Events
- 22 January: State funeral for Sir Edmund Hillary
- 5 April: A huge propane explosion at a coolstore in Tamahere kills firefighter senior station officer Derek Lovell, and seriously injures seven others.
- 5 June: A newly redesigned flag for the Governor General of New Zealand is flown for the first time at Government House, Auckland.
- 1 July: Rail transport network is renationalised as KiwiRail
- 11 July: Police Sergeant Derek Wootton (52) is struck and killed by a vehicle fleeing police, while laying road spikes at Titahi Bay.
- 1 August: Crown entities Land Transport New Zealand and Transit New Zealand merge to form the NZ Transport Agency
- 16 August: Dunedin Public Hospital is put in lockdown for a week after approximately 170 staff and patients fall ill to a norovirus outