1987: Telecom New Zealand Materialises
July 9, 2019
By AHNZ
Doctor 4.0 (Jon Pertwee) is the Doctor Who actor I like best. I had no idea he worked for the New Zealand Government until stumbling upon it just now! Pertwee would have been 100 years old today.
Labour 4.0 used their State-Owned Enterprises Act (1986) to wrest control of New Zealand’s telephones away from the Post Office. In the same stroke, the Post Office’s banking function was taken away and they were encouraged to focus on taking care of the mail. At one time Roger Douglas and Labour 4.0 seemed to me genuine free market reformers. Revolutionary moves like this ticked the right political and economic freedom boxes. Where I found fault was that it was done without moral consent.
The Forth Labour Government were really big on shrinking The State and breaking up protectionist rackets with a seemingly virtuous zeal. We libertarians thought they were doing it for us, for liberty! Now I accept Labour 4.0 were instituting radical reforms to cut the legs out of their political opponents, to unplug their enemies from the power supply with a view to plugging themselves into it.- 1985: Free Market Honey
When Telecom (now known as Spark) materialised on 1 April 1987 one of the things it inherited from New Zealand Post were five Pertwee advertisements. Costing the public some $400,000, they never aired on television at all. The new Telecom didn’t want them!
Filmed in Wellington, The Doctor interacts with Kiwis to demonstrate the wonders of Telecom’s phone system. Only three of the five clips are known to survive. They are described here and able to be viewed here. One of them features Peter Rowley as the chauffeur of a broken down Mercedes. The expensive waste of money for material that never made it out of the vault made for a minor public scandal at the time.¹
The new telephone mafia monopoly, Telecom, wanted to set its own marketing agenda. They wanted to establish their own brand and use the advertising occasions to pay their own chosen people. And, they didn’t want to have that NZ Post logo stuck to their product. As for NZ Post, perhaps they thought they were doing the right thing for the hand-over to go ahead with marketing business as usual rather than freezing operations in the intermission. More likely, in my opinion, someone had a job to do and were determined to do it anyway as to justify their existence. They knew their time was coming to an end so decided to go off on one more spending spree to blow some public money in this End Game scenario.
Maybe the NZ Post head of marketing liked Doctor Who, had half a million bucks in their account to use or lose. Maybe their nephew was the director and needed a job? Maybe they owed a production company a favour? Maybe we’ll never know. Just another example of Old Government refusing to go quietly.
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See also: 1939: Genesis of the Cybermen
1 Jon Pertwee – The Telecom Commercials By Graham Howard; doctorwho.org.nz
image ref. Douglous and friends; Osborne, Geoff Auckland Sun; Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections
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