the time, was the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal..." (See King, 2003, p. 484). The key purpose of the Tribunal was to deliberate and make judgements on the alleged breaches of the original 1840 Treaty of Waitangi since the year 1985. The Tribunal was not well-known by the public, including the Maori community for that matter, for the first ten years, until 1985 under the fourth Labour government of David Lange. It was then radically amended to include claims retrospectively not to 1975, or even 1875, but all the way back to 1840. At that point it became the key focus of Maori resource (land) claims against the Crown. During the 1980s and 1990s the Tribunal created grants that amounted to nothing less than a revolution.

Election '75 was one of those sea-change polls, where an 'experiment', such as the Second Labour Government, is ended, and the status-quo, what some may term the 'natural party of government', such as the National Party, is re-instated. Kirk and then Rowling's government was not as radical, far-reaching, questionable or as left-wing as its counterpart across the Tasman, but it failed to secure a second term nonetheless. Whitlam's Australian Labor Party (ALP) government in Australia was sacked by the Governor-General, acting on the orders of the Queen, as it had lost Supply. This was an extreme way of leaving government. At the 1975 election in Australia, Labor lost to the Opposition Coalition by astronomic proportions. This was not the case in New Zealand, but people had lost confidence in Labour here also, and a return to conservative rule was the desire by a large majority of the electorate. The election campaign involved, on the government side, the ill-fated campaign: "Citizens for Rowling". This was utilising the backing of some major players in the New Zealand corporate and social arena, but was ultimately deemed elitist and a dismissal of ordinary, middle-class New Zealanders. National responded with "Rob's Mob", but it is questionable whether that made any difference to the outcome. Muldoon was a consummate orator, television performer, and evoked a forward-looking, centre-right, financially-responsible alternate government. After all the problems and economic difficulties of the previous three years, Kiwis were looking to rebuild the national economy and recreate individual wealth that had been a hallmark of the 1950s and 1960s, mostly under the "Tories". A clever tactic of Muldoon's was to use his previous finance minister's experience and focus on the economic impact of Rowling newly-created compulsory personal superannuation platform, which would cause government ownership of the New Zealand economy, using the workers' capital. This, he said, is Communism. Muldoon used the premise that it could be funded from future taxes rather than an additional impost on current wages. The results turned out to be a mirror-image/carbon-copy of the state of the Parliament pre-election. From Labour Government 55 seats vs. 32 seats National Opposition, it became National Government 55: 32 Labour Opposition. Although Social Credit won 7.43 per cent of the vote, or almost 120,000 votes, it still failed to secure a single seat. As was the case to a lesser extent for Values, winning about five per cent, or 83,000 votes. This election was another example of small parties (mostly left-of-centre) not being empowered in the national polity, so it was argued at the 1993 MMP referendum. The full results below:

The new government adopted its election pledge on personal super shortly after taking office.

A government estimate in 1975 put the official poverty statistic at eighteen per cent of all New Zealanders, or approximately half-a-million persons. This was a staggering statistic and was blamed on the previous Labour government, but in truth it had been edging up before 1972. A product of unemployment and the sharp decreases in the cost of living in the early 1970s, Muldoon's new government acted to bring the economy back to the black, but this was insufficient, and poverty and unemployment continued to rise, albeit at a slower rate.

The "Think Big" strategy of the new National government commenced very soon after being re-elected, and was a major part of Muldoon's policy manifesto for the first term (1975-78). It basically comprised the creation of large-scale investments, such as the expansion of a steel works, the construction of chemical plants, and the construction of an oil refinery. Through these investments, he aimed to reduce the national import bill and thereby effect a notable improvement in the balance of payments/ terms of trade. Think Big was the main hallmark of the Muldoon years of 1975-84, but ultimately it failed, as the projects were inherently risky and had not been costed effectively. Think Big in particular, and the government's manifestos of all three terms were designed to stabilise and rocket the economy forward, but the end result was the opposite effect.

Think Big of the late 1970s and into the first half of the Eighties was an attempt to re-create the economic prosperity New Zealand had enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s. It was simply a way of utilising technology to capitalise on native resources. Part of the programme was for the government to invest heavily (and ultimately) unsuccessfully in a venture to make synthetic petrol, ammonia urea and methanol out of natural gas. This was a bold move designed to make the country self-reliant in energy, as well as to kill unemployment. Think Big was a hallmark of the Muldoon years right from its inception in 1975, to its downfall in 1984, but as King suggests,

"These were all policies and tactics favoured by the man who had chosen to be both Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, and who was so strong-willed that nobody in his cabinet or caucus was capable of challenging him or deflecting policies he was determined to follow." (See King, 2003, p. 486).

Although a rather harsh and erudite summary of Muldoon's leadership style, this was quite close to the truth. However, it must be remembered that as well as being elected by a substantial majority in 1975, he was re-elected with a smaller base in 1978, and again in 1981. New Zealanders were satisfied enough with his leadership to give him a go for three terms; almost a decade, and therefore a discussion in posterity of his government's failings, including Think Big and the 1982-84 price and wage freeze, amongst other policies, must be examined in that light. The key question relating to Think Big, is did New Zealand benefit? Cynical historians may surmise that it was a significant distraction to the success of the National government, which by the 1981 election, retained power by a single seat. By the 1980s, fundamental changes were required in the New Zealand economy. In the absence of actual studies, it is dubious whether the programme actually assisted the economy during its long tenure, but there was a definite powering-up of economic activity during the construction phases. Higher oil prices, on a permanent basis, did not materialise, although oil prices dropped in real terms. Was this as a result of the programme? There were benefits to the construction industry, but only of a short-term nature. The Muldoon years may be judged harshly re-Think Big, but it was a kick-start to the economy from the 1969-75 years of stagnation; however was this kick-start a product of Think Big, the National government, or a combination of New Zealand and the Western world's revival since the economic events of the early seventies that featured the nation's forty-six drop in the terms of trade and a climb of inflation to the value of more than ten per cent (much as a result of the oil crises)?

The creation of Television New Zealand (TVNZ), following on from the NZBC, in Avalon, near Wellington, and the start of Channel Two, was a cogent new era in television broadcasting for the nation. On 1 April 1975 NZBC was separated into three state-owned corporations: TV1 (Channel One), TV2 (Channel Two), and Radio New Zealand. The existing NZBC TV service became TV One, based in Avalon, opening on that day. TV One used the WNTV1 and DNTV2 studios, whilst AKTV2's (Auckland) Shortland Street studios (name used for a 1980s/1990s soap opera show of that name) and CHTV3 (Christchurch) studios were used for the new TV2, which started later in 1975. The next major change occurred in 1980, when the two channels merged to form TVNZ. TV2 was known prior to this year as South Pacific Television. One of the highlights of the new TVNZ from 1976 onwards was the immensely-popular and extremely-successful Telethons, held at Avalon (more about Telethons shortly).

On the 6th February 1976 New Zealand Day was permanently re-christened 'Waitangi Day'. Since the previous year the Waitangi Tribunal was a new force in Pakeha-Maori relations and an attempt by the Rowling Government, then the Muldoon administration, to redress some of the land ownership issues for the indigenous community, as well as a general boost to Maori-Pakeha relations, government attempts to reduce the disparity in general living standards between the two groups and a firm and material engagement of what some may refer to as 'fixing the wrongs'. The renaming of the national anniversary was supported by a substantial majority of New Zealand, as many were sympathetic to the Maori cause in the mid-1970s, but also because it gave new meaning to the officially-recognised date of the birth of New Zealand's civilisation. It was of course fully accepted by Maori as it recognised the role of the Treaty's signatories, who were the ancestors of a large group of late twentieth-century Maori people. Despite some in the National Party who were opposed to the change, Muldoon was nothing if not pragmatic, and the vote was passed quickly and easily.

Waitangi Day has always been a day of protests and discontent from some in the Maori community, going back to 1971, when Nga Tamatoa had a major role in the demonstrations. Initially it was argued that the Treaty should have a greater role in governmental Maori affairs, but this evolved by the early 1980s to a complete rejection of the Treaty- that is, that it was a fraud perpetrated by the 1840 English colonial authorities, designed to trick the Maori to cede their sovereignty, their lands, and what was on the lands/in the seas, lakes and rivers. By the mid-eighties, under the Lange Labour Government, Maori leaders and/or elders had admitted that the Treaty had indeed been honoured and that it should be honoured. This may have been at least partially as a result of Lange's new "Consensus Government", whereas National had only demonstrated a grudging acceptance of Maori recognition and Treaty-based land rights, and this from the side of politics (conservative) that most Maori didn't support. (All of the four Maori seats were, and still are, Labour). There is a perception today that the Treaty is constantly being politicised and the media only cover protests. Ngapuhi, whose ancestors comprised the main Treaty signatories, have not supported protesters and attempted to keep the Day peaceful and commemorative. Being a day that is observed by everyone in the country, many people have an opinion. Some suggest that, being divisive, Waitangi Day should be rejected in favour of ANZAC Day on 25 April. Some even suggest the revival of Dominion Day. Others say that the day is not relevant to those in the community who are neither Maori, nor of British descent. Peter Dunn, leader of United Future party, has suggested a return to New Zealand Day. One thing that is certain is that Waitangi Day will always have a political and debatable undertone.

In 1976 the EEC import quotas for butter were set until the year 1980. This was celebrated by dairy farmers, of which almost all had expected such movement when voting National in 1975. It was a case of New Zealand fighting back against Britain's entry into the Euro zone, but was ultimately a failure.

Subscriber toll dialling was introduced in that year, and meant that people in New Zealand could easily (but not cheaply) call anywhere overseas directly, without the need to first connect with an operator. The quality of the line was often very second-rate, with static, long delays and poor audio quality, but this had changed by the 1990s.

From an idea to follow the rest of the world, save America, in the early seventies, to its actual implementation in 1976, metric conversion was a challenging, but ultimately rewarding, accomplishment. A simpler and more common-sense system that used tens as its base, it was not accepted by everyone in the community, especially, but not exclusively, the older members of New Zealand's community. Metrification in New Zealand was actually commenced in 1969, but not completed until 14 December 1976. The government body that oversaw the change was the Metric Advisory Board (MAB). The initial adjustment was the introduction of the New Zealand metric symbol, introduced in March 1971. By late 1972 temperature, road signs and measures of important commodities such as wool and milk had been metrified. Unlike Great Britain, which had major opposition from many groups, New Zealand's experience was relatively docile and accepting. Today there are few who still use imperial units, even among the elderly. This latter group would be mostly in the late seventies upwards. One of the few industries that still utilises imperial measurements (and possibly the only one) is the aviation industry, but this is by international convention. Even in that industry a number of aspects, such as fuel quantity, aircraft weight, runway length, and others are expressed in metric terms.

Controversial in some circles in 1976, and still today, was the deportation of a large group of Polynesian over stayers. New Zealand's immigration policy tends to be middle-of-the-road, as compared to tough administrations such as the USA, and more lenient ones such as Britain, Australia and Canada. By the early seventies South Pacific Island immigration was beginning to rival those from more traditional sources such as Britain, Ireland and Europe. This was comprised of mostly Samoan and Fijian nationalities, but also from small island nations that were originally external territories (overseas dependencies) of New Zealand, such as the Cook Islands, Tokelau and Nuku'alofa. Auckland was the city of choice for most, being the largest and most cosmopolitan centre, the one with the best climate, first port-au-call and the place where there was a family, friend, employer and cultural network already established. However a large proportion also settled in Wellington, and significantly smaller movements to Christchurch, Dunedin, Hamilton, Gisborne and other regional centres.

Telethon '76! The first telethon in New Zealand was an historic, memorable all-night event telecast live from TVNZ's Avalon studios, to raise money for disabled people nationwide. Telethon NZ was an event that only those people who lived through them could really know how exciting and uplifting the whole experience was, and how it brought together all Kiwis from Bluff to Cape Reinga, from all walks of life, all ages and all ethnicities. Telethon New Zealand was more than just raising money, albeit that was its prime objective; it was a night of national camaraderie, Kiwi spirit, a joining of hands (literally - dancing in the studio!), the only night of the year that children can stay up all night without reprimand, a night that individuals, small business and corporations alike got together to make a difference to the disadvantaged.

Twenty-one minutes of the highlights of Telethon '76 has been uploaded to YouTube by TVNZ OnDemand. URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv4VRljK-nQ

1976 Telethon was, together with the 1981 Telethon, arguably the equally-most historically- memorable one. Hosted by Dougal Stevenson, it featured a number of live performances, a bank of telephone-operators, and the theme song, which became an iconic piece of music for New Zealand history: "Thank you very much". The full lyrics were:

CHORUS: "Thank you very much for your kind donations,

Thank you very much,

Thank you very very very much,

Thank you very much for your kind donations,

Thank you very very very much."

VERSE: "You don't know how nice it all seems,

It's been much better than we dreamed."

[CHORUS], etc.

Amongst the performances were the Conga Line, Red Indian dance and song, Bunny-Hop, Hawaiian luau dance, drag/beauty queen dance, and the ticker along the bottom of people's television screens would display donation amounts and the donors. Constantly the grand total was displayed on a digital board bordered with light bulbs. All that was needed was a telephone and a pledge; no money was actually transacted on the night (unlike today with phone or Internet payments via credit cards or BPAY). For people living in the greater Wellington region, it was doubly exciting as they could go to the studios, although access to the live studio was restricted. Different to today's telethons in New Zealand or overseas, which do not attract a national audience and bring everyone together, the 1970s telethons in New Zealand were nation-building and culture in-the-making. Additionally important was the fact that neither of the channels were twenty-four-hour broadcasting until the early nineties, and this made it even more imperative to be viewed and to participate in. Often donors would challenge presenters to perform for their donation, such as: 'Helen Steward Ltd's staff and management giving $150 if Rees Jones and Craig Little will sing two verses some time or other of "Rock around the Clock"'; the police answering donations on-air, and other public-friendly stunts to raise funds. Telethon '76 was the second such event, started the previous year, and repeated every year until 1979, thereafter it was held every two years until 1985, followed by 1988, 1990, 1991, and by the Canadian Canwest owners of TV3 in 1993 and 2009. The 1970s telethons, 1990 and 1991 ones were hosted by TV2; others by TV1 prior to 1993. The 1975 event raised almost $600,000 for St John Ambulance, and it increased each time until 1985, where more than $6 million was raised. The final national telethon by TV3, in 1993, raised $3.5 million for the Starship Children's Hospital. The most recent event, in 2009, hosted by TV3, raised just under $2 million, and was called "The Big Night In", supporting KidsCan- children with cancer.

Telethon '76 will forever be remembered as one of those iconic events where all age groups, ethnicities and backgrounds contributed to the sense of Kiwiness, nation-building, generosity and community, that from the late eighties onwards gradually diminished, although has not totally disappeared. It was a snapshot of the country in the 1970s, as much for its hair, clothes and music fashion as its sense of national spirit and camaraderie.

# Chapter 2: 1977-82

The seventeen-month occupation of Bastion Point, in Auckland, from 1977-78 was due to an effort by the Ngati Whatua tribe to regain ownership of the site. It may be asserted that the protest grew out of the 1975 Maori Land March and was closely aligned with Whina Cooper's Te Roopu o te Matakite (later called Te Matakite o Aotearoa); it also had ties with the campaign for the return of Raglan golf course to indigenous ownership. Bastion Point culminated in the arrest of approximately two-hundred protesters in May 1978 after the most massive police operation in New Zealand to date. The following year the Labour MP for Northern Maori and former Minister for Maori Affairs, Matiu Rata, resigned his seat and recontested as a member of Mana Motuhake. He did not regain the seat and Motuhake, although popular at first, was whittled down by Labour adopting many of their policies in the early 1980s.

Bastion Point was an event historically the equal of the Land March and was a coastal area of land in Orakei, north of Auckland metropolitan area, on the Waitemata Harbour. It was purchased by the government for public works from the mid-nineteenth-century until the 1950s. Used as a defence point from the mid-1880s, it was decided that it was not required in 1941, and instead of returning to Maori, it was gifted to Auckland City Council as a reserve. To add insult to injury, thirty-five years hence, in 1976, the Crown under the Muldoon Government planned to develop the site for a corporate high-income housing development. This was the melting point, at which Joe Hawke, members of his hapu, and other political activists made the decision to form the Orakei Maori Action Committee. They took immediate action to halt the subdivision. The occupation from 1977-78 commenced to prevent the Muldoon administration from confiscating the land. This included a marae, housing and planting of crops. One of the buildings caught fire and killed a young girl. For 507 days Bastion Point was mostly peacefully occupied, ending on 25 May 1978, when an unprecedented combined force of eight-hundred NZ Police and the NZ Army gained control of the site. The temporary buildings, marae and vegetable gardens were necessarily destroyed and 222 protestors were arrested.

The 1980s witnessed a more pacifist and conciliatory approach by government, and an apology was made to Ngati Whatua, and the land was returned, plus compensation. This was under the guise of the Treaty of Waitangi. An official documentary was created during the protest, made by Merata Mita, Leon Narbey and Gerd Pohlmannn, entitled "Bastion Point Day 507". The event will forever be known as one of the country's pivotal events in its modern history.

The Muldoon-devised superannuation scheme gave eighty per cent of the average wage to married people over sixty. It was a hefty drain on the country which many claimed it could ill-afford. Starting with an announcement on 15 December 1975 that the previous Labour scheme was socialist, it would be replaced with the new taxpayer-funded system. The Labour scheme was compulsory for all employees between seventeen and retirement-age, funds could only be withdrawn if the contributor left the country, each contributor had their own individual account which were portable, after a brief phase-in contributions were eight per cent of gross income, comprising four per cent by employees and four per cent by employers, it was not taxable, and contributors could receive a lump sum payment for one-quarter of the value of their individual fund upon retirement with the rest distributed as income on a regular basis. This scheme was a major issue in the 1975 election. The new National scheme has ultimately failed, as:

  * Under the Labour scheme it is believed that the total funds would now be in excess of $240 billion, whereas in 2007 it was costing an estimated $7.2 billion, and rising

  * New Zealand would have led the world in savings with 146 per cent of GDP (compared to the best performer in the world currently, Australia, at 82 per cent of GDP)

  * Kiwisaver (the current scheme) will not have a positive impact on the country for a long time to come

(See Gaynor, 2007).

Gaynor also surmises that if Muldoon had chosen to retain Rowling's system of April 1975,:

"New Zealand would have led the world in terms of savings. Based on the $240 billion projection each worker would have $111,200 of superannuation assets compared with $6300 at present and A$74,400 ($86,821) in Australia." (See Gaynor, 2007).

The Gleneagles Agreement of 1977 was a forerunner to the massive social upheavals (demonstrations) of the 1981 Springboks Tour to New Zealand. After New Zealand's taking part in the South African All-Blacks Tour of 1976, which was criticised by some overseas nations, including Black African ones which boycotted the 1976 Montreal Olympics, Muldoon made the argument that a free and democratic country such as New Zealand, could not, and would not, restrict the overseas movements of its citizens. He also repeated his staunch belief that politics and sport should not mix.

Commonwealth Heads-of-State meeting in 1977 discussed the 'South African Question', and unanimously adopted what became known as the Gleneagles Agreement'. This proposal set down a commitment to discourage contact and competion between their sportsman and sporting groups, teams or individuals from South Africa, due to their government's continuing policy of apartheid. The riots in Soweto, a suburb/township of Johannesburg, in 1976, was on the minds of attendees. (The name 'Soweto' is an acronymn for 'Southwest Township'). Gleneagles, however, was not binding on individual national or provincial/state governments, and its interpretation left quite a bit to be desired. Condoned by the New Zealand government, the New Zealand Rugby Football Union (NZRFU), in 1980, accepted that it was fine to invite the Springboks to tour in 1981, and despite such people as the deputy PM, Brian Talboys, protesting, the Prime Minister was all for it, and it happened. Despite Muldoon seeing that the 1981 Tour may incur much condemnation, including from overseas and large demonstrations at home, he did not back down from his personal beliefs in freedom of travel and the mantra of politics and sport not to be unified (more about Springbok Tour later).

The Territorial Sea and Exclusive Economic Zone Act of 1977 (amended in 1996 to "Territorial Sea, Contiguous Zone and Exclusive Economic Zone Act") established the Exclusive Economic Zone of two-hundred miles (320km) around New Zealand's coastline, which was subsequently altered in 1982 by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). UNCLOS gave New Zealand the fourth-largest economic zone in the world of over four-million square kilometres, which is approximately fifteen times the size of the land area of the country. The 1977 Act was the first time it was enacted as law what New Zealand's outer fishing boundaries were, in the new concept of an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The EEZ formed Part Two of the Act, the largest section, and was composed of twenty chapters, all of which save the first two and the final two, have since been repealed. The first two, chapters nine and ten, entitled "The exclusive economic zone" and "Seas in zone to be New Zealand fisheries waters", and the last two, chapters twenty-seven and twenty-eight, entitled "General regulations in zone" and "General provisions as to offence in zone" are the sections that have remained the same since the Act was passed. These chapters are a legalistic definition, and do not contain any real details or data regarding the Zone, but four-million kilometres is a vast area. It extends from the ocean surface, right to below the ocean floor, and covers almost to Norfolk Island in the northwest, Kermadec Islands in the northeast, east past Chatham Islands, south past the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands, and west of most of the coastline for two-hundred miles.

In late August 2011 the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environment Effects) Bill (the "EEZ Bill") was introduced into Parliament. This bill recognises the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) as being the proposed consenting authority for activities occurring in NZ's EEZ. The Ministry for the Environment is developing the policy, legislation and regulations associated with this bill. These regulations will be required to be developed before this latest bill comes into force.

The 1977 Roger Donaldson film Sleeping Dogs was an iconic movie for late 1970s New Zealand. It starred a youthful Sam Neill, and featured as its central theme the dark topic of state/police repression. Additional cast to Neill were Sam Mune, Nevan Rowe and Bernard Kearns, who all had leading roles. This was Donaldson's directorial debut and was also a breakthrough for Kiwi film-makers, as it was the first New Zealand motion picture to open in the US. Genre was action/thriller/drama. Running for 107 minutes (US version), and costing an estimated $450,000 ($4-5 million) in today's dollars), the theme is that Neill is a married man who lives in a fictitious New Zealand that is nearing economic collapse, and his wife has an affair. Emotionally unable to deal with his marital problems he shifts out to live alone. In an environment approximating early 1980s El Salvador, the political and economic chaos creates repressive extreme-right government forces determined to murder opponents to the government's policies. The conservative and right-wing electorate in the film have turned their back on the government. Neill, who plays a character named 'Smith' joins a group of freedom-fighters eager to preserve democracy and joins up with another freedom-fighter who is apolitical named 'Willoughby' (played by Warren Oates). The central theme of the film is not completely fantasy as the Muldoon government of the time was battling extremely difficult economic times, and its detractors have likened the government and the prime minister to a right-wing dictatorship, although the reality was somewhat removed from this. Sleeping Dogs has been rated as 6.7 out of ten by 362 registered users on IMDB.com (Internet Movie Database) as of December 2011. (See IMDB, 2011).The movie review website, Rotten Tomatoes contains five reviews of Sleeping Dogs, including three by top critics. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times published a critical analysis of the film in 1977, which is available on the newspaper's website, and is linked to in Rotten Tomatoes:

"Roger Donaldson's "Sleeping Dogs," from New Zealand, is a very well made and acted movie about a time in the near future when New Zealand goes into a state of martial law, and underground groups form to fight against the dictatorship. Donaldson uses precise details of Hitler's takeover of Germany and plugs them into the New Zealand setting, and then he gives us a hero who wants to sit the fight out and is publicized by the government into being a symbol of opposition. American troops are sent in to help the New Zealanders put down the "rebellion," and the rebels conduct a running guerrilla battle against them. The movie resembles "Z" and "The Battle of Algiers" in the way it combines ideology with fiercely-paced action. The biggest box-office hit of its time in New Zealand, it launched Donaldson's career. In 1982 he directed "Smash Palace," with its strong performance by Bruno Lawrence in the story of a man who grows desperate when he loses custody of his daughter. Then he moved on to Hollywood, becoming a successful director of thrillers and adventure movies." (See Rotten Tomatoes, 2011).

The Beehive is the executive building of government in Wellington, shaped like a bees' hive, and was commenced in 1969 and completed in 1977. In the latter year it was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II, and in 1979 government offices were moved into it from the Parliament House (Old Parliament; legislative wing). Designed by British architect, Basil Spence, after a visit to Wellington in 1964, his concept was for a central core with rooms and offices radiating outwards. This was adopted and when work commenced it was developed by the Government Architect for the Ministry of Works. The building, which is now a trademark part of the landscape of the capital, on postcards and photographs, etc., is seventy-two metres tall and is ten stories high, plus a further four below ground. The top floor is reserved for cabinet meetings, below that for the prime minister and Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and other floors dedicated to ministers' offices, and the first three levels for Bellamy's banquet hall and various function rooms. There was a proposal during the late-nineties Clark government to shift the Beehive behind Parliament House, and to finish the latter according to the original 1911 plans, but this was scuttled due to a lack of public support and subsequent withdrawal of Labour Party support. (See Wikipedia, 2011). The Beehive is so iconic that when the New Zealand government went onto the World Wide Web in the late 1990s, it adopted the URL www.beehive.govt.nz. This became the Web address for government ministries (not Parliament).

In 1978 an Act was passed, to establish the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC), and to define its functions, powers, and duties. The Commission was set up to encourage and assist the creation of home-grown films, as well as its promotion, distribution and exhibition, in addition to foster the general development of the New Zealand film industry. One of its charges is to only allow financial assistance if it is satisfied that it contains significant local content. One of the most successful Kiwi films worldwide, Once Were Warriors, from the early nineties, was generously assisted by the Commission, and it overly satisfies the criterion of being almost one-hundred per cent local content. It handles both feature films and short films, such as are shown at local and international film festivals. Appointed by the Minister of Culture and Heritage, it is made up of a chairperson and seven other board members. Formally meeting bi-monthly, it is run by a staff of about twenty from its Wellington Office. The New Zealand Film Commission handles applications for assistance, contracts for NZFC investments and contracts for NZFC sales. The financing is made by way of loans or equity financing, and is preponderantly a ratio of 6:4 feature film financing over feature film development financing. Advanced project development or production financing commences at $110,000. (See Wikipedia, 2011).

On 30 July 1979 the Muldoon government introduced Carless Days, a rather short-lived campaign to reduce fuel consumption after the oil shocks of the early and late 1970s. It involved households keeping the car at home for one day a week, only vehicles for private use, not those over 2 tonne tare or motorcycles, and it was another policy of the Think Big scheme. It also involved a reduction of some open-road zones from 100 km/hr to 80 km/hr and a restriction of hours for service stations to sell petrol. After one year, by mid-1980, the scheme was revoked as it had obviously failed. There was no reduction in the national oil use; in fact it had risen. People who owned two or more vehicles could get around the scheme, the exemption stickers that were a component had become unworkable and unenforceable, fines were not being paid and some perversely drove more just to stifle the system.

The nation's post-1975 recession was still hitting hard in 1979 in New Zealand: 25,000 were on the dole, and 31,000 were in job-creation schemes, sometimes leading to permanent employment, often not. Commencing after the first oil shock in 1973, and deepening in 1975, by 1979 the country was in what some have labelled a third depression, every bit as comparable to the two in the 1890s and 1929-33. Whilst this may be regarded as an emotive or subjective label, the state of the nation was so bad that this was painfully close to the truth. Where the 1970s recession/depression differed from the past two recessions/depressions was that the national economy didn't bounce back to the pre-recession situation. In fact as a consequence of the 1970s/early 1980s, economists have had to redefine full employment as not meaning zero per cent unemployment, but rather five per cent unemployment. It has been envisaged that New Zealand, as well as many other Western nations such as Australia, UK, US, Canada, Italy and France will never again experience true full-employment.

Brian Easton, academic, economist and historian, postulated in 1979 that there were three Great Depressions (Three New Zealand depressions): first in the 1860s-1880s, second being in the early 1930s, which are the universally-known 'Great' Depression and the third in the 1970s. He stipulated that:

"... The most important conclusion... is that the... Great Depressions have not been an external world depression imposing itself on New Zealand. The evidence of the recession phase preceding the world depression suggests that part of the depression phase is of our own making. Whether we can unmake the depression phase of the Third Great Depression remains to be seen."

Easton claimed at the time that it is popularly but errantly believed that the cause of the late seventies 'Depression' was the massive drop in the country's external terms-of-trade (export prices vis-à-vis import prices), occurring after the first oil shock in October 1973. He then goes on to state that this is in fact not correct, and that it actually had its roots much further back in the mid-1960s. The terms of trade had been declining since the Korean conflict in the 1950s, except for the 1972-73 boom before the first oil crisis. This was manifold especially in the farm sector, originally impacting the underlying rate of return, and then causing a slowdown in the investment programme through lack of re-investable income. This led to a halt in the increase of farm output, which created a new type of land investment specifically for returns on untaxed capital gains.

(See Brian Easton, 1979).

Muldoon's Think Big was in full-flight in 1979, but as stated earlier, was an unmitigated failure. Labour had no concrete suggestions on what to do to fix things, and ultimately the nation recovered, but not until the late-eighties, well into Lange's term and well into Rogernomics. It would prove to be a short-term upturn, as by 1990 things were looking bad again.

Although completed in 1977, in 1979 government offices relocated from the Old Parliament building into the Beehive, and it became the home of the Executive. Top floor was reserved for caucus; floor below for the Prime Minister's office and his Department, below that other cabinet and junior minister, and the first three levels for functions, banquet hall and Bellamy's. Below-ground was car-parking. Gradually the Beehive became an icon of Wellington, featured on postcards and associated with the capital. The first PM to have his office housed in the Beehive was Muldoon, and this was a partial-boost to his government, as it was similar to a 'fresh start'.

The Mana Motuhake Party, meaning an approximation of "Maori self-rule and self-determination' became an aspect of New Zealand politics in 1979 and cemented itself further throughout the 1980s. A forerunner of the Maori Party, which at the time of writing is a significant member of the 2011-14 National-led coalition government, Mana Motuhake was formed by Matiu Rata, a member of the Labour Party. Standing in the by-election of Northern Maori in 1980, he was narrowly defeated by the new Labour candidate, Bruce Gregory. Motuhake fielded candidates in all three elections in the 1980s - 1981, 1984, and 1987, as well as 1990, but did not receive enough votes to win a seat in parliament. It joined forces with New Labour, the Greens and the Democratic Party in 1991 to form the ex-Labour MP Jim Anderton's 'Alliance', and this proved successful in 1993, when Sandra Lee-Vercoe was elected under the Alliance banner. The party continued to have minor success with candidates in Parliament, but lost representation in 2002, and in 2005 most of its support transferred to the new Maori Party, which led to Motuhake's deregistration.

The 1979 Nambassa Festival was a counter-culture, hippie festival held in Waihi and Waikino from 1978-79. 'Nambassa' is the tribal name for peace, love and an environmentally-positive lifestyle. It has been claimed that this, and other Nambassa festivals, were the largest events of its kind in the world (See Nambassa, 2011), and involved music, arts, alternative culture, and drugs (especially marijuana/cannabis and LSD). New Zealand hippies organised the Festival voluntarily and were closely aligned to the international experience, especially of the USA. It was a free-love, anti-establishment, highly-left-wing, anti-war (Vietnam in particular) experience, but of a Kiwi nature. In addition to anti-war, the hippies of Nambassa were also opposed to nuclear energy and nuclear-testing, such as at nearby Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia, meat-consumption, alcohol, fuel-consumption, general Western values, but cunningly did not acknowledge drug use, which was then, and is even more so now, linked to crime, degenerative disease and antisocial behaviours.

A Litany of Lies

On 29 November 1979 TE901 was travelling south towards the Antarctic continent, on a return eleven-hour sightseeing journey from Auckland (departure 0820 NZDT) when it smashed into Mount Erebus on Ross Island, East Antarctica, instantly killing all passengers and crew. Renamed Air New Zealand in 1974, the old callsign "TE" was still being used in international aviation. The aircraft was one of the latest wide-body "jumbo" jets, a DC-10, and was carrying 237 passengers and 20 crew, comprised of 16 flight attendants and four cockpit crew: Jim Collins as captain, Gregory Cassin as first officer (co-pilot), and Gordon Brookes as second officer (flight engineer). Peter Mulgrew was the official 'tour guide', on the checkpilot's seat in the flightdeck. The route was advertised to take the aircraft south of New Zealand, past Stewart Island, past NZ & Australian sub-Antarctic islands in the Southern Ocean, and entering Antarctica via McMurdo Sound.

The DC-10 aircraft (short for "[McDonnell-]Douglas Corporation- [Model] 10") was a widebodied medium- to long-range tri-star aircraft (three engines- one on each wing and one fitted to the tail), designed to be competition to Lockheed's Tristar and Boeing's 747. Like the 747, it was also a jumbo jet (meaning widebodied), and entered service with American Airlines in August 1971. The Lockheed TriStar also saw initial service with American, but the DC-10 was the more successful and lasted longer, despite several disastrous crashes in the early days, such as with Turkish Airlines and American Airlines. However this didn't markedly dampen enthusiasm for the plane, and a trans-continental/long-range variant was soon introduced: the DC-10 series -30, which had a more powerful powerplant, additional fuel tanks and a third undercarriage unit.

Air New Zealand purchased, and first operated, DC-10s on their long-range routes, such as to Honolulu, Los Angeles, and from 1977 the return Antarctic sightseeing sector. In fact it was the company's choice of long-haul aircraft until the purchase of Boeing 747s in the early eighties, when the DC-10 was phased out. (This was not a response to or a lack of confidence in the aircraft type, from the Erebus disaster, but rather a desire to be capable of transporting more passengers). The aircraft was an intercontinental DC10-30 (ZK-NZP), brought into service in December 1974, therefore being just under five years old, and had accumulated 20,763 hours of flight time. It had a number of benefits over other long-range aircraft, such as: it was longer range, had cheaper landing fees (rear centre gear being retractable), lower operating cost than similar four-engine aircraft, and had the ability to carry a greater payload and freight. The Antarctic sightseeing trips from Auckland to the edge of the continent at about 77 degrees south latitude and back (nonstop) were something of a treat for Kiwis, many of whom had an interest in the beautiful frozen continent and for those could afford a quick day trip abroad. The points of interest were in the Ross Dependency, which is part of the vast New Zealand-owned part of Antarctica. It contains Scott Base (NZ) and McMurdo Station (USA). Now let's get to the crux of what happened at what One Network News that night headlined "Disaster in Antarctica":

When the Antarctic flights began, in 1977, the route planned by the airline and followed by pilots was a direct route south down the Southern Ocean, followed by a figure-eight to get down to a low level (around 3,000 feet), before flying into the Lewis Bay northern approach of Ross Island, just past Mt Erebus, and down to the Dailey Islands waypoint, before flying north back home. This was the route followed by all the sightseeing flights until late 1978, and quite often if the weather was good, pilots would safely deviate from the waypoints to let their passengers enjoy all the beauty of the continent. This would involve disengaging Nav mode and pressing Heading mode. When the captain was ready to return north he would reenter Nav mode and the return waypoints would be flown courtesy of the Inertial Navigation System (INS). In late 1978 the flight plan was computerised in line with a full computerisation of the airline's operations. At this time whilst a clerk was keying in the waypoint (reference) coordinates, a small error was made, and this shifted the flightpath about thirty kilometres west of Mt Erebus and Ross Island, so that the flights would now fly over the centre line of McMurdo Sound, west of Ross Island, and east of the mainland. It would be very similar in appearance if there were conditions of whiteout, where Mt Erebus could easily be mistaken for sea ice, Cape Bird (northwestern point of Ross Island/western approach to Lewis Bay) may appear to be Cape Bernacchi (mainland), and Cape Tennyson (eastern side of Lewis Bay) may be mistaken for Cape Royds (western point of Ross Island). Of course there would have to be exact conditions to create this phenomenon, and as we will see this was tragicly happened with TE901.

For close to a year this new route was accepted by pilots of the flights, without hesitation, as the nav track appeared to make good sense; it was safer and easier to fly over the sea than around a very high mountain and over other terrain on Ross Island. Air New Zealand management and flight planners also accepted the route, and everything went along cheerfully until 2:05 am on 29 November 1979. Whilst working in the Queen St Auckland office on the route, a flight planner discovered the error made some fourteen months previously, and amended the key waypoint by overwriting the number '4' instead of '6' into the computer for the latitude of Mt Erebus/central McMurdo Sound. This effectually shifted the waypoint west some 28 kilometres back around Mount Erebus as in the 1977-8 flightplan; the data entry operator thought he/she was doing the right thing, and did not relay this small but crucial change to either the airline management, or more importantly the cockpit crew of the flight later that day. This was a tragic but monumental error that would result in the deaths of a great many people. TE901 had lost what pilots call situational awareness before it had even become airborne. There now existed a small but ultimately crucial discrepancy with what the navigational company planners had as the flightpath and what the flightdeck crew thought was their flightpath.

The flight proceeded smoothly to the north of Lewis Bay, courtesy of Captain Collins and the first and second officers, and passengers were given an excellent commentary by Peter Mulgrew, who had flown on many of the airline's Antarctic flights and had a knowledge of the white continent that was second-to-none. After performing the 'figure eight' to get down through cloud cover to 3,000 feet, the crew flew south down what they believed to be the flat expanse of McMurdo Sound. The phenomenon of Whiteout, where the sea ice of McMurdo and the cover of Mt Erebus merged, had occurred. (This was something that was totally ignored in the first report into the accident, the Chippindale Report, but was subsequently explained and covered extensively in the Royal Commission\- the Mahon Report). In addition to this, conditions had created the afore-mentioned illusion that the plane was flying between Capes Royds and Bernacchi, rather than the true flightpath of between Capes Bird and Tennyson on each side of Lewis Bay. There were later claims that the crew were lost and that Mulgrew was also confused, but this was later ruled out. By the time the pilots realised they were heading straight for the mountain there was insufficient time to power up and climb, although even the steepest climb would not have been sufficient to clear the thousands of feet required. The black boxes- the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and Flight Data Recorder (FDR)- however both showed that it was only seconds before, barely enough time for the three engines to spool up to full power.

The Search for TE901

Last communication with the aircraft was at approximately 12:30pm NZDT, and the last known coordinate was 38 nautical miles north of McMurdo Station. Once all attempts at communication had failed a US LC-130 aircraft and two UH-1N helicopters launched a search at 3:43pm. About half an hour later a further six planes left McMurdo Station, and at this time a RNZAF Air Force Orion P3-B left Auckland to search for wreckage. Concurrently a USAF Starlifter followed the plane's path from McMurdo Station to Christchurch.

For the rest of the evening the US military sent situation reports (SITREPs) to their commanders in New Zealand and to authorities in New Zealand. At 10pm Air New Zealand CEO Morrie Davis officially announced at a press conference that TE901 was lost as it had exhausted its fuel supplies. A tense wait ensued for the family and friends of passengers and crew, until about two hours later, at 11:50pm NZDT when a US Hercules sighted a black smear on the slopes of Mount Erebus. This was likely to be TE901, but due to poor weather conditions, it was not until 1:25am when it was officially identified. Crew report read "Debris at crash site being blown by wind. No apparent survivors". This was the death knell for family and friends of those lost and became Air New Zealand and New Zealand's darkest hour. Morrie Davis was also in shock. A base camp was established by New Zealand police and mountaineers for the recovery operation: there were eight polar tents, sleeping bags and food for twenty people for a few days. The first few days of recovery and investigation were difficult because of foul weather, but eventually it settled enough for such endeavours.

Chippindale Report and Mahon Report (Royal Commission)

The first report of the accident was conducted by Chief Inspector of Air Accidents, Ron Chippindale, and his official findings were that:

... _[T]he accident's probable cause was, "the decision of the Captain to continue the flight at low level toward an area of poor surface and horizon definition when the crew was not certain of their position..." (Paragraph 3.37)_

He further asserted that:

... _[T]he flight engineers had expressed "apprehension" and "dissatisfaction" at the flight's "continued descent towards a cloud-covered area." (Paragraphs 2.25, 3.24). The basis for these claims was the content of the cockpit voice recorder ("CVR") transcript appended to the report._

(See NZALPA, 2009).

Most disturbing is NZALPA's claim in Erebus.co.nz, created on the thirtieth anniversary that the published transcript used in the Chippindale investigation

differed in 55 ways from the official version that had been constructed by a specially trained and supervised team in Washington, and it was the source of considerable controversy.

The Chippindale Report was commenced in early 1980 and released, contrary to advice, in June 1980, before the Royal Commission had gotten fully underway. The subsequent Royal Commission was begun in March 1980 and released its findings in early 1981. The Chippindale Report laid the entire blame on the aircrew, whilst the Mahon Report blamed the airline. Therefore Justice Mahon disagreed completely in substance with Mr Chippindale's findings. In relation to the whiteout phenomenon Chippindale made the statement that the condition made the snow slope appear to the crew as "an area of limited visibility", whilst Mahon's coverage displays a much greater understanding of the illusion. Chippindale made much out of the company-ordered minimum altitude for the flights as being 16,000 feet or 6,000 south of McMurdo if specified visual meteorological conditions (VMC) existed, whilst Justice Mahon disputes the absolute nature of these company minimums. Mahon also pointed out that many previous flights had been flown below these minimums by crew and also that, after all, it was a sightseeing flight and therefore should be flown as close to the surface as is safely possible (my emphasis). These low-levels were advertised by the airline and publicity films were made by the National Film Unit.

Chippindale acknowledged the changes made to the flightpath coordinates and the failure of Air New Zealand to notify the crew in their pre-flight briefing or earlier, but then continues on to make the unbelievable statement that:

_"no evidence was found to suggest that they_ [the crew] _had been mislead_ [sic] _by this error"_.

Chippindale also brought up several other issues that he eventually found to be irrelevant, such as lack of polar survival equipment on board and a delay in changing local altimeter (QNH) settings; the root cause was the:

_"captain's decision to make a VMC descent below the specified minimum safety height while north of McMurdo."_ (Paragraph 2.1)

Even though the Royal Commission had been announced, the early release of the Chippindale findings in June 1980 led to media publishing headlines such as "Crash Report Points to Error by DC-10 Captain" and "Flight Thousands of Feet Too Low". Justice Mahon's summation of his report was that:

" _The palpably false sections of evidence which I heard could not have been the result of mistake, or faulty recollection. They originated, I am compelled to say, in a pre-determined plan of deception. They were very clearly part of an attempt to conceal a series of disastrous administrative blunders and so...I am forced reluctantly to say that I had to listen to an orchestrated litany of lies_ _."_

The end-result of Mahon's investigation was that by looking into those 'standing conditions' and naming them as a latent failure that contributed to the disaster, helped move the focus of official accident investigation in New Zealand from apportioning blame to

_"identify[ing] those systemic failures which either foster and enable human error, or which fail to contain and negate its consequences."_

This was an entirely new and ground-breaking allocation of culpability to organisational failure, and was somewhat revolutionary in 1981.

(See NZALPA, 2009).

The aircrew were posthumously exonerated and Air New Zealand and Morrie Davis were found culpable, although no charges were ever laid. Although there were many thousands of hours and millions of taxpayer dollars put into finding the true cause of the tragedy, the frightening outcome is that unless a flight path map is chosen to be displayed on modern aircraft's all-in-one LCD displays by the pilots, such a misunderstanding could conceivably still occur today, over thirty years later. Even if a map is visible during flight, if it is not cross-checked with coordinates, that would be insufficient to avoid a repeat. Aircraft today no longer have INS, but rather use GPS, which considerably reduces the possibility of such an event occurring. Many people in New Zealand in 2012 still remember the event, and those too young to remember know that it was a black day in history that will never be, and should never be, erased. It is particularly raw for close relatives of the dead, such as the wife of Captain Collins, who worked with NZALPA and remembrance groups to ensure that the name of her husband and the other three cockpit crew members always remain clear.

_Courtesy of NZALPA_ _, 2009._

In January 1980, and again in June of that year, the Otago-Southland regions experienced their worst floods in decades. Neither rural properties, farms, nor the cities of Dunedin and Invercargill alike were spared the wrath of Mother Nature, and the insurance bill ran into the millions. It was an unprecedented natural disaster for southern New Zealand. This event (and the 1978 flooding) led to Parliament passing the Otago Southland Flood Relief Committee Empowering Act 1980 in 1981. The Clutha River had overflowed during this disaster and the floods of 1978, and led to the relocation of a small town, Kelso, in Otago, ten kilometres north of Tapanui on the Kelso River, near to the junction of the greater Pomahaka River. The Clutha River, which was a part of Dunedin as well as numerous small towns, was a major cause for concern, but thankfully there were no drownings or fatalities. In all, fifteen-hundred people were directly affected by the floods, which were to repeat themselves four years hence.

The 1980 East Coast Bays by-election was held as a consequence of the resignation of National MP, Frank Gill, who left parliament to take up the New Zealand ambassadorship to the United States. The main candidates were National: Don Brash, Labour: Wyn Hoadley, Social Credit: Gary Knapp, and Values: J.S. Moore. The result was a close one with 38.2 per cent going to National and the unusual outcome of a minor party – Social Credit – winning with 43.31 per cent of the vote. Labour received 17.71 and Values 0.77 per cent. Social Credit held the seat for seven years, until National re-claimed it during the 1987 general election. Don Brash much later (in the twenty-first century), briefly became leader of the National Opposition during the Clark Labour Government. Over a quarter-century before MMP and during a period when there were ever only two or three minor parties vying for elections, it was abnormal for a small party to win an election, as under simple-majority voting it was difficult to beat either of the two master parties. This made Knapp's win very sweet for his party, and for the people of the electorate, and it was Social Credit's only other seat ever won, in addition to Rangitikei in the 1981 general election. Not long after the 1987 election Social Credit began its demise, and was relegated to the history books.

1980 saw the legalisation of Saturday trading. Between 1945 and 1980 weekend trading was banned, but retailers, the general public and government recognised that it was detrimental to the New Zealand economy, and people's rights, not to be able to go to the supermarket or shopping centre. Of course it was protested against by the churches. Ten years later Sunday trading was permitted (even more heavily opposed by church groups), and from 1990 onwards there has been a gradual movement by most retailers, both large and small to trade seven days. There are a small number of public holidays where trading is still banned: Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Christmas Day and prior to 1 pm on ANZAC Day. Even Boxing Day and New Year's Day are now permitted.

The findings of the Royal Commission of the Mount Erebus Crash of 1979, popularly known as the "Mahon Report", were released in April 1981. The 'single effective' cause of the crash was stated as the alteration of the flight coordinates in the aircraft's Inertial Navigation System (INS). Done without the knowledge of cockpit and cabin crew, it resulted in the deaths of all twenty crew and 237 passengers. Justice Mahon wrote his now-famous claim, that the airline had "indulged in a litany of lies" in order to cover their guilt. Air New Zealand subsequently appealed his findings. See the section on the Crash, above.

The new punk era in fashion, music and culture of the 1980s did not take grip in Europe and North America until 1981, and this was when it also exploded into the New Zealand scene. With as much force as the previous hippie/flower-power/"1970s Cool" movement roughly a decade earlier, punk rock/clothes/hair/culture moved New Zealand abruptly into the new decade. The most home-grown manifestation of this was undoubtedly the Pop music group Split Enz (later Crowded House - 1985), formed around 1975-6. Tim Finn, as the leader of the youthful group, brought the 1980s to New Zealand as well as Australia, where they moved to in the early eighties. Neil Finn, the younger brother of Tim, joined Crowded House in 1990 on vocals, guitar and keyboard. Split Enz in 1981, had already achieved a good measure of success in Australia and England, and was well-received in New Zealand, where they resided for now. Other members of the group were Mark Hart and Matt Sherrod. Fashion styles in New Zealand in 1981 mirrored most closely Britain and Australia, but also contained elements of American 1980s breakthroughs. Some styles synonymous with this era were: New Romantic (New Wave), Valley Girl, Power Dressing, Leotards and Dancewear, the Miami Vice look (named after the television show), the Thriller look (named after Michael Jackson's Thriller single and album), Madonna, Tracksuits, Doc Martens, Hair Metal, Metalhead style and of course, Punk style. The new hairstyles of the 1980s, which became the norm by 1981/2, also reflected pop and rock groups, television shows and films of this period.

Other notable fashion trends emerging in New Zealand in 1981 were fashion inspired by heavy metal bands, which included neon clothing, ripped jeans and teased hair. In fact some of these influences were actually retro-1950s styles. The perm, the Mullet (now with hair gel), the Flattop, the Hi-top fade, the Jheri curl and Big Hair were the "in" hairstyles. 1981's most popular clothing was jean jackets, leather pants, aviator jackets, jumpsuits, shoulder pads, leg-warmers (especially in the film Flashdance, off-shoulder shirts, skin-tight acid-washed jeans, and members-only jackets. Accessories were Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses (Top Gun movie), headbands, and slap bracelets. Video gaming, which had come out in the late seventies took hold by the early eighties: Space Invaders ('Spacies'), played in video game parlours, takeaway shops, especially fish and chip shops, Nintendo hand-held devices, Commodore personal computers (PCs), and the most difficult traditional (physical) game of them all: Rubik's Cube. Telethon '81 epitomised the new cultural and societal trends of the new decade, as seen in the presenters, acts and studio audience.

In March 1981 the Kiwis Care March, an anti-union gathering, attracted between fifty- and one-hundred-thousand demonstrators. Conservative sources put it closer to the fifty-thousand figure; it may have had significantly more, but probably not as many as hundred-thousand. The March was organised by Tania Harris, a twenty-two year-old sales assistant, and was possibly the first street march not on the political left. During the march ticker-tape flew from shop windows, the national anthem (God Save the Queen) was blasted from a stereo shop and people openly wept. The protest was organised by Harris because of a deeply-felt public anger over union strikes that had halted international flights, sailings of the Cook Strait ferries and beer deliveries. Ten years before the public and the government placed a check on the power of the unions; this march reflected many Kiwis beliefs that the unions wielded excessive power and was slowly damaging the economy. Conversely, up to four-thousand unionists striked the previous day, arguing that they did not have enough control. During that demonstration, shoppers and businesspeople hissed, booed, abused and waved their fists at union-sympathisers, and labelled them "traitors to New Zealand", also demanding that they "get back to work". The Kiwis Care March elicited emotions from some of the public and the government that was used to National's advantage when they got back into government in 1990. The Bolger National Party Employment Contracts Act of 1991 would more than likely not have been devised (or possibly even envisaged) without the Kiwis Care March of 1981.

The population movement to Australia, which commenced in earnest in the seventies, and was rapidly accelerating by the early eighties (where Muldoon commented that it "increases the IQ of both countries"!), has been dealt with earlier in this work.

On 27-28 June 1981 TVNZ hosted another national Telethon at its Avalon studios. Done much to the same tune of the event five years previous, it was a success as it raised $5 million for the International Year of Disabled Persons. Like Telethon '76 it involved ordinary Kiwis and local celebrities performing unusual and funny deeds in community halls and other studios of TV1 and Channel 2. In total there were six venues, five mobile studios and thirty-two cameras. Some of the guests who flew over from abroad were Kenny Everett (US), Kamahl (Australia), Basil Brush (UK) and Bill Oddie (UK). As with all Telethons in New Zealand the "Thank you very much..." theme song was the key identifier and nostalgic aspect.

In February the Kiwi film "Goodbye Pork Pie" was released in New Zealand cinemas, and became an overnight success. Involving a Mini Minor travelling the entire length of the country, from Cape Reinga to Bluff, it has become an iconic movie from "Enzed" homegrown's early days. Earning $1 million after only ten weeks, it was screened on television a few years later, and was watched by an estimated fifty per cent of the entire population (excluding under-fives)- 1.5 million people.

Also in February, the so-called "Underarm Incident" rocked New Zealand sport in general and cricket in particular, and created an international disgrace. The game, on February 1, was the third final of the 1980/81 Benson and Hedges World Series Cup between Australia and New Zealand, and the former had scored a respectable 4/235. A century by Bruce Edgar allowed New Zealand the opportunity to even the score, and with a single over left in the match, the Kiwis only required fifteen runs for victory. There were two forceful blows by Richard Hadlee and then Ian Smith, followed by two quick wickets, and now New Zealand only needed six runs to tie the match with one ball remaining. The final delivery was to be bowled by Trevor Chappel to Brian McKechnie. This was the moment when the Australian captain, Greg Chappell, ordered his brother Trevor to bowl underarm to the New Zealand tailend batter, McKechnie. Chappell had informed umpire Don Weser of his intention. This was contrary to conventional cricketing rules (but not yet prohibited), and this prevented the New Zealand from making the six runs necessary to tie the match. The ball was rolled down the pitch in a carpet bowls-style; the batsman blocked the ball then tossed his bat away. Edgar was at the non-striker's end and made a two-fingered salute to the bowler, whilst Kiwi skipper Geoff Howarth ran on to voice his objection to the umpires.

The New Zealand public were outraged, and displeasure went all the way to the Beehive when the Prime Minister telephoned the Australian PM Malcolm Fraser to express his disgust. MCG website, in its history pages, recalls that:

"New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon called it, 'the most disgusting incident I can recall in the history of cricket', and 'an act of cowardice'. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser called it, "contrary to the traditions of the game".

Chappell was universally condemned by the general public and most cricketers, New Zealand and Australian. He said a short time later:

"If it's written in the rules of the game it is fair play."

But he later apologised and claimed that the stress of the situation had got to him. It took many years for him to be fully forgiven. (See MCG, 2011).

In 1981, National's major policy plank, Think Big, officially started, but did the government no favours at the polls later that year. (See the full discussion of Think Big above).

The day of Saturday 28 November, 1981 began with an expectation by the media, commentators and the parties that Muldoon's increasingly-unpopular government of six years would fall to Labour's newly-revived Bill Rowling, but by the evening this was proven to be not the case. A cliff-hanger again, there was just over two million voter turnout, and like the previous poll in 1978, and in 1969, National won more seats than the Opposition, but with less of the popular vote. National achieved forty-seven of the ninety-two seats, while Labour narrowly missed out on government with forty-three. Social Credit won only two seats, but held twenty per cent of the vote. Similarly, Labour had more votes that they won seats for. Here again was ample reason to change the voting and electoral system, which finally occurred in 1993. National's share of the vote was markedly smaller than 1978 and they lost three seats- Hunua, Kapiti, Miramar and Wellington Central; all except one in the greater Wellington region, whilst Labour picked up these seats, but lost Taupo. Social Credit had won East Coast Bays in a by-election the previous year, and at this election, Rangitikei. It was a very disappointing result for that party because of the fact they had been voted for by one in five people. Although a positive result for Labour, this election was to be the death-knell for Rowling, as rarely does the public give a party leader more than three chances at the polls. It however created a powerful Opposition that would dog Muldoon over the next three years more effectively than the previous six, and ensured a victory under the extremely popular Lange in 1984.

The Springbok '81 Tour's government position was not an unusual stance for a Tory/Conservative party: Muldoon and National did not condone apartheid, but did not actively denounce it either. Moreover, when it came to national prestige, the major sports event was ultimately more important than the politically-correct views of the "leftist groups and nations". This is not to state that the fourth National Government and all major national political parties on the conservative side are racist, as some on the left in New Zealand are prone to claim. Muldoon, like his successor, David Lange, were political pragmatists, and if the country were vehemently opposed to certain events, sporting, cultural or other, then they were dealt with in the appropriate fashion. Neither Muldoon nor the National Government as a whole were ever truly accused of supporting apartheid, and it is absurb to think that this was the case. It has been claimed by historian, Jock Phillips, that PM Muldoon's attitude towards the 1981 Tour was inbedded in his psyche as a product of post World War One New Zealanders:

"They had grown up in depression and war. They believed strongly in the British Empire and the role of New Zealand men in armed conflict, and rugby was central to this culture. Its emphasis on physical strength and teamwork made it the perfect training for war. Muldoon was himself a war veteran, as were seven members of his first Cabinet. The so-called Rob's Mob – older, male, blue-collar, often provincial, New Zealanders – supported this outlook." (See Gleneagles Agreement, 2011).

The Tour saw more protest marches and general disorder than any previous time with the exception of the anti-Vietnam demonstrations of the late sixties/early seventies. In fact some say that it was an even bigger civil disturbance than Vietnam; more attuned to the scale of the 1951 waterfront dispute. Occurring over a fifty-six day period from July to September 1981, over 150,000 people took part in more than two-hundred demonstrations in twenty-eight cities and towns, and fifteen-hundred were charged with offences. It may have been inconceivable that such unrest was caused by the playing of a sports code; rugby has always been not only a major feature of New Zealand life, but it is embedded in the country's national character and psyche. It is even more a part of New Zealand's identity than in Australia, UK, South Africa and France. The events of 1981 undoubtedly damaged the sport's reputation, and took quite a number of years before players and supporters arrested and reversed the fallout of the code in New Zealand. Some social commentators and historians have given credence to the opinion that the Springbok Tour was the moment when New Zealand lost its innocence and it became a watershed. This line of thought is open to debate, as it may be claimed that Vietnam demonstrations marked this watershed, or possibly the collective sadness and disbelief of the Erebus tragedy.

In 1982 the first Kohanga Reo came into being. Te Kohanga Reo was started by the Department of Maori Affairs in 1981 as a response to concern by Maori that the language had a short life remaining. Opened near Wellington, Pukeatua was followed by one-hundred more in that year, and it flourished until 1989 in an atmosphere of excitement and celebration. The growth continued until 1994 where there were by now eight-hundred Kohanga Reo, catering for 14,000 mokopuna. It was a burgeoning movement that had become almost self-reliant, but in 1990 when control was transferred from the Department of Maori Affairs to the Ministry of Education, it increased regulatory controls thereby affecting operation at the grassroots level. Despite this and the slowdown in the movement from the mid-1990s, Te Kohanga Reo continues to have remarkable success in keeping the Maori language alive in the indigenous community. The official website of Kohanga states that in the 2010s:

"The language still has a fragile hold in Māori society as a whole, but every year now there are several thousand young children entering the education system already fluent in the language and tikanga (customs) of their ancestors.

This remarkable turnaround was not an accident but the result of a deliberate decision in Māoridom to keep the language alive. These mokopuna (grandchildren), and there are now something like 60,000, are the young "graduates" of the Kōhanga Reo movement.

Te Kōhanga Reo without question has flourished on the realisation that all members of the whānau are extremely significant and valuable in the lives of the mokopuna. They provide a climate that is caring, joyful and secure where the mokopuna learn their language and values. This results in children and whānau who are more confident and proud.

Since its inception the Kōhanga Reo movement has been hailed as one of the most exciting and powerful national initiatives undertaken by Māori people. It has had an impact on New Zealanders, on the government of this country and indeed on the international scene. This success is due to belief in the kaupapa, the unconditional commitment required of the people and the knowledge that 'the child shall lead the way'." (See Kohanga, 2011).

In 1982 New Zealand took part in the FIFA World Cup in Spain. From 13 June to 11 July, the tournament was won by Italy 3-1 over West Germany. This was New Zealand's first time participating in the World Cup, and was without a doubt a very small player on the world scene, but a strong one, as soccer has been a popular and well-played sport in New Zealand for quite some time; as a pastime, in schools, colleges and universities and also at a professional level. Soccer was, and still is, the most-played sport in the world. Twenty-four other teams took part and the final was held on 11 July. There were fifty-two matches, goals scored were 146 (an average of 2.8 per match), and the attendance was 2,109,723 (an average of 40,571). The New Zealand team (NZL) performed well, with twenty-two players; coach was John Adshead, from the UK. Beating Australia, China, Fiji, Indonesia, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in the finals, the All-Whites went on to achieve an admirable result, playing Scotland (2-5 loss) on 15 June, with goal scorers being Sumner and Wooddin, Soviet Union on 19 June (0-3 loss) and Brazil on 23 June (0-5 loss). All the All-White scorers were Sumner: 9; Turner: 9; Wooddin: 9; G. Turner: 8; Herbert: 2, Cole: 2; Elrick: 1, Mackay: 1; and McClure: 1.

During 1982 Prime Minister Rob Muldoon implemented a one-year wage, price and rent freeze, which ultimately lasted two years- until 1984. The price and wage freeze background was against the background of a tightening of government control and a heavy reliance on macroeconomic policies to rein in inflation and wildly fluctuating economic growth. The Think Big platform was the platform which was supposed to hold it all together and achieve economic success. As a last measure the freeze was implemented and appeared to achieve quite positive results in the early stages, but only a brief period elapsed before it was seen to be another abject failure. In tandem with a regressive-style all-government tightening of economic controls, which wasn't considered the way forward by the 1980s, the freeze further frustrated and held back real economic and financial growth for the country. As a modern, increasingly free-market nation, and with a conservative right-leaning government, the whole scene was not only imbalanced but anachronistic. It was the historically left-leaning social democratic Labour Party- the Labour government of 1984 onwards- that was the unexpected mover and shaker in the freer, unrestricted new New Zealand.

On 2 April 1982 war broke out between Britain and Argentina over who was the rightful owner of the little-known group of islands east of southern Argentina, in the South Atlantic - the Falkland Islands. It was home to approximately 1,800 people. Under control by Britain since 1833, they were a cause of friction between the two countries. New Zealand provided operational support to the Royal Navy during the crisis, until 1983. They were the HMNZ Canterbury and HMNZ Waikato frigates. On the breakout of the war New Zealand also offered to relieve a Royal Navy vessel that was on operational duties in the Indian Ocean, so that its ships could be available for operations in the Falklands area. The lead up to the war was based on several events: the Argentine flag was flying over Government House in the capital, Port Stanley; the head of Argentina's military junta, General Leopoldo Galtieri welcomed the recovery of 'Las Malvinas'- the Argentine name for the island group; General Galtieri proposed military action against Britain; and the invasion came on the back of months of rumours and a build-up of warships off the Islands. The conflict involved an attack on Government House, one Argentine death, one injury of a Falkland Islander and no casualties on the UK side. A ceasefire was called on 14 June. New Zealand's involvement in the conflict was restricted to support to Britain, but did not involve fighting. Argentina and Britain resumed diplomatic relations in 1980, and the 1982 conflict has been relegated to history.

# Chapter 3: 1983-88

If the late 1960s to early seventies was the era of political, societal and cultural change for the country, then the mid-1980s from 1984 to 1986 was undoubtedly the powerhouse of unparalleled economic change. From floating of the dollar, to deregulation, privatisation, "SOEs", GST, it was all the brainchild of David Lange, new Labour Prime Minister from July 1984, and his sidekick, Minister for Finance, Roger Douglas. This earth-changing period in New Zealand would forever on be referred to as the "Rogernomics" era. Not only did the fabric of New Zealand's economy change, but the nation had now completely grown up to be a fearless and powerful component of the free-market in the global economy. Protectionism became a byword of Muldoonism and earlier, and people's attitudes towards where New Zealand was placed in the ever-shrinking world (through transport and communication advances), would theoretically become unbounded. New Zealanders had a stronger and much more forceful psyche after the mid-eighties, but it did not come without its challenges both at the time and for evermore, nor without a great amount of community divide on the new direction. Nevertheless, like it or not, Labour had been elected with a sizeable majority, and sink or swim, Lange and Douglas would utilise this mandate for major change.

In 1983 the Closer Economic Relationship came into being. Signed by NZ PM Muldoon and Australian PM Malcolm Fraser the previous year, this marked the start of a new era in trans-Tasman relations, one that would provide New Zealand with a more effective trading partner in the shape of Australia, and one that would hopefully be even better than it had already been for over one-hundred years. Originally an Australian initiative, prior to 1982, it became warmly embraced by New Zealand, leading to its signing. CER has continued to the present day, being encouraged by all later Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers.

US nuclear-powered navy frigate "Texas" entered New Zealand waters in 1983. It was met by vociferous protests because of widespread opposition to nuclear power; a bipartisan and community opinion and state-of-affairs that were becoming increasingly significant in the country at the time. It would reach its zenith the following year with the total banning of nuclear vessels by the new Lange Government and become synonymous with the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior the following year. But at this period an awakening was occurring for a fully nuclear-free New Zealand and nuclear-free Pacific. The latter was a response to the long-running tests at Mururoa Atoll near Tahiti. In terms of nuclear power in general the New Zealand people's views mirrored most of the globe's feelings in the 1980s. The two superpowers, Russia and USA had come closer to World War III – a nuclear holocaust caused by the escalating seriousness of the late-stages Cold War\- than people even realised. For children and teenagers especially, but adults also, the mid-eighties in New Zealand was a frightening time in this respect. Added to these megalithic powers, there was also the problem of French nuclear-testing in the South Pacific, of which some were claiming that the radiation was reaching closer island-nations such as New Caledonia and Fiji, and a closer proximity to New Zealand. Whether the latter was correct or not, there was a general mood of discontent with nuclear power, from the majority of the electorate, and also from both National and Labour. The key difference between Labour and National, however, was that prior to 1984 the government was not willing to alter its nuclear policies or risk alienating America. Not only had Labour made it clear that nuclear-powered vessels would not be welcome in New Zealand ports under a Labour government, which were primarily those from the US, but the new leader, Lange, had even made it part of the Labour Manifesto if elected in 1984.

In 1983 the New Zealand Party was established by millionaire property tycoon, Bob Jones (later Sir Bob). Its fundamental policy was to promote social and economic liberalisation, and therefore was a right-wing, conservative minor party. Its motto was "Freedom and Prosperity" and was occasionally classified as a libertarian movement, although this term has not been a feature of New Zealand history. Jones's party was sometimes credited with assisting the defeat of the Muldoon government in 1984 by splitting the vote, although the evidence is such that the result would have been probably even without its existence. Muldoon's Think Big programme, which was grounded in the prime minister's belief that only with massive government involvement could New Zealand prosper- strangely contrary to the normal beliefs of a centrist-right party- also required huge overseas borrowing to finance his projects and this is central to what Bob Jones' Party was all about. Jones, who was a self-made millionaire and property tycoon, strongly opposed these policies, writing articles against the government, in particular making the claim that the National Government had totally abandoned its principles of free enterprise and personal liberty. Rather than being an opponent of the National Party, Jones was staunchly against the particular Muldoonist brand of it, and he had previously been a friend of Muldoon. He even compared the government to that of Soviet Russia. The New Zealand Party had far more radical, capitalist policies than either Labour or National, and as well as garnering much community support, also attracted equally as much community opposition. After Jones laid the foundations for the party and chose its name, its primary policies were drafted. Some of his most famous ones related to economic matters such as adoption of laissez-faire principles, a liberalisation of the economy, and also defence concerns, such as a total abolition of the country's armed forces (!), reduction of military expenditure and a cutting of defence ties with the US and Australia.

In 1983 the Official Information Act replaced the Official Secrecy Act. This was an important attitude-change by the Muldoon government from one of maintaining a closed, secure system to one that was more transparent, democratic and reflected the changing times of the 1980s. Passed the previous year, the OIA is believed to be one of the freest FOI regimes in the world. Basically the Muldoon government reversed the old official secrets mantra and made a declaration that all government information is open (unless it needs to be protected). There are few absolute exemptions or exclusions, except in matters of national security, and its underlying premise is that it is "a balancing goal to protect official information consistent with the public interest and personal privacy." (New Zealand Privacy Commissioner, 2005).

By the start of 1984 Auckland's population exceeded that of the entire South Island! Constant and accelerating urbanisation in the twentieth century, particularly in the second half was not only a New Zealand phenomenon, but that of all Western industrialised countries. In 1984 the greater Auckland metropolitan region had a population of around 800,000, which for a small country of 3.5 million, was significant. Two-thirds of the national population lived north of Lake Taupo. In fact Auckland's population was more than double the next largest city, Wellington, which could only boast of 350,000. Auckland has continued to grow, and is now approaching a figure of 1.1 million. In addition to natural increase, as well as movement of peoples from other places in New Zealand, Auckland's meteoric rise was also attributable to a mass drift of South Pacific Islanders/Polynesians (what are now referred to as 'Pasifika'). This exodus from countries such as Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Nukualofa, Tokelau and the Cook Islands had its roots as far back as the 1950s, but became very significant since the 1970s. Auckland now contains more South Pacific Islanders than any other city of Polynesia, and in 1984 was demographically changing faster than at any time previously. However Auckland's rapid growth up to the mid-eighties wasn't solely due to South Pacific immigration, but also it was New Zealand's gateway for immigration, because of its already-established migrant population network, its size, it being almost an 'international city', and its mild climate. As well as South Pacific immigration to Auckland in 1984 by Polynesian peoples, its already large Fijian Indian population (in large numbers also in Wellington, Christchurch and Hamilton) increased as well. Northeast Asian (China, South Korea) and Southeast Asian (Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia) immigration was only starting to take off at this time. It would rapidly accelerate in the 1990s. New immigrant destinations for New Zealand, such as Africa (including South Africa) and the Middle East had its origins in the mid-eighties. Almost all of these new New Zealanders would choose Auckland as their starting-off point for their new lives in this country, however Islander immigration was by far the largest single source of new arrivals in Auckland in 1984.

Although the new wave of cultural change commenced around 1981-3, the year 1984 saw the grasping of the following idiomatic features of the 1980s:

*Break dancing

*"Ghetto blasters"

*Street kids

*Youth unemployment

*Drugs

*Crime

Break dancing was a particular style of popular street dance, which had its origins in the music of Michael Jackson and was also a synthesis of 1980s musical style worldwide, particularly in the USA and other western countries, but was adopted in New Zealand mostly by Maori and Pacific Islander youth. It started around 1983/3, but hit its fame in 1984/5; it was displayed in the 1984 film Footloose, starring Kevin Bacon. Some cite the New Zealand phenomenon as having originating in American (Western) Samoa. Early hip hop releases around the mid-1980s in New Zealand include the collection Ak89 - In Love With These Rhymes, compiled by Simon Laan and released by Auckland radio station bFM in 1989 (on cassette only), and a variety of releases by Deepgrooves,Voodoo Vinyl and Southside Records, owned by Murray Cammick. Amongst these were releases by  Urban Disturbance featuring a young rapper, Zane Lowe, now a UK radio personality, and  MC OJ & Rhythm Slave. After almost a decade of popularity, break dancing went out of fashion in the 1990s, but there was a revival; now part of the hip-hop (rap) movement since the millennium.

"One reason break dancing became popular was that many youth saw it as a way of being recognized or a channel of identity. Maori youth that had little chance of being recognized for accomplishments in school or sport found break dancing as a new way to achieve recognition. Early on, New Zealand even sponsored a national break dancing competition for young Maori and Pacific Islanders. This helped many young breakers to realize their potential by giving them a nation (sic) audience". (See Wikipedia, NZ Hip Hop, 2011).

"Ghetto-blasters" were a major feature of New Zealand's cultural movement around 1984. The Ghetto blaster, also known as the jam box, wog box, radio-cassette was a device introduced in the late 1970s in the Northern Hemisphere and arrived in New Zealand in the early eighties. It became a household appliance in NZ by 1984, and was not only a means of listening to music/audio-recordings from broadcast radio, but also via audio-cassettes. It became intricately-entwined with NZ popular culture by 1984 in the form of young persons, indigenous and Pasifika groups of youth, general youth, street/break-dancing and fundamentally an integral feature of 1980s culture. The term  
"Ghetto-blasters" may have been accurate in the US, Britain and parts of Western Europe, but in 1984 (and still today), New Zealand, even Auckland, has not been afflicted with ghettos, except possibly with the exception of Manakau and South Auckland and Porirua, north of Wellington. Even these areas are not ghettos in the American or European sense of the term.

Street kids, youth unemployment, drugs and alcohol abuse and crime, unfortunately became a feature of New Zealand's landscape by 1984. Not limited to the major centres of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and Hamilton, this social blight became a sad aspect of all New Zealand cities, towns and minor centres. All of the these societal difficulties did not begin in the mid-eighties, and were not limited to New Zealand, but were the result of more than a decade of creeping unemployment, inflation, cost-of-living pressures, social, economic and cultural change, also in large part due to overseas influences. It would have been unusual, to say the least, if New Zealand had not experienced such shifts. The five afore-mentioned problems were intertwined and youth unemployment was often the root cause of the other four. At the time unemployment of persons aged 18-25 was as high as forty per cent in some areas, mostly regional or rural areas and some urban settings such as Manukau in South Auckland and Porirua in Wellington. The problem of youth gangs was taking off at this time and congregations of young people looking for trouble in places like inner-city pedestrian malls and outside fast food restaurants. Glue-sniffing was not such a problem in the major centres, but the latter were fast becoming no-go areas because of public drunkenness by youth and illegal drug use. Not only was this an issue within Maori and Pacific Islander youth, but also pakeha, and violent crime was rapidly becoming a new problem for the authorities, one which had been relatively restricted up until this time.

In 1984 the little-known Maori culture club, the Patea Maori Club, based in Auckland, released an album named "Poi E", with sixteen tracks, the twelfth one being the song behind the album. Within days of its release it hit the number one in the NZ pops, where it remained for four consecutive weeks. It was that year's biggest-selling single, even eclipsing major international record labels. The music video involved traditional poi twirling and tribal costume. It also showed scenes of Auckland's inner-city, youth and street kids. The whole album was sung entirely in Maori and Poi E had a catchy harmony. It was produced and led by Dalvanius Prime, who is known for merging traditional Maori song and more recent Maori-flavoured hip-hop. Perhaps no other song, video or book is more evocative of New Zealand culture in the 1980s, from the author's point-of-view.

Conjointly with the increasingly Polynesian makeup of New Zealand culture, especially youth culture, the street language/slang/idioms started to alter. Samoan words started to be spoken by Maori and Pakeha youth, some derogatory, such as "FOB", meaning "Fresh Off the Boat", but often in a jesting, humorous manner. Other Maori slang words came into being or became more widely used. Another word that will forever be associated with the eighties in New Zealand, and is still used today is "Choice!" meaning "Great/excellent", etc. Other words that were a mixture of Maori/pigeon Maori/English that gained prominent usage around the mid-eighties were:

Cuz- meaning cousin or friend/mate

Bro- meaning brother or friend/mate

Sweet as- meaning great/very good

Chur Bro- meaning sure Bro, recently shortened further to Chur Bo

Green-fingered bro- meaning regular marijuana/cannabis smoker

Halfpai- meaning to do a half-arsed job

OTP- On the Piss- meaning getting intoxicated

Et/ Eta/ Eta Harry- mostly used in Gisborne, meaning getting on with the job

In late June 1984 Prime Minister Muldoon called a snap election for 14 July. It would be a nationwide vote to decide the shape of the 41st Parliament, and whether, given poor polling, the National Party should stay in power. The leader of the Labour Party and Opposition was a relatively young lawyer, highly charismatic, personality-driven, and very confident and above all a great debater with excellent vocabulary skills. His name "Lange" was also a source of interest, as not many Kiwis knew the correct pronunciation of the surname; whether it rhymed with "flange", pronounced "Lang", or something else altogether. David Lange was so charismatic that even people who had voted National all their lives were prepared to commit to the other side of politics. One may argue that he embodied a new "presidential" style of leadership, not in the sense of dictatorial, but more a new-age 1980s broad-based, populist, consensus type of leadership, as would be seen more in the United States than in formerly British nations. As a politician he also immersed himself with the people by regularly leaving Parliament House or the Beehive to walk, shop or get lunch down in Lambton Quay.

The election campaign, designed to be a short one by the Prime Minister, got off to a poor start. On the night of the announcement Muldoon, in a reasonably intoxicated state, announced to TVNZ reporters and thousands of New Zealanders that there will be a snap election on July 14. When suggested to him that it doesn't give him a lot of time to prepare, he responded in a drunken slur,

"It doesn't give my opponents much time to run... up...to an election". (See YouTube video).

This gave rise to the unofficial nickname for the '84 General Election of the "Schnapps Election". Observers of New Zealand politics and history have later said that the writing was on the wall after this brief interview where Muldoon wasn't at his best, but this was not necessarily the case. Firstly the Nationals had governed by a very slim majority anyway- forty-seven seats to Labour's forty-three for three years, and had therefore a precarious hold on power. Secondly, the government had been increasingly seen as inflexible/rigid, not listening to the electorate and its concerns. Thirdly price and wage freezes had been an abject failure and was partly responsible for poor economic performance in the early eighties. Fourthly the Think Big programme did not deliver the investment and infrastructure that the government had promised. The original purpose of calling a snap election was that National MP Marilyn Waring had told Muldoon that she wouldn't support the Opposition's side when voting for Labour's anti-nuclear policy, which was a major part of Lange's 1984 election manifesto. It never eventuated, but even if that had been the case, and Waring's statement was not absolute and binding, meaning she may have changed her mind in the eleventh hour, this would not have been a threat to block supply thereby creating a state of no-confidence in the government. Put simply, the decision to go to the polls early was not valid; however, that stated, it is still very likely that National would have lost the poll.

The short election campaign scored each side some points, but it was Labour that came out in front. Their campaign was more positive than negative, which is the opposite of what an Opposition normally undertakes. Labour campaigned to reduce government borrowing which was immediately popular in the electorate. In addition to National's flagging performance and key economic failures over the previous three years, there was a definite feeling in the air for a change in government. Three terms and nine years is a long time, and the Government was appearing fatigued and its policy framework was becoming hackneyed. The more youthful, highly motivated and charismatic Lange easily won the campaign from a personality perspective. The newly-formed New Zealand Party, led by Bob Jones was launched to oppose the government, although it was not formed to give Labour a win. It was hoped that it would win some seats (which it did not), but its main purpose was to act as a spoiler. It may be said that it was rather pointless as Labour won by a landslide anyway.

On Saturday 14 July 1984 the election was held, and it was apparent soon after polls closed at 6pm that there would be a change in government. Labour won fifty-six of the ninety-five seats in the parliament, giving which was a gain of thirteen, whilst National won thirty-seven. This gave Labour an absolute majority (forty-eight required to govern), and a lead of nineteen seats over National. It became the nation's fourth Labour Government. Social Credit won two seats, the same as in 1981, and despite gaining 12.2 per cent of the vote, New Zealand Party failed to win any seats. Values Party came fifth but failed to win any seats. Most of the seats won by Labour were in urban areas, following the party's distinctive pattern. Exceptions to this general trend include the eastern tip of the North Island and the western coast of the South Island. Labour's strongest regions were the Wellington area (where the party won every seat), as well as Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin (centres in which it won most seats). Smaller cities such as Hamilton, Nelson, Napier, Hastings and Palmerston North were also won by Labour. As expected, Labour also won all four Māori seats, maintaining its traditional strength there.

The National Party, the outgoing incumbent government, was (as expected) strongest in rural areas. Most of the rural North Island was won by National, as were a most of the rural areas on the South Island's eastern coast. In the larger cities, the party fared poorly, with Auckland and Christchurch being the only places that the party won seats. It was more successful in smaller cities, however, winning Rotorua, Tauranga, Invercargill, New Plymouth and Whangarei. It was placed second in two Māori electorates, and third in the other two. (See Wikipedia, 2011).

Almost immediately after Muldoon's defeat, he was criticised for not following convention and devaluing the dollar (it was eventually devalued before floating it subsequently). Roger Douglas became Lange's right-hand man, the Minister for Finance, and he was about to embark on an economic rationalisation programme, the likes of New Zealand never seen before. His massive deregulation of the economy came quickly to be known as "Rogernomics". Lange made himself Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Prime Minister was Geoffrey Palmer, who also had the portfolio of Attorney-General, and of Justice, Defence Minister was Frank O'Flynn, Housing was Phil Goff, also held the portfolio of Employment, Health was Michael Bassett, also holding Local Government, Richard Prebble held the portfolios of Railways and State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), Education was Russell Marshall and Minister for Maori Affairs was Koro Wetere. This was a carefully handpicked team in the Cabinet that would prove to be a winner over the next three years, and most would continue as ministers with the same or different portfolios in the fifth Labour government of 1987-90.

Initially the now-caretaker Prime Minister, Muldoon refused to devalue the kiwi dollar, which was against convention as the outgoing Prime Minister must follow the wishes of the new national leader, and this was Lange's wish, but he about-faced and announced not only a twenty percent devaluation, but also under Labour's wishes, the removal of controls on interest rates and a three-month wage freeze.

Roger Douglas was a third-generation MP, who had in 1980, whilst in Opposition, released an alternative budget which was at odds with both Labour and National policies. He was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet. Douglas was a Thatcherite and Reaganite in terms of monetarist and supply-side economic orthodoxy, and was now in a position to implement real fundamental change in the new government. Douglas found strong support from Treasury, whose advice had been mostly ignored by Muldoon. A 352-page paper advocating a New Right economy was presented by Treasury to Douglas and it was the origins of the Rogernomics revolution begun in 1984, and mostly complete by 1987. A fairly middle-of-the-road welfare state, less so than Sweden or Denmark, more along the lines of Britain or Australia, there was no serious ideology or political/social agenda in the 1970s and early 1980s, but now Labour was proposing the commencement of a better welfare state in confluence with a base of capitalist success.

One of the first changes was the removal of exchange controls and the floating of the New Zealand dollar. There was also a surtax imposed on super annuitants, thereby restricting the pension to only those who needed it. Targeting low-income earners was the new Family Care package and then the Guaranteed Minimum Family Income. This was the first breach of the universal welfare system in New Zealand since its inception under the 1930s Seddon administration. Perhaps the biggest and most widely-remembered implementation under Rogernomics was the imposition of a broad-based consumption tax in 1986. This was called the Goods and Services tax (GST), and was not simply a new tax, but an entirely nouveau taxation system. The Labour government, in 1984, floated the exchange rate, deregulated banking and abolished exchange and price controls. These changes that New Zealanders experienced were possibly more extensive, faster and closer to theoretical purity than anywhere else on the globe. It dismantled trade barriers, removing import licensing and farmers experienced the immediate removal of agricultural subsidies. Inflation was targeted and the Reserve Bank was held responsible for maintaining the rate at 0-2 per cent (which became a requirement under the Reserve Bank Act 1989).

Public sector reforms under Lange and Douglas' administration caused government departments to become virtually unrecognisable. Service arms of government had private enterprise values imposed on them, the number of departments doubled, for example there were two defence departments: one to reflect on strategy and one to fight! The Department of Labour and the State Services Commission came out of it better as they managed to restructure themselves. Labour market reform was probably the only instance where interest groups were consulted. The new State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) were made to perform identically to a business model and it was believed that this would provide for more efficiency as well as better returns to the public purse.

The reforms to government trading arms were the most successful in terms of efficiency. The unions were however not so keen as corporatisation quickly became privatisation; government mortgages, Rural Bank, state forest rights reductions, Air New Zealand and the railways were all sold. The entire previous century's creation of public infrastructure was simply put up for tender and sold. The Think Big projects of the Muldoon years were also sold. The big winners were big business and the biggest winners of all were the merchant banker brokers such as Fletcher Challenge and others. This latter state-of-affairs mirrored similar situations in the US and Britain in the 1980s.

