Politician, conservationist, and busy volunteer honoured

Monday, 2 June 2025

Ruth Richardson CNZM ‒ fiscal policy reformer

Ruth Richardson might be best known for her “mother of all budgets” while Finance Minister in 1991, but her King’s Birthday honour hails her pioneering work on fiscal policy.

Richardson, MP for Selwyn from 1981 to 1994, was the New Zealand’s first female Minister of Finance and principal architect of the nation's wave of market-style reform in the 1990s. Her Fiscal Responsibility Act 1994 is now widely regarded as setting international best practice.

She is now a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services as a Member of Parliament and to governance.

Richardson said when the Jim Bolger-led National Government was elected in 1990, New Zealand was at “huge risk”.

“We were drowning in a sea of debt, debt forecasts and runaway public expenditure.”

A course correction was needed, she said, and the reforms she championed left the country with a legacy of high employment, growth, budget surpluses and low debt.

“Those budgets were circuit breakers. They got the books back in the black”.

Richardson said that work was now being recognised “more than 30 years later”.

After leaving Parliament, Richardson established a global consultancy for New Zealand-style public policy reform.

Her parallel governance career included directorships and board roles at private and public companies in the agri-business, information technology, biotech, finance and utilities sectors.

She served as a director of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand from 1999 to 2004. She is a trustee of the Christchurch Early Intervention Trust, which runs the Champion Centre, which provides early intervention services to young children with significant disabilities.

Richardson was recently appointed chair of the New Zealand Taxpayers Union, which she said aligned with her long interest in fiscal responsibility and preventing government waste.

Diana Shand MNZM ‒ environmental leader

Diana Shand spent her career making connections between humanity, prosperity, sustainability and the environment.

Those interwoven threads led to her being unveiled as a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in this year’s King’s Birthday honours.

In the early 1980s, her house on Montreal St was a hub of political and environmental activism, including plans to protest the 1981 Springbok Tour.

Future Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer attended Labour-Green meetings in the house. Lianne Dalziel, the former Labour MP and Christchurch mayor, flatted there; as did landscape architect Di Lucas.

Shand made a career of public service. As a Human Rights Commissioner in the 1980s, she established and led its South Island office and focused on women’s issues. She was an inaugural Environment Canterbury councillor, serving 1989 to 2004, where she focused on public transport, climate change, sustainability, biodiversity and smog.

She was a community member of the New Zealand delegation to the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, known as the Rio Earth Summit.

When she got back from Rio, she worked tirelessly to explain sustainability and biodiversity: “Fairly new terms then.”

She held roles in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature between 2004 and 2016 and served as regional councillor for Oceania.

She worked hard to establish New Zealand eco-tourism as a sector, realising that “it’s our landscape and our nature which really makes us so very special”.

Shand chairs Forest and Bird Society’s North Canterbury Branch.

Jim Lilley MNZM ‒ charity volunteer

From cancer fundraising to wildlife rehabilitation, water rescues to RSA dawn services, Jim Lilley has spent decades helping where help is needed.

His years of voluntary work have seen him named a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to conservation and the community.

Lilley began picking up wildlife knowledge while volunteering with conservation groups, rescuing and helping injured seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds along the Canterbury coast.

One troublesome customer was an elephant seal named Dumbo, which was rescued more than 600 times ‒ including once from a rubbish bin ‒ over several years between Kaikoura and Sumner beach.

In 1992, Lilley established Marine Watch, leading volunteer groups and writing best practice manuals which are still used today.

Between 1999 and 2005 he was the honorary national manager of the Hector’s Dolphin post-mortem database.

Lilley joined the Canterbury Coastguard in 1994, after visiting one day to say thanks for help with a wildlife rescue. He ended up volunteering for 17 years as a training officer, skipper and communications officer and was involved in the rescue of more than 500 people.

He helped organise the South Island’s largest search and rescue exercise over three days in 2007, and helped run welfare centres for evacuees during the Christchurch earthquakes.

Another achievement was instigating a biennial scooter cancer charity ride to the West Coast after persuading “a large group of other lunatics”.

In 2014, Lilley joined the executive committee for the Christchurch Memorial RSA. As current president, he organises the Anzac and Armistice Day services.

Lilley said he was stunned to be recognised. His community work was “a very big part of who I am”.

Volunteers with a willingness to help don’t need specialised knowledge and can learn on the job from others, he said.

“New Zealand would tip over if it weren’t for volunteers.”