Deane a key driver in steering NZ to market-driven economy

Dr Roderick Deane

Last year Dr Roderick Deane told the Herald his success in life and his reputation as a key figure in the economic transformation needed for New Zealand to "re-join the world" could be attributed to the cooking of his wife Gillian.

"Those [commerce] jobs weren't the result of headhunter work," he said. "It was dinner parties.

"Gillian is a wonderful cook so all our lives we have known a wide array of people and been well networked."

So it was that Dr Deane revealed the secret of his success - the dinner parties which led to business cards with CEO on them and chairmanships of companies including Telecom, Fletcher Challenge, and ANZ National Bank.

Yesterday, Dr Deane severed his ties with Telecom, effective from the end of the month.

Considered one of the country's best business brains, he came from a childhood in an Auckland returned soldiers transit camp and a state house.

He claimed he wasn't that good at maths at primary school, but soon caught up. He graduated from Victoria University with a BCom and PhD in economics.

He had stints at the Union Steamship Company, the International Monetary Fund in Washington and as chief economist of the Reserve Bank in 1976.

In 1982, when he was 40, he became deputy governor, with whisperings of economic reforms and the need to remove regulatory controls on the economy.

In 1986 he became chairman of the State Services Commission during one of the biggest overhauls the public service had seen. A year later, as the first government departments were becoming profit-seeking state-owned enterprises, the dinner parties paid off.

He was handpicked as the chief executive of the biggest of the SOEs, Electricorp, by multi-millionaire John Fernyhough.

In six years, Dr Deane and Mr Fernyhough turned it from a hulking government department into a hugely profitable corporation, albeit at the cost of 25 per cent of the staff.

In 1992, he was appointed to perform the same magic on Telecom, reforming the company with layoffs, a push for better service and a recognition of the need to keep up with changing technology to ward off increasing pressure from competitors.

In 1999 he left the job to become chairman.

By then, he was also chairman of ANZ Banking Group (New Zealand) and TransAlta. Soon after he also took over as chairman of Fletcher Challenge and became a driving force in its restructuring.

He has been called a key driver in the transition to a market-driven economy. Detractors have given him nicknames such as Hatchet Man, and Dr Death.

Sir Rob Muldoon said: "His principal defect is an inability to comprehend the importance of his policies on people."

In a Listener profile in 1994, he said he did not like confrontation, and layoffs were tough but necessary.

Some stories reveal he loves surfing and the biggest devotion of his life was the IHC. He was president when it bought about 700 houses and moved people out of psychopaedic wards into the community.

He loves the arts and science and both profit from income from his "significant" financial interests.

He is chairman of Te Papa Museum, and a patron of the NZ Symphony Orchestra and the IHC.

Dr Deane appointed Theresa Gattung as his replacement in 2000, despite acknowledging it was high-risk and that she was an outsider.

Last year he said he had plenty to entertain him once the reins were handed over.

"If I was not in a corporate space, I would have a tonne of things to keep me interested.

"I love music, reading, and technology, so at some stage, maybe not for a few years yet, I will ease out of the corporate space. If I don't get eliminated by other means."