Labour’s enthusiasm for privatising state assets had ebbed but, in the early 1990s, bulldozing the past to make way for different sort of future was still National government preoccupation. NZ Rail’s sale to an American consortium in July 1993, with merchant bankers Fay Richwhite securing 40 percent holding, was decision with consequences that still reverberate. In September 1994 the Housing Corporation sold $1 billion prime rate mortgages to the ANZ and Countrywide banks and in November, EDS NZ, subsidiary of American multinational General Motors, bought the government’s GCS computer company. National’s most ardent reformer, Ruth Richardson, lost the finance portfolio following the 1993 election and resigned her Selwyn seat, precipitating an August 1994 by-election won narrowly by the government. Her departure brought to an end decade of change unprecedented since the Liberal government’s reforms of the 1890s.
Anthony Ellison, Sunday Star-Times, November 20 1994
From the NZ Cartoon Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library, P O Box 12349, Wellington, Tel/fax 04-474 3154
The national collection of cartoons and caricatures