It was 25 years ago today, July 14th, 1984, that I witnessed as a teenager one of the most transformative and ultimately disastrous moments in our political history - the arrival of the Fourth Labour Government and with it the free market counter-revolution heralded by Rogernomics.

Like the dates of September 11th, 2001 and August 31st, 1997 (the death of Princess Diana), I will forever remember the events of Saturday, July 14th, 1984 like as if it was yesterday. I awoke on my parent's then dairy farm on the Taieri Plains to hear heavy rain pounding on the roof at about 6.30am. Looking back, it was probably a portent that the next six years was going to be rough on the economic and social fabric of our society. After eating breakfast and watching early morning kid's television, I spent what turned out to be the last hours of the Keynesian Social Democratic consensus era waiting to be picked up by my grandmother to be ferried into town so we could stay the night at my aunt and uncle's place in the Dunedin suburb of Corstophine while my parents journeyed to South Otago for the 40th birthday of a family friend whom, despite being a dairy factory manager, was a strong Labour supporter.

This was where I spent election night 1984 in front of my aunt and uncle's television screen alongside my two younger sisters and maternal grandmother. For days beforehand (and indeed since the time on June 14th when a very inebriated Rob Muldoon made the biggest drunken mistake of his life and called an election after being piqued by Marilyn Waring's decision to vote with Labour on their nuclear free legislation), expectations were high within me that a change to Labour would be a good thing. I remember lying in bed at the hostel for disabled schoolchildren where I was staying at the time and listening on radio to David Lange's opening address to the Labour faithful in the Christchurch Town Hall almost three weeks before polling day and being impressed by his oratorical style and the promise that Labour would heal the divisions that Muldoonism had wrought over New Zealand and bring a fresh start. Labour's media campaign was very heavily influenced by the Australian Labor Party's own campaign which had successfully brought Bob Hawke to power at the federal level in 1983.

Appeals to unity and common purpose aside, the country was clearly ready to reject Muldoon and the National Party in 1984 and the emnity towards the man was felt on both the left and right of the political spectrum. For many working class people, he was the face of the wage freeze which contained their pay rises. For the pacifists of the environmental and peace movements (who then flocked to Labour in large numbers), he and his government represented the conservative RSA generation wedded to the imperialist ANZUS alliance and the bomb. For those on the neoliberal right, he represented a conservative who had, in their eyes, become a socialist in sheep's clothing who was out to regulate the economy and limit profit maximisation. For the educated middle class social liberals, Muldoon represented a social conservatism which sought to control the lives of women, disabled people, Maori, Pacific Islanders, ethnic poeples as well as gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people in a way that was no longer seen as socially acceptable. This same group also despised Muldoon for the way he used the Cabinet and Parliament as the executive and legislative bulldozers of his will in order to trample over the civil liberties and property rights of both Pakeha and Maori New Zealanders.

'Enough was enough' went the cry and a new electoral coalition was born which sprung Labour into power on that cold Bastille Day a quarter-century ago. Quite cunningly, the libertarian millionaire businessman and former Muldoon confidante Bob Jones and his New Zealand Party split the centre-right vote and, therefore, gave Labour more than enough seats to govern in its own right (on only a 43% vote share plurality) in the then first-past-the-post electoral system. With this political move, the New Zealand Party was able to exercise effective electoral leverage over both National and Labour in that if Labour wanted to continue to govern and if National wanted to regain the Treasury benches, then it would have to win over the free market leaning support base built up by Jones.

This Labour very easily sought to do from day one. Little did I know that while sitting excitedly on the couch, cheering (much to the consternation of my National voting aunt and uncle) every Labour victory that night, that Roger Douglas and his friend Richard Prebble had been planning a treacherous reversal of nearly 70 years of Labour history by introducing a programme of free market economic and social reforms that would be popularly known by both supporters and detractors alike as 'Rogernomics'.

Douglas and Prebble had, just before the election, been trying to push their free market agenda through the Policy Council of the Labour Party. At their scheduled May meeting (just before Muldoon's election call), a bitter battle had been waged between the right led by Douglas and the left led by then party president, Jim Anderton. This huge political battle royale saw then deputy leader Geoffrey Palmer intervene and draw up a compromise economic policy statement which included pledges to hold down inflation, create jobs and extensively consult stakeholders such as business, community groups and trade unions (through the holding of an Australian-style economic summit) to determine the policy direction going forward. Palmer's compromise saved any further acrimony at that time but merely sowed the seeds of later division within the Labour Party, some of which I directly witnessed at the tumultuous 1988 party conference in Dunedin, as both left and right claimed the moral high ground in terms of how they interpreted that document to read.

All this was for the future. On that night, July 14th, 1984, a cold, snowy Dunedin night, the future of the nation had taken a decided right turn although few outside the close confines of the Labour Party political elite and the Treasury and Reserve Bank knew what was really about to happen. With Douglas having in the campaign gone around calling for a 20 percent devaluation of the NZ dollar (thereby engineering a deliberate foreign exchange crisis), Muldoon was forced by the incoming Douglas-Lange-Prebble trio to do so five days later on July 19th, 1984, thereby providing the rationale and ultimate excuse for introducing Rogernomics, which was the counter-revolutionary philosophy that finally overthrew fifty years of Keynesian Social Democracy in this country.

Within three years, unemployment had risen, many farmers had gone to the wall, income inequalities had widened with the sharemarket boom, and this country (in the one great act of the Lange Labour Government's time in office) had become nuclear free. Today, especially with the worst recession in 70 years, we are living still with the legacy of Rogernomics in the economic and social policy sense while still feeling a little bit of pride (perhaps) that we are a nuclear free nation.

For all those reasons and more, July 14th, 1984 will live on as a crucial day in our history and one which ranks alongside the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and the election of the first Liberal and Labour Governments and the granting of women's suffrage as an important milestone in our history and for all the wrong reasons in my view.