Were New Zealanders ready for such far-reaching reform in the mid-1980s? The scope and nature of the reforms were greater than expected given that Labour and other social-democratic parties are not generally known for emphasis on right-wing, capitalist, free-market polities, or for that matter, new and wide-reaching taxes such as the GST. In fact, for the first time in New Zealand, Labour and National were starting to converge, much as was the case with the conservative Coalition in Australia and the Australian Labor Party. It has given rise on both sides of the Tasman to the terms "Tweedledum and Tweedledee", or more viciously, "Tweedledum and Tweedledummer". To answer the question, it was not only Rogernomics legislation, including the "overnight" implementation of GST, but Kiwis have experienced a number of major bills brought in much faster than most other Western industrialised nations, and have shown to be more resilient than their compatriots in Australia, Britain or Canada. For example, in the nid-2000s in Australia smoking in pubs, bars and nightclubs was phased out gradually over a five-year period, whilst in New Zealand it was an overnight event. The fact that Labour, under Lange, had a mandate for change, and it was indeed a public part of their 1984 campaign manifesto, did not necessarily give it a mandate for such radical change. However it was on the whole received well, implemented successfully, and was even carried on by their opposite side, National, when they won back office in 1990!

Economic revolution was not however the only sea change by Lange in 1984: it also extended to the socio-political arena with the official legislation to ban nuclear-powered ships from all New Zealand ports. This was enthusiastically supported by the vast majority of the electorate and even gained bi-partisan support in the Parliament and Beehive. However one of the major ramifications of the policy was to put serious stress on the 1951 ANZUS alliance, in particular with New Zealand's most-important trading partner and key ally, the United States. It did not appear to damage relations with Australia, although Bob Hawke and the ALP were careful to simultaneously maintain their allegiance to the USA, whilst also maintaining friendly and official relations with New Zealand. President Reagan was not in the business of making its allies feel intimidated, but it was still a David versus Goliath battle. The US made it plain that it was not happy about the little Antipodean country putting down its feet and standing its ground, but Lange was steadfast and resolute. After all he had the whole of the Parliamentary Labour Caucus, much of the Opposition and most of the electorate behind him. The banning of the USS Buchanan was the first event in the security relationship crisis between the two countries. It quickly moved from a diplomatic issue, to one of a defence crisis, followed by the threat of the entire friendship, one that had been built up since World War II. Eventually there was talk of economic sanctions. On 4 February 1985 New Zealand officially disallowed the entry into New Zealand waters of the giant US aircraft carrier, the USS Buchanan. The banning of the USS Buchanan threatened to be much more than a minor foreign relations hiccup and David Lange flew to Washington to meet with President Reagan. The official US line was that the "United States would neither confirm nor deny that it had nuclear capability". Purpose of Lange's trip was to reassure the US administration that New Zealand remained fully committed to the US as an ally, and that this should not place any negative pressure on the state of the ANZUS alliance. Unfortunately for New Zealand the US did not take it lightly and over time New Zealand was left out of joint training exercises. America withdrew its security guarantees, New Zealand's status went from ally to "friendly country" and ANZUS became effectively inoperative. Both Thatcher in Britain, and Hawke, in Australia, expressed their disapproval at Labour's stance. There was a very real perception that the United States was bullying its smaller ally and interfering in New Zealand's sovereign right to form its own internal and foreign policies.

Meanwhile in the South Pacific France was continuing to test nuclear weapons in such places as Tahiti and Mururoa. If America was listening to New Zealand's new policy, then France had its head in the sand. It was now a majority of New Zealanders in support of the policy, and it had bipartisan support. On the night of 10 July 1985, docked at Auckland Harbour the Greenpeace flagship, the Rainbow Warrior was bombed. One crew member lost their life, official photographer, Fernando Perreira, who drowned after the explosion. This was New Zealand's first experience with terrorism and it was also plain murder by another country in a sovereign country. It was found out that France had ordered the attack under its foreign intelligence service, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), and was aiming to prevent the vessel from protesting at a nuclear test on the tiny atoll of Mururoa. It was quickly discovered that two agents of the French secret service were responsible: Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur. These agents were arrested by the New Zealand Police on passport fraud and immigration charges. They were charged with arson, conspiracy to commit arson, wilful damage, and murder. As part of a plea bargain, they plead guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to ten years in prison, of which they served just over two. The only casualty on the French side was the Foreign Minister, Charles Hernu, who had to resign. The fact that these two murderers got extradition to a tropical South Pacific paradise to serve their time, and that it was only for twenty-four months, still arouses anti-French emotion from many New Zealanders today.

David Lange said later, "The Rainbow Warrior was the defining moment for me because I knew that was the end of any New Zealand commitment to the so-called Western Alliance. It was not when it was sunk that I knew. It was when we knew who'd sunk it that I knew. And then the overwhelming silence from Great Britain...Margaret Thatcher was prepared to condemn Gaffafi for everything, but the French could go and kill people in our harbour. Hawke never said a word. Ronald Reagan pretended total indifference. We never had a peep out of those people that we were allegedly in a Western Alliance with; those people who fought for democracy." (See Smith & Callan, 1999).

The Oxford Union debate in England, televised on TVNZ Channel Two on Saturday 2 March 1985 was perhaps the single most defining moment of his five-year prime-ministership, and was the point when he represented his government and his country on the world scene in the most memorable environment. "Nuclear weapons are morally indefensible" was the argument, and the players were the Right Honourable David Lange for the affirmative, and the Reverend Jerry Falwell, leader of the American Moral Majority, for the negative. The live coverage was estimated to have reached a television audience in excess of fifty million, and was presented by John Laurence for the American bureau programme, with special comment by Peter Jay, former British ambassador to Washington and past-president of the Oxford Union. Lange's massive vocabulary, oratory skills and debating experience, which won him the prime ministership of New Zealand wowed, intimidated and silenced the opposite side; it also created a new-found respect for Lange back home, as well as in Britain and overseas viewers. One of the defining moments of the debate was when he received a standing ovation, with Falwell shaking his head and rubbing his forehead in defeat. Whilst the televangelist Falwell was famous for convincing people and making them "see the light", Lange was the clear-cut winner of the debate, convincing the viewing public that not only were nuclear weapons morally indefensible, but that they were "evil and reprehensible". The debate was not simply a public spin lesson early in his term, but was a delimitating moment of his first and second terms; his entire prime-ministership.

On 7 December 1984 a riot occurred in Queen St, Auckland. It occurred as the open-air concert by DD Smash was finishing, on Aotea Square, and caused almost $1 million in damages (equivalent to about $11m in today's figures). A hastily-convened judicial committee decided that the cause was easy access to liquor and poor planning by the Auckland City Council. Others were not so sure, and surmised that it was a combination of factors such as steadily-rising youth unemployment, lack of family and society values, the "mob mentality", general permissiveness, the type of team policing that today may be considered provocative, and alcohol of course. Although many Maori and Polynesian youth were present in the melee, there were also white persons, and the latter were also responsible for the riot. However, these were the days before CCTV and although there were persons of interest to the police, no one was arrested or charged, although those present would have known who these persons were.

1985 saw the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 amended to include claims dating back to 1840. It was the first amendment since the original act was passed, and was to be followed by four more amendments; two in 1988, one in 1993 and one in 2006. In addition to enabling the Tribunal to investigate claims from 1840, it also enlarged the Tribunal's membership, enabling it to handle the larger number of claims. It created a requirement that the Tribunal have a Maori majority. The amendment widened the scope of the Tribunal's enquiries and resulted in an ongoing debate over the correct response by the Crown to the findings and recommendations of the Tribunal. It was a component of the fourth Labour government's policy of allowing greater acknowledgment of the Waitangi Treaty; references to the Treaty were included in other key legislation, for example in the State-Owned Enterprises Act. The second 1988 amendment was solely directed at the SOEs Act. The 1985 amendment was one of the most important changes to the Act in attaining relevance in the Treaty in New Zealand law and society.

On the 22 November 1985 Paul Reeves (later Sir) became the fifteenth Governor-General (G-G) of New Zealand. He was the first indigenous vice-regal representative. He would remain as G-G for five years, until November 1990. Immediately upon appointment there was scepticism due to the facts that he had had previous political involvement, supporting the Rowling Labour Government, his political involvement in opposing the Springboks Tour in 1981, and also the fact that he was an ordained Anglican bishop. Opposition Leader Jim McLay was one of those vocally opposing the appointment. However the Maori community was overjoyed that finally one of their own held such high office, and Sir James Henare argued that it was a direct result of the Treaty of Waitangi, although this seems tenuous at best. One of Reeves' acts was to join the Newtown Residents' Association (Wellington), and to invite members of that association to visit Government House. He was the first G-G to host an "open day" at the House, and the first to employ a public affairs officer.

Reeves' tenure was not without controversy however. In November 1987 he made comments critical of Roger Douglas' Rogernomics, stating the reforms were creating "an increasingly stratified society". (See Maclean, 2006). After being rebuked by Lange, six months later he stated that "...the spirit of the market steals life from the vulnerable but the spirit of God gives life to all". (See Maclean, 2006). He also later recalled that many times he felt alone, and would write to the Queen, but often would receive no reply, or just a reply from her private secretary. On a state visit to Vanuatu in 1989 Reeves was invited to slaughter a pig at an official ceremony, creating another controversy, as he was patron of the SPCA.

In 1986 the Constitution Act finally ended the right of Britain to pass laws for New Zealand, and the Privy Council was abolished. The High Court became the highest court in the land. This, to most New Zealanders and the Labour Government, was a welcome and timely development of the 1980s. However there were some traditionalists, monarchists, staunch conservatives and the National Party, as a whole, that did not feel so pleased. Jim McLeay knew he was outnumbered though, and accepted the majority view of the public.

Privatisation/SOEs: This was one of Rogernomics' major programmes for 1984-7 government, and totally transformed both New Zealand's economy and society. It transformed the economy as it turned government departments and public corporations into quasi-private enterprise, and profit-driven, and it transformed society as it made a basically government/public state into a private/profit-driven free-for-all. Some would applaud the new New Zealand, whilst others would claim that the country had been given to major business, corporate interests, and even private, family-run firms. The reality was somewhere in the middle.

The GST was finally passed as law and implemented in August 1986. It was based mostly on Value-Added tax (VAT) in the UK, and was initially set at ten per cent (later raised to 12.5 in 1988, and then to fifteen). Marginal tax rates were flattened, and the GST involved the removal of a number of other taxes such as payroll tax, and a massive reduction in personal income tax from a previous high for the highest tax bracket of sixty-six percent to thirty-three percent. It was also lowered for all income brackets. Although GST didn't deliver all the benefits promised, such as a general improvement in standard of living for all New Zealanders, and a slowdown in inflation over the next decade or two, it was nevertheless seen as a success, and was not wound down or reversed by the new Bolger government in 1990. It was also copied by Australian Prime Minister John Howard in 2000. Rather than being brought in after winning government, the Australian experience was different in that the incumbent government went to the voters with the proposal before the election. It failed to win voter support in that country in 1993, but succeeded in 1998.

1986 saw the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act. It was a contentious issue even by the mid-1980s, but had been on the agenda for the Labour Party ever since it was defeated by Muldoon in 1984. Unlike Muldoon, Lange supported it as did most of the Labour Party, and it was therefore going to pass in parliament. The Bill was also presented as a conscience vote and therefore it was voted in by members of the National Opposition also. The Act is a law that legalised consensual sex between men aged sixteen and older. It removed the provisions of the Crime Act 1961 that criminalised this lifestyle choice. From 1840 when New Zealand became part of the British Empire, penalties for homosexual sex were harsh, reflecting British law, but there was a softening of the punishments in 1961, reflecting a new era of social attitudes. This was furthered by a 1968 petition signed by seventy-five prominent citizens calling for legislative change, but was rejected by the Holyoake government. First attempts at law reform in 1974, and later in 1979 and 1980 failed, but in 1985 government MP Fran Wilde introduced the Homosexual Law Reform Act. The original bill was comprised of two sections: firstly the decriminalisation of male homosexuality; second part was a provision of anti-discrimination law protections for gay men and lesbians. The first part passed narrowly – 49 to 44 – on 9 July 1986, and even though the second part failed that part was incorporated into the New Zealand Human Rights Act 1993. The new Act was a focus of fierce debate from far right sections of the community, such as a group of fundamentalist Christian political activists including Norman Jones, National for Invercargill, Keith Hay and Peter Tait. Another group which threatened to finish the Labour Government in 1987 was the Coalition of Concerned Citizens. (The government was returned with near-exact numbers in the House to those of 1984).

The Homosexual Law Reform Act of 1986 was doubtlessly only the beginning of a more equal, less discriminatory, all-inclusive New Zealand. By the 1990s New Zealand would have several openly-gay MPs and by the twenty-first century it would have a system of civil union for gay or lesbian couples. It has been ahead of Australia and most of the United States in this social hemisphere.

The Act was also passed in a challenging time for New Zealand, as well as the world. Antibody Immuno Deficiency Virus (AIDS) was only just becoming part of the human awareness in New Zealand and even though a part of US society since at least the late seventies, it was still mostly an unknown subject. However by this time the number of deaths in the US, Britain and Europe had skyrocketed since it was first discovered about ten years earlier. It was now a major blight and a huge worry for New Zealanders. High-profile deaths such as Hollywood actor Rock Hudson had brought the new disease into people's homes worldwide via their television set, as he rapidly deteriorated and died the year before. AIDS had originally been known in the 1970s as GRID- Gay-Related Immuno Deficiency- as when it was discovered in the US it was believed to be caused only by unprotected homosexual sex. This was now known to not be the case- in fact by the 1990s it was being spread mostly by the heterosexual world community, and especially in Africa.

Another thing killing people overseas and in New Zealand at this time was Legionnaire's Disease. This was a disease which turned out to be caused by bacteria multiplying in the water towers of building air-conditioners. Also known as Legionellosis, it acquired its name when in July 1976 there was an outbreak of pneumonia amongst people attending a convention of the American Legion at a large hotel in Philadelphia. The cause of the outbreak was discovered six months later. In New Zealand, 1986 was the year it first appeared.

Potential sources of such contaminated water include cooling towers (some forty to sixty per cent of one's tested) used in industrial cooling water systems as well as in large central air conditioning systems, evaporative coolers, nebulizers, humidifiers, whirlpools, hot water systems, showers, windshield washers, whirlpool spas, architectural fountains, room-air humidifiers, ice making machines, misting equipment, and similar disseminators that draw upon a public water supply. The disease was tackled effectively over the next few years.

A Royal Commission into possible changes in the electoral system was held in this year. In particular it examined the possibility of a European-style addition to the New Zealand electoral system called "Multi-Member Proportional Representation", or MMP. This was a variation on the voting system used in Australia and America for Senates, or on the state level, upper houses of parliament/Congress. The proposal was not that New Zealand should ditch the first-past-the-post simple majority system of voting, but rather that a more representative, fairer system be layered on top of the former. For example, in New Zealand, small parties had no chance in winning seats, as it was a winner-take-all system, and a minor party could never hope to achieve an absolute majority of votes in one particular electorate. Take for example the case of Bob Jones' New Zealand party in 1984 which won 12.4 per cent of the vote, and the Values Party winning a substantial number of votes. If Jones' party had won all the votes in a single seat, or even two seats, it would have been represented in parliament, but because of simple majority that wasn't possible. The 1986 Royal Commission was a result of pressures from such smaller parties to the electoral commission, and would lead to positive change at the end of the century, also under a Labour government. It also, more importantly perhaps, would halt the case of a major party losing to the other one even with a greater percentage of the vote, as happened time and time again in the second half of the century.

One of the biggest news stories in 1986 was the maritime disaster in the Marlborough Sounds, of the cruise ship, the Mikhail Lermontov. It occurred on 16 February at Port Gore, which is directly across the Cook Strait from Wellington, and involved one loss-of-life and eleven casualties. The vessel was the Soviet Union's prestige cruise liner and could accommodate five-hundred and fifty passengers in comfort. It was a regular liner in New Zealand waters and had been refitted four years prior to the sinking. The particular cruise on the day was part of a summer cruise season, of which a number were eleven-day sailings. On 16 February the vessel left Picton at 3:10pm, carrying seven-hundred and forty passengers and crew. On board the vessel was Marlborough harbourmaster Don Jamieson, who was left in charge by the captain, who had gone to his cabin. The vessel sailed up Queen Charlotte Sound towards the Cook Strait. As it neared Cape Jackson Jamieson altered the heading to bring it closer to the Cape. This course correction was queried by the navigator as he believed it was a dangerous move, but Jamieson had already made the decision to drive the ship between Cape Jackson and its outlying lighthouse – a 460-metre-wide passage. The captain was not notified. At approximately 5:20pm the Lermontov, travelling at a speed of fifteen knots (twenty-seven km/hr), grounded against rocks on the starboard side, suffering major damage to its hull. The ship remained in motion, but started taking on water, and then rolling over. Captain now made his way back to the bridge and attempted to head towards Port Gore where the gigantic ship could be beached on shore, as opposed to sinking in open waters. An hour later the situation was dire with all onboard power lost, and drifting on and off a sandbank. As the tide rose it lifted the Lermontov completely off the sandbank and she sank in deep waters at approximately 10:50pm. As with the Wahine eighteen years earlier, rescue ships arrived soon after, however due to rain the rescue was almost unmanageable. All the passengers and crew were accounted for and taken off the stricken vessel except a Russian engineer who was believed to have drowned when the ship initially hit the rocks. His body was not recovered. He was the only fatality and there were a further eleven casualties, all with minor injuries. The preliminary enquiry determined that harbourmaster Jamison was operating outside the limits of his piloting area; however he told investigators that he was very familiar with Marlborough Harbour. When questioned why he piloted the vessel through a narrow and too-shallow passage, he could not give a solid answer, only to state that he was suffering from mental and physical exhaustion after working eighty-hour weeks for the previous four months. Minister of Transport Richard Prebble chose not to hold a formal inquiry. Jamison refused to speak in public about the sinking but surrendered his pilot's licence. Back in the Soviet Union they held their own inquiry and the captain was given a suspended four-year gaol sentence. The Marlborough Harbour Board and the owners of the Mikhail Lermontov reached an out-of-court settlement. Although not salvageable, the wreck's oil was removed from her tanks over the next two months, and since 1986 three people have died whilst diving on the wreck.

