Former PM Jim Bolger, the ‘great helmsman’ of the 90s, dies at 90

Thursday, 16 October 2025

Former Prime Minister Jim Bolger has died after months of treatment for kidney failure. He was 90.

Bolger died peacefully surrounded by his nine children, 18 grandchildren and his wife, Joan, on Wednesday.

“Over the period of his illness, Jim and the family have greatly appreciated the support and companionship of so many friends near and far,” the Bolger family said in a statement.

Tributes have flowed in from Bolger’s successors and one-time rivals, including Prime Ministers Christopher Luxon and Helen Clark, and his former caucus colleague and coalition partner Winston Peters.

A career marked by change

Bolger came to power in a landslide victory for the National Party in 1990, before winning two more elections in 1993 and 1996, then being ousted in a caucus coup.

His time in power saw New Zealand go through massive change, including the introduction of MMP, the end of compulsory unionism, the first major Treaty of Waitangi settlements, the creation of the New Zealand honours system, and the creation of Te Papa.

It was also marked by the huge economic and political headwinds confronting him just days after he entered office, when he became aware of the need to bail out the Bank of New Zealand at a cost of $720 million - about $1.6 billion in 2025 dollars.

This was followed by a period of austerity led by his finance minister Ruth Richardson, who slashed welfare and other payments in her 1990 mini-budget and “Mother of All Budgets” in 1991.

Nicknamed the “great helmsman,” he was the only prime minister to lead the country under both the First Past the Post and Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) systems, winning power in 1996 by negotiating a coalition deal with his former Cabinet colleague Winston Peters, by then leading the young NZ First party.

He was ousted while overseas in 1997 by Jenny Shipley, who had chafed at the amount of power shared with NZ First in the deal.

Following politics, Bolger served in a huge variety of public roles, including as chair of NZ Post, Kiwibank, and KiwiRail, Chancellor of Waikato University, US ambassador, and as the head of the sixth Labour government’s Fair Pay Agreements Working Group.

The boy from Taranaki

Bolger was born in 1935 in Taranaki in an Irish Catholic family who had recently arrived in the country.

He was the last New Zealand prime minister not to do any tertiary education, instead quitting school at age 15 to work on the family dairy farm.

Bolger married Joan in 1963.

He rose to national politics through Federated Farmers, joining the National Party and eventually winning the brand new King Country parliamentary seat in 1972.

Bolger would be the only politician to ever hold this seat, which was abolished when New Zealand moved to MMP in 1996 while he was prime minister.

He rose steadily through the ranks, entering Robert Muldoon’s Cabinet in 1977 and participating in unsuccessful plans to unseat Muldoon as leader and replace him with his free marketeer deputy, Brian Talboys.

When Muldoon was defeated in the 1984 election, Bolger made an attempt to replace him as National Party leader, but lost to Jim McLay - known as “city Jim” to Bolger’s “country Jim”.

He was elected as McLay’s deputy but remained set on the top job, challenging McLay unsuccessfully once in 1985 and successfully in early 1986.

Bolger lost the subsequent 1987 election to David Lange’s Labour Party but managed to retain his hold over the party, even as fiery National MP Winston Peters began to out-poll him as preferred prime minister.

The ‘Great Helmsman’ in power

Bolger won National a gigantic landslide in 1990, winning 67 of 97 seats.

He had campaigned on a return to a “decent society” after a furious pace of reform under the fourth Labour government.

But his popularity and that of the government was soon dented following radical cuts to government spending and a broken promise on ending the superannuation “surcharge”.

These cuts were epitomised in the welfare-slashing 1990 mini-budget and 1991 “Mother of All Budgets”, which welfare advocates continue to criticise as cruel to this day. They were undertaken at a time of high unemployment when the Government was also undertaking radical workplace reforms, hugely reducing the power of unions.

One promise Bolger did not break was to undertake a referendum on the voting system, a promise Labour had made but not followed through on in the 1987 election.

While Bolger himself was against MMP and favoured a new upper house, his government enacted a two-stage referendum in 1992 and 1993 that brought the radical change to New Zealand’s voting laws, delivered by voters seemingly determined to punish both National and Labour.

He faced a huge challenge in 1993 but managed to edge out a two-seat victory against Labour’s Mike Moore.

Soon after the election he removed Ruth Richardson, the architect of his first term’s radical fiscal policy, from her role as finance minister, leading to her quitting his government.

This signalled a softer approach to economic policy for the term, which was beset by a chaotic confusion of new parties and coalitions as MPs prepared for the approaching first MMP election in 1996, which would also see the destruction of many electorate seats.

Bolger ended up leading not just one but several coalition and minority governments with the support of breakaway MPs over the 1993 term.

Yet his government continued to undertake major reforms, including the passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act in 1994, a lasting legacy of Richardson’s.

A staunch Republican, Bolger attempted to move New Zealand away from the British system, creating a new New Zealand honours system and proposing to end recourse to the Privy Council. His National Party caucus was generally less keen on this, and it was his 1996 opponent Helen Clark who would eventually create the new Supreme Court to replace the Privy Council in New Zealand’s judicial system.

Bolger became a member of the Order of New Zealand in the 1998 New Year’s Honours. He had declined a knighthood.

In foreign affairs Bolger’s government attempted to pivot the country closer to the growing economies of Asia, and prove to the public that it too was committed to a Nuclear Free Pacific.

Bolger sent a freighter to the Pacific to help support protesters against France resuming nuclear testing in the region, and unsuccessfully sued the French government in the International Court of Justice.

His government saw New Zealand sign its first major Treaty of Waitangi deals, including the Sealord deal in 1992 and the Tainui deal in 1995.

Bolger was also instrumental in pushing forward a national museum at Te Papa, despite some pushback from his Cabinet colleagues, who baulked at the cost in a time of straitened finances.

Many doubted Bolger would be able to work with his old caucus colleague Peters when the latter wound up as the “king-maker” at the 1996 election.

But a deal was hammered out and New Zealand’s first MMP government began.

It was not to last. Shipley organised a caucus coup against Bolger while he was travelling overseas in 1997.

Bolger resigned rather than being voted out, and retired from his seat in 1998.

“When you get to 90, and reflecting back over my variety of positions I’ve had across the world, and the countries I’ve visited, which are without number, there’s so many that it's just been very fortunate,“ he told RNZ in an interview earlier this year.

'I've had a wonderful life with a wonderful wife and family. It's all been good.'

The former prime minister has been on dialysis since kidney failure in 2024. He is survived by his wife Joan, nine children and 18 grandchildren.