Jim Bolger
Jim Bolger was prime minister of New Zealand from November 1990 to December 1997, the Taranaki dairy farmer who led the National Party to the largest victory in its history in 1990 on the promise of a decent society after Labour's reforms. His finance minister Ruth Richardson then delivered the mother of all budgets of 1991, which cut the benefits by a fifth, charged for hospital beds, and ended compulsory union membership under the Employment Contracts Act. Rogernomics became Ruthanasia and the country's welfare state was remade a second time by the party that had promised to stop it. He sacked Richardson after the election of 1993, which he won by one seat. He governed the rest of the decade as the man who settled things. There were the Treaty of Waitangi settlements, the fiscal envelope of a billion dollars and the Tainui settlement of 1995 and Ngai Tahu's of 1997 with the Crown's apology in the Queen's own hand, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the surplus. There was the referendum of 1993 that changed the electoral system from first-past-the-post to proportional representation against his advice, and the first coalition under it in 1996 with Winston Peters's New Zealand First, which took nine weeks to make and a year to break him. He was born in Opunake in 1935 to Irish immigrants, left school at fifteen for the farm, and was a Federated Farmers official, entered parliament for King Country in 1972. He was Muldoon's labour minister. He took the party from Jim McLay in 1986 after the defeat of 1984. The coalition's price, Peters as treasurer and deputy, and the cabinet's discontent were used by Jenny Shipley, who took the caucus while he was at the Commonwealth conference in Edinburgh in October 1997 and told him on his return that she had the numbers. He resigned in December and she was the country's first woman prime minister, for two years. He was ambassador to Washington from 1998 to 2001. He chaired the state coal company, the post office bank Kiwibank, and the government's working group on fair pay agreements in 2018, which recommended the sectoral bargaining his own government had abolished. He has said that the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s went too far and that he had been wrong about the unions. That is a large thing for a prime minister to say and which he has kept saying at ninety.
- Lived: 1935 CE – ?
- Nationality: New Zealander
- Roles: prime minister, politician