Other events to occur in the year 1986 in New Zealand were:

The official end of the "White New Zealand" immigration policy: although there had been at least forty years of immigration from continental Europe, Fiji, Polynesia, and in the eighties Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa, it was officially ended by parliamentary legislation in 1986.

The first visit to New Zealand by the Pope

The music of Dave Dobbyn, which will be fondly remembered by New Zealanders as a fundamental part of home-grown 1980s-era Kiwi music. His biggest hit was Footrot Flats, and it was turned into a major feature film: Footrot Flats: the Dog's Tale. Dobbyn performed at Auckland's Aotea Square in 1986, and was a sell-out success.

In the Soviet Union the world's biggest nuclear accident occurred, where a power station went into meltdown. It was located at Chernobyl, in northwest Russia, and resulted in thousands of deaths in the town, followed by many more deaths throughout Russia, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe in the years following, due to radiation exposure.

1987 saw the single largest emigration numbers to date, and most were to Australia. The number of singles, couples and families leaving the shores permanently had been climbing rapidly every year since the late 1970s, and was notable by the early eighties. It was becoming a concern for the government, as it amounted to a serious financial drain, as well as a brain drain. It also wasn't good for the nation's pride. Muldoon once joked that every Kiwi moving to Australia increased the IQ of both countries, but it deserved serious analysis. One source states that currently (2011) there are about one million (close to one-fifth) of New Zealanders living in other countries, about one-half of whom are in Australia. (See Byrnes, p.318).

At about this time there was a challenge by the Maori Council in the Court of Appeal, which was successful. It marked a breakthrough in the indigenous struggle to regain some control of resources. The appeal was to halt crown lands being transferred to the newly-created SOEs when the ownership was under dispute and claims were before the Waitangi Tribunal. The court ruled that

"the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi override everything else in the State Owned Enterprises Act... [and that] those principles require that Pakeha and Maori treaty partners [are] to act towards each other reasonably and with the utmost good faith". (See Smith & Callan, 1999, p. 255).

There was also an alike claim to protect fishing rights, filed by the Muriwhenua of the Far North and the Maori Council, which brought a temporary stop the issue of fishing quota under the new Quota Management System until Maori rights to the fisheries were resolved. The 1989 Maori Fisheries Act returned ten per cent of the fisheries and founded a Maori Fisheries Commission with a grant of $10 million.

In 1987 the Maori language - Te Taura Whiri i Te Reo Māori - became the second official language, with full equality to English. This was as a result of the Maori Language Act 1987 passed with substantial bipartisan support. The early agitation for making Maori a key part of New Zealand culture and identity may be traced back to 1961 when the Hunn Report described the Maori language as a relic of ancient Maori life. In the early 1970s concerns for the Maori language were expressed by Maori urban groups including Nga Tamatoa and Te Reo Maori society. In 1972 a Maori Language Petition was signed by 30,000 signatories and sent to Parliament. By 1973 a NZCER national survey indicated that only approximately 70,000 Maori, or 18-20 percent of Maori were fluent Maori speakers, and that most are elderly. In 1975 Ngati Raukawa, Ngati Toa and Te Ati Awa originated a tribal development exercise which emphasised Maori language development. The Ruatoki School became the first bilingual school in New Zealand in 1978. Between 1979 and 1980 the Te Ataarangi movement was established in an effort to restore Maori language knowledge to Maori adults, and in 1981 Te Wananga o Raukawa was established in Otaki. The now well-known Te Kohanga Reo was established in 1982 in primary schools, and throughout the 1980s experiments in Maori radio broadcasting led to the establishment of Te Upoko o te Ika and Radio Ngati Porou. 1985 saw the first Kura kaupapa Maori for Maori children and the Te Reo Maori claim WAI 11 brought before the Waitangi Tribunal. By now the number of Maori speakers had dropped to only about 50,000, or about twelve percent of the Maori population. Recommendation that legislation be enacted to enable Maori language to be used in legal proceedings occurred in 1986, and that a supervising body be set up. After the 1987 Maori Language Act was passed, it was not long before Maori language speakers began increasing, official government documents, signage, ministry titles and descriptions started containing both English and Maori, and from the late 1990s Web Sites of government departments, official government organisations, as well as local government city and regional councils. It is a long step to restoration of the language as it was at the time of the early European settlement, but with the official status in place, it can only be a matter of time.

Kiwis have always been keen gamblers, and in 1907 the first government lottery ticket- the Golden Kiwi- was introduced. Eighty years later saw the introduction of Lotto, and the year after that Instant Lottery tickets, or "scratchies". Lotto has since become more complex, with Strike, Powerball and Keno, but 1987 was the year that modern day national lotteries really started. The NZ Lotteries Commission was established on 1 June 1987 and the first tickets went on sale on 22 July. The draw was on 1 August and carried a top prize of $100,000. First prize is now $1 million, but often jackpots to several millions. Lotto NZ paid out NZ$64.5 million in prizes for the Lotto games in 1987/8 - its first full year of operation. By the year 2007/8, this figure had risen to NZ$274.15 million in prize payouts. To date, more than NZ$3.75 billion has been paid out to lucky lottery winners of the NZ Lotto since it began back in 1987. There have been at least three-hundred and seventy people who have won NZ$1 million or more on the NZ Lotto since its inception.

Rogernomics extended to changes in farmers' lives in 1987. From this year onwards they had to pay for Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries' (MAF's) advisory services. This was all part of the new economic landscape: "a level playing field", "efficiency and accountability" and the "funder/provider split". The user-pays theme was almost a flashback to Muldoonism. Farmers' Federation was very vocal in its hostility for the new scheme and the Lange/Douglas administration. The year earlier they had gathered at Palmerston North, called by the Rangitikei and Manawatu branches, and attendance was approximately one-thousand. Roger Douglas was present, and he told the farmers what he was trying to accomplish as Finance Minister and agreed that the increase and exchange rate increases were hurting, just as drawbacks on government spending were also doing. He recalls what he said years later:

"We are taking a hell of a lot of political pain to do that. And you've got to believe we mean it, and you have to respond by adjusting your own actions. So does the rest of the community...Your council has shown it knows that if we go back to subsidies, the industry will be wrecked permanently. This country can't afford that. If agriculture goes under, we all go under. We will continue to look for ways to help, but they must be ways which do not damage your industry forever." (See Smith & Callan, 1999, p. 241).

Some other significant events of 1987 were:

New Zealand's first heart transplant

The nation declared legally nuclear-free: a permanent state-of-affairs

1987 Rugby World Cup victory against France

The Edgecumbe Earthquake:

This occurred in the small Bay of Plenty town of Edgecumbe, at 1:42 pm on 2 March 1987, measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale. Moment magnitude was 6.5 megawatts, depth eight kilometres, and there were no fatalities, but twenty-five injured. Even though it was shallow, the quake was one of the most damaging New Zealand has experienced in recent times, with about half of the houses in the town being damaged. There was also damage to a local milk processor, where storage tanks fell over. The nearby forestry town of Kawerau was damaged and the second-largest town in the region, Whakatane was badly shaken. A NZ Railways eighty-tonne locomotive was tipped over. There was a foreshock prior to the event and a large aftershock measuring 5.2 ten minutes after the quake. Even though the Edgecumbe Earthquake officially lists no fatalities, there was a heart-attack victim who died at the time of the tremors, and it is likely that it was caused by shock.

The 1980s was a time of unrelenting, never-before-experienced economic growth and prosperity, due to the new economy, freedom in the economy from Rogernomics and a general world financial and economic boom. Some of this economic prosperity came from the markets of America and Europe, in particular the astronomic rise of the stock markets in Wall Street, London, Europe, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and also in Sydney and Wellington. The physical appearances, i.e. skylines of Auckland CBD in particular, and also Wellington, were altering faster than people could keep up with. By 1987, at the height of the building boom in New Zealand, cranes dotted the CBDs and glass and steel skyscrapers seemed to appear everywhere. Beautiful old buildings fell to the demolition ball, whilst glassy, mirrored, mediocre (?) towers rose in their place. There was plenty of money for building, industry and there was a feeling that New Zealand was entering its latest golden age. However this was unreal, as it was built on the bullish share markets in Wellington and overseas, built on financial speculation, overconfidence, etc. "Greed [was] piled on ambition and heaped on ego." (See Smith & Callan, 1999, p. 244).

On Tuesday 20 October 1987 all this was about to change. Black Tuesday, as it was to be known, saw share prices plummet by up to sixty percent, and it started on Wall Street, and flowed on worldwide. When the markets opened in New Zealand, the latest "South Seas bubble" had burst. This was the largest crash since the 1929 event, which had at the time triggered the Great Depression. The world and New Zealand was about to experience a similar massive recession. Over the following two months, to Christmas 1987 $23 billion was wiped off the stock market boards, equating to almost fifty percent of the market. The supremely wealthy, ordinary investors, major companies and small business all fell with the stock market. By the end of 1989 the New Zealand market had still not recovered to the extent that overseas markets had. This was to be a costly and memorable lesson for New Zealand. Many commentators have observed that "the New Zealand share market rose higher, fell further and stayed down longer than those in comparable countries. New Zealand share-trading volumes boomed one-hundred percent in the year preceding Black Tuesday. In Australia, Britain and the United States the figure was between twenty and thirty percent." (See Belich, 2001, p.407). Whether justified or not, the crash led to a loss of confidence in the government, and was to prove irreparable in 1990. Rogernomics reforms continued unabated in the debris of the crash, although it was now under the command of Lange, as he had developed hesitations about the latest new round of reforms. The boom and bust ventured into the lives of many, not just the market speculators. The boom was a mass movement, similarly the bust was also. Major players who lost big time included Allan Hawkins of Equiticorp, who was bankrupted and imprisoned. He "crashed to earth, to a chorus of satisfaction from those who had previously worshipped [him]". (See Belich, 2001, p. 406).

The re-election of Labour on 15 August 1987 saw a plus-five-percent swing in support and a minor gain of two seats, from fifty-five to fifty-seven. It won forty-eight percent of the popular vote. National, under its new leader, Jim Bolger, also saw a swing of plus-eight-percent, and a rise of two seats, from thirty-eight to forty. It commanded forty-four percent of the vote. This was due to none of the minor parties winning any seats. Also there was fallout in voter turnout to 89.1 percent, or over 70,000. As in 1984 Labour secured most of the seats in the four major centres, as well as most of the West Coast of the South Island. National performed well in most of the rural and regional areas. Although not an increased mandate, it was more than enough of a mandate for government legitimacy and appeared not to have been harmed by the massive changes brought about by Rogernomics or the sharemarket demise. However even though the incumbent government emerged from the election with a seventeen-seat lead over the Opposition, the real discrepancy between each party's count was significantly less. Labour had won a five percent swing increase from 1984, but National had secured a huge 8.5 percent increase (35.5 percent to 44 percent). This meant that even though Labour had retained its lead, the gap had closed by a bigger amount than the basic seat count indicated. This gap would widen over the next three years, due to general voter backlash and dissatisfaction, and the direction and leadership of the Party would gradually but surely fall apart.

1988 was a year where the nation was still commiserating over the events of late 1987, but had not yet truly entered the serious recession. It was in a kind of limbo, and the boom was only slowly collapsing. By February unemployment had hit the 100,000 mark, but this was nothing compared to what it would later rise to in the early years of the nineties. It was very bad for Pakeha, but much worse for Maori, where since 1986 and the end of 1988 the general Maori unemployment rate jumped to close on twenty percent. "In effect, about one-fifth of the Maori working age population lost their jobs in the two years from March 1987 to March 1989." (See Belich, 2001, p.474). In proportionate terms Maori unemployment was roughly quadruple the Pakeha rate, and these figures may be understated due to those who gave up hope and no longer registered for work. By 1991 in some Maori areas the numbers who were "unavailable for work" reached almost half!

On 30 March the State Sector Act was passed to reform the Public Service. The State Sector Act 1988 defines what constitutes the State sector organisations in New Zealand. Along with accompanying reforms, it substantially reshaped the Public service, and to some extent its culture. It granted Ministers some role in the appointments of departmental chief executives. This was a part of the later Labour cabinet, persuaded by Douglas, to set in motion reform of the Public Service, a transformation of some departments into SOEs and sale of other departments. Old Labour, before 1984, had worked towards big government, whereas new Labour conversely sought to devolve or sell as much of its inherited business as possible.

January 1988 may be marked as the start of the Lange-Douglas split, which commenced when Lange cancelled a previously-announced economic and tax package after returning from overseas. From the prime minister's statement in 1984 that "the government will either stand or fall with Roger Douglas", their extraordinarily close relationship had gradually fallen apart. Even though the stock market crash had seriously damaged the New Zealand economy, Douglas still wanted to persevere with economic reforms. In December he recommended further asset sales, the liberalisation of the labour market, further remodelling of the public sector, further reduction of tariffs, the introduction of a Guaranteed Minimum Family Income (GMFI), and radical tax reforms involving a flat income tax rate of twenty-three per cent and an increase in the goods and services tax (GST) to 12.5 per cent. The tax reforms and GMFI were approved by Cabinet, and on 17 December Lange, Douglas and other senior cabinet ministers proclaimed this package at a press conference. Possibly due to a reflection over Christmas and New Year whether it was a wise move, Lange cancelled the flat tax in January. From this moment on the relationship between the two top men gradually moved downhill, and it flowed on to their supporters in the cabinet and caucus. First Richard Prebble was dismissed and then Douglas left cabinet at the end of 1988. He remained in the party as a backbencher, where he may have been the main architect behind a vote of no-confidence in the prime minister six months later. Lange narrowly won this vote, but against his wishes caucus re-elected Douglas to cabinet in August 1989. This was the final straw for the prime minister who resigned on 8 August 1989.

# Chapter 4: 1989-91

After Lange's departure as leader of the party and leader of the country, Deputy PM, Minister for the Environment and Minister for Justice Geoffrey Palmer was elected in August 1989. He knew that Labour was doomed at the election to be held the following year, from the moment he took the reins of power. Moore was to be PM for a year, until September 1990, and although a worrying time for Labour, his succession to the leadership was quite a successful move for the party. It put an end to the bitter caucus infighting between Lange and Douglas supporters which had now blighted the party for close to two years, as well as, of course, the intense rivalry between the two personalities themselves. It also worked well as Palmer was a likeable figure within both the Party and in the opinion polls, and he was not a divisive or controversial figure. He could also see that the Party's time for radical reform was over and that New Zealanders were by this time just wishing for a return to economic prosperity or at least recovery, and socially for life to settle back to normal. As well as authoring an influential book, "Unbridled Power", during his thirteen months at the top, he also set up the royal commission that recommended switching to the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) voting system, passed the New Zealand Constitution Act 1986 and laid the groundwork for the Resource Management Act.

In September 1989 there was yet another change in leadership, and therefore the prime ministership: the new leader became Mike Moore, who led the doomed ship that was the government for a very short period of less than two months. He was chosen to contend the party leadership as Palmer's electoral support, although good at the beginning of his leadership, had plummeted, in line with support for Labour. It was hoped that the sinking ship may be repaired and go on to sail the high seas after November, although that definitely wasn't to be the case.

After over half a decade of major economic upheaval: ground-breaking reform, prosperity, disaster- New Zealanders were ready for a new conservative decade, and many decided a return to the Right was the best way to go. The 1990s was ushered in with terrible economic conditions- massive unemployment, continuing inflation, mortgage defaults, business bankruptcies and a generally sluggish, zero-dynamic state-of-play. The January 1990 sesqui-centenary, celebrating 150 years since the Treaty of Waitangi was not eagerly-awaited; in fact it was considered by many (and eventually played out to be) something of a non-event. One of the first acts of the new Bolger National Government was surprisingly a very social democratic move to return $1 billion worth of lands, waters and fisheries to the Maori People. The following year a move that was more right-wing occurred: the Employment Contracts Act. As the new decade progressed, there were tragedies: the 1995 collapse of a rural viewing platform where many youth lost their lives. Early in the new decade such consumables as fax machines, button telephones, a huge growth in VCRs, and the introduction of pay TV occurred. Mid to late decade the introduction of the Information Superhighway/ cyberspace - the Internet, or more correctly, a new and revolutionary side of the Internet called the World Wide Web. Websites would spring up virtually overnight for businesses, government, information, leisure and practically every area of life. The 1990s would see a vast take-up by New Zealanders of mobile (cell) phones, personal computers (PCs) with dial-up Internet access, and then broadband high-speed Internet, and by the end of the decade, flat-panel Plasma or LCD TVs with digital broadcasting/transmission. Kiwis youth, both Pakeha and Maori, would also become more disillusioned with life, than ever previously experienced, and would assist the creation of a new and permanent underclass.

Sesqui 1990 (Sesquicentennial) in February 1990 was ostensibly a big deal that fizzled out before it had really even begun. Wellington was chosen for its centre as it marked 150 years since the founding of Wellington and of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. It was also chosen as it was the newly-created cultural Capital since the Wellington City Council 1989 adoption of its new theme and plans for many years to come: 'Absolutely Positively Wellington'. (It was further expanded upon in 1993, under Mayor Fran Wilde, former Lange Government Minister). The council played on the extant feeling of Wellington that it was cultural and modern-European and it moulded the new and ambitious plan to redevelop the city in the minds of its people, but also of its image around the country and overseas. Even though Auckland was more cosmopolitan, more multicultural, had a milder climate (no wind!), Wellington was the perfect choice for the country's celebrations...or so the planners believed. In a nutshell the event was an abysmal failure. Marketed as 'New Zealand's Biggest Event Ever' in 1988-89, it was slated to run for six weeks, and to be held at two locations: the Winter Showgrounds in Newtown, where Wellington's annual Winter Show had been held for many years which was an amusement park-styled location just five to ten minutes from the Central Business District; and also the fairgrounds at Taranaki [Street] Wharf almost in the heart of the CBD. After only twelve days the event was abruptly closed, and in addition to being a disaster for both the government and the Wellington City Council, it was also a financial catastrophe, where a massive $6.4 million ended up being owed to creditors. In fact it has become something of a reminder to New Zealanders of corporate mismanagement on a grand scale. The festival was to include cultural, trade and scientific exhibits, as well as entertainment and fun park amusements, the latter mostly at the Newtown location. Because of the large amount of monies still owing when it was prematurely shut down, it had a flow-on effect of causing receiverships and bankruptcies of a number of smaller companies who had been contracted to provide various goods and services. Sesqui was effectually doomed before it had commenced as many Wellingtonians and those from other parts of the nation were disillusioned with life in general due to the sharp recession, unemployment rivalling that of the Great Depression and a belief that all the pain of the Lange years had only dragged personal incomes down; there had been little reward. As well as the financial slump, there was at the time a generally depressed and negative psyche. There occurred graffiti of the major billboard on the Urban Motorway (Hutt Road), and the official Sesqui mascot, named 'Pesky Sesky', which may have been an opossum or even a sasquatch (?), had blown away in one of the capital's notorious windstorms! All in all, there was little public support for the event, even though it should have been a meaningful anniversary of New Zealand. Added to the loss to taxpayers and Wellington ratepayers was the $150,000 fireworks on the evening of the opening day, which would be approximately $300,000 in today's dollars. Sesqui 1990 was the absolute antithesis of the 1988 Bicentenary across the Tasman.

The Commonwealth Games in Auckland in January 1990 was a totally different story. Watched by hundreds of millions around the globe, it was a fantastic showpiece for New Zealand in general, and Kiwi sports talent in particular. It was an administrative and commercial success. Although all Commonwealth Games (like Olympic Games) are a drawcard for dozens of countries, this was handled differently to Sesqui, and Auckland further cemented itself as the dominant centre to Wellington's detriment. The Games logo was a shooting star motif and was called the "Hungry Enzyme". The official mascot was a revitalised Kiwi, "Goldie", and was perceived to be a major success. It had been the mascot for both Olympic and Commonwealth Games teams in the past, and was still in its original form. Goldie became a strongly competitive force after being depicted as a performer in each of the Games' sports. The official anthem was "This is the moment", sung by Chris Thompson. New Zealand performed well, coming fourth, after Australia, England, and Canada, and this was a very acceptable result. The fourteenth Games were the Friendly Games, as in 1982 in Christchurch, and were officially a part of Sesqui. The main stadium was Mt Smart and ten sports were on offer: athletics, aquatics, badminton, boxing, cycling, gymnastics, judo, lawn bowls, shooting and weightlifting. There was also the Triathlon, a demonstration event. The official medal tally was: Gold: 17, Silver: 14, Bronze: 27, total: 58 medals.

As the first stage in a long-awaited reform of the currency, in fact the first since decimal currency was introduced in 1967, 1990 saw the abolition of one and two cent coins as legal tender. Later fives and tens would be removed, and then one- and later two-dollar coins were introduced. Further on there would be a major transformation - in the 2000s, where paper currency was replaced with plastic notes that, along with watermarks and other security features, would become un- counterfeit- able. Much later, in 2010, twenty cent coins were removed from circulation and fifty cents became small and light. The New Zealand changes mirrored Australian government mint reforms in terms of removal of one and two cents and plastic notes, but New Zealand went further with the discarding of ten cents, twenty cents and physical reduction of fifty cents. Today, New Zealand has a streamlined, efficient currency that is in tune with the twenty-first century.

Telecom was sold in this year for a whopping $4.25 billion. This occurred under the Labour government, just before the election of the new Bolger National administration. In 2010 Bolger said of the sale that it was a mistake, and that New Zealand governments, [Labour or National], have been inept at privatisation. Prior to the sale, in 1987, it had been split off the Post Office, and of late, NZ Post is facing a severe and inevitable decline in its core business, a situation which may be halted if it can embrace the delivery side of the massively-burgeoning e-Commerce trade, such as Australia Post has most successfully done. Bolger said that "With glorious hindsight you could say we hung on to the wrong bit", but added that at the time the deal was done, the postal business was the "right bit" to retain. (See Bennett, 2010).

The year 1990 was a momentous one in Europe with the death of Communism, manifest most famously in January with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, to create a unified, democratic Germany. This was watched on television back home on now three channels (TV3 established two years earlier), as well as radio and newspaper. Also, Kiwis witnessed the crumbling of the Soviet Union partly thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev, which did not deliver the successful type of democracy in Russia and the new CIS that occurred in Germany. In short, major overseas and local events were becoming more a part of New Zealanders consciousness by the new decade than ever before, and this would be even greater still by the end of the nineties, with more television channels and especially the Worldwide Web.

In this year Catherine Tizard (later Dame Catherine) became the first female governor-general of New Zealand. Born in 1931, in Auckland, she attended university in 1949 and met her husband, whom she married two years later. After having four children they eventually separated. Her first administrative position was at the Play Centre, which she later became president. After this she was elected to the Board of Governors of the Eastern Suburbs Secondary Schools of Auckland. After returning to university in 1961 to complete a degree in zoology, she became a part-time tutor for the Zoology Department at Auckland University the following year. This turned into a tenured appointment. In the early 1970s Tizard was elected to the Auckland City Council and remained a councillor until 1983. At this point she was elected the first woman mayor of Auckland. Immediately after leaving the mayoralty in 1990 she became New Zealand's first woman governor-general, a post she would hold until 1996. Whilst Mayor, in 1985, she was awarded a DBE, and as governor-general, received a GCMG in 1990. During her tenure as Governor-General, it was not always easy sailing: at the Waitangi Day celebrations on February 6, 1995, she was spat on, which was out-of-keeping with the usual respect New Zealanders have for their Queen's representative. Earlier, as Mayor, in December 1984, during the Dave Dobbin concert Queen Street riots, she found herself in the thick of the random violence. In 2002 Dame Catherine became a member of the Order of New Zealand (ONZ), which was the replacement of the old Order of the British Empire (OBE). In recent years Dame Catherine has had a hand in a number of community groups, such as the Historic Places Trust, the Marriage Guidance Council (!), the Auckland Institute and Museum, the Auckland Theatre Trust and the Auckland Maritime Museum Trust. (See NZ Government, 2011). At time of writing she is eighty-one years of age.

The Sky TV Network from the United Kingdom began pay-broadcasting in New Zealand in 1990. Previously only available in commercial premises such as pubs and hotels, it was now available for anyone to view from their home. It was founded in 1987 as Sky Media and was redirected into pay television following a successful bid for four groups of UHF frequencies in Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga. It initially received rights from ESPN, shortly followed by CNN, HBO, BBC and Sky Movies. As Sky extended its coverage throughout most of the country in 1994, it launched two new channels: Discovery and Orange. By 1996 the entire nation had full, uninterrupted coverage. In 1997 Sky introduced Direct Broadcasting via Satellite (DBS), which was an analogue service using the Optus B1 satellite. This allowed for more channels and interactive choices. In December 1998 Sky went digital, which was several years ahead of Foxtel in Australia.

Sky had some problems with customer understanding of decoder technology, but after simplifying it, it was taken up with vigour. There was a brief period of Sky email – 'Skymail' – but due to low take-up it was pulled. Sky TV is now in over fifty percent of New Zealand homes, and keeps the broadcast networks – TV1, TV2, TV3 and TV4 – on their feet to deliver as good a service as Sky.

The Hawkes Bay earthquake of 1990 was 6.4 on the Richter scale and although there was nowhere near the devastation and casualties of the 1931 Napier quake, it was still a significant earth tremor. The epicentre was Weber (Tarewa), which is a hamlet approximately thirty kilometres south of Dannevirke. The local geology magnified the strength of the quake and made it seem more like an 7.0-plus event or thereabouts. The second shock to strike Weber in this year, it occurred only twelve weeks after its predecessor. Focal depth was thirty kilometres and the Maximum Intensity was MM9. Over the next two years two more earthquakes would strike this East Coast region. The 1990 event was felt from Hamilton in the northwest to Christchurch in the south, and different intensities were felt in different locations, as a result of the sediment and underlying soils in the area. Areas that were poorly consolidated experienced greater shaking and sustained more damage than ones that contained harder bedrock and more compact soil. There were no deaths or reported injuries. (See Canterbury Quakes, 2012).

On 27 October 1990 a general election was held. Opinion polls prior to the day pointed to a decisive National victory, led by Jim Bolger, and that is exactly what transpired. National won by a landslide and the radical, controversial era of 1980s Labour was well and truly over. In fact it only took a little over two hours after polling stations closed before outgoing PM, Mike Moore, telephoned Jim Bolger to congratulate him and concede defeat. The magnitude of the government's defeat was even greater than the public and media foresaw. In fact from a parliament composed of fifty-seven seats for Labour, forty for National and one held by New Labour, the change was a total and massive swing of the pendulum. After the election, National now held sixty-seven seats of ninety-seven (over two-thirds!), Labour a dismal twenty-nine and again one New Labour. Discrepancy between the number of seats won and actual percentile share of the vote was not so great however, as has been the case in New Zealand more often than not under first-past-the-post. National only received about half of the share (48 percent), Labour one-third (35 percent), and minor parties 17 percent in total. Yet again there was a case for a change in the voting system, which would in fact be put to the public in a national referendum at the next election (1993), and would succeed, taking effect from the 1996 election. However it was a great victory for the conservative party, and gave Bolger an unequivocal mandate to do what his government felt was in the best interests of the nation- whether to implement change, to roll back some of Labour's contentious reforms, or whether to stick with the status quo. There was definitely a mood in the electorate for change, not necessarily a rollback of the past four government's reforms, but to move forward to tackle the economic quagmire New Zealand was currently in, and to effect social and political changes, with especial focus on Maori.

Bolger was elected on a promise of a "Decent Society". This was a direct attack and repudiation on the previous Labour government's economic reforms, although the phrase was intended to include social decency in addition. Bolger appealed to the voters by implying that the harshness of the previous six years would be reversed and although National as a rightist party was not known as being a kindly or economically and socially beneficent force. Only seventy-two hours after the election however, the new government was forced to bail out the Bank of New Zealand (BNZ), which was in 1990 the largest bank. Originally costing $380 million, this ballooned to almost three-quarters of a billion, as the budget had to be rewritten. This birthing event had an impact on Bolger's direction of government for at least the next three years, with the first budget being nicknamed the "Mother of all Budgets." (See Wikipedia, 2012).

On 13-14 November 1990, David Gray killed twelve people at Aramoana, before police shot him dead. A small seaside town, Aramoana is situated opposite the Otago Peninsula, about 15-20 kilometres northeast of Dunedin. David Gray was a recluse who was thought of as odd, but harmless. He was unemployed. Unsurprisingly, he was a big fan of warfare, weaponry and survivalist books, and owned a decent haul of firearms and ammunition. Also unsurprisingly, he was going crazy, but sadly this was not discovered until after twelve innocent people died unnecessarily. Paranoid and a believer of fanaticism, Gray's madness came to a head on 13 November. NZ City crime and punishment website describes the unfolding of the events in their article, "The Aramoana Massacre":

"At around 8 pm Gray and his next door neighbour, Garry Holden, were heard arguing. Rifle shots were heard and Gray entered the Holden's' residence where he shot at Chiquita Holden (Garry's daughter) wounding her. Chiquita ran out of the house to raise the alarm. She discovered her father's body face down in the yard. She fled to friend Julie Ann Bryson's house. Mrs Bryson rang 111 and then took Chiquita in her van back to her house knowing Chiquita's sister, Jasmine, and Julie Ann Bryson's daughter, Rewa, were there still, having hidden when Gray shot at Chiquita.

The Holden's house was on fire and Gray was standing outside. He fired on the pair as they passed by in the van. The local men in the town were alerted to the fire and came to see what was going on. Most will never forget the sight of Gray with a balaclava rolled up over his head and a rifle in his hands as he took shots at any moving targets. Vanessa Percy was gunned down as she ran screaming down the street. Gray then shot and killed two boys, Leo and Dion Percy. Their sister, Stacey, suffered severe wounds to her abdomen. All three children were in the back of their father's Ute on their way home, when their father had seen the fire. Ross Percy, their father, and Alec Tali were shot and killed near the Ute. Gray entered the Jamieson residence and killed locals Vic Crimp and Tim Jamieson. Jimmy Dickson was killed as he looked for his dog and his wife who went looking for him watched in horror as David Gray shot Chris Cole who was out walking. She managed to crawl for help but unfortunately help had come too late. Chris Cole died in hospital.

Sergeant Stewart Guthrie , from Port Chalmers police, and Russell Anderson, the local Fire Chief, with sirens blazing and an ambulance following, approached Aramoana. Fire engines were on alert and had to remain a certain distance away until the gunman was put under restraint. They split up and began to take in the dreadful scene and to locate Gray. During this time Sergeant Stewart Guthrie was shot and killed by Gray.

The Armed Offenders Squad had been called in and they surrounded Aramoana. All care had to be used as Gray had a high powered rifle with telescopic sights and was shooting at anything that moved. They moved slowly and when the dawn came up the next day the realisation started to hit New Zealanders of what was taking place. In the dark, early the next morning, many brave police officers slowly moved in. Gray was still at large and after claiming thirteen victims had to be considered one of our worst murderers of all time. In Bill O'Brien's book, "Aramoana - The True Story" he describes the many heroic acts that the police and residents performed. An anti terrorist unit was in the area helping to co-ordinate the scene. One by one the squad entered and searched houses still not finding Gray. Finally he was located and after tear gas was thrown in, he came out of the house shooting, yelling "Kill Me". Five shots hit Gray and he was killed. The siege was finally over.

This had taken 34 hours and the dedication of the police and Armed Offenders squad, a number of whom received Gallantry Awards from the Queen.

Rewa Bryson and Jasmine Holden's bodies were found in the burnt out Holden home. Thirteen people lost their lives and a town lost it's peace and serenity. David Gray is now believed to have been schizophrenic or otherwise mentally disordered - but for whatever reason, he became one of New Zealand's most horrific mass murderers." (See NZ City, 2012).

This is the end of Book One. If you've enjoyed reading this, please look out for the second and final book in this mini-series, to be published in 2014/15. Thank you!

# Afterword

Thanks to ex-Pat Kiwis (now Aussies) Graham and Jan Poore for their first-hand experience in 1960s and 1970s New Zealand history and culture, as well as giving help and suggestions.

Also thanks to Graeme Camac-Benson for providing ideas on maintaining reader interest.

Any errors are purely my own.

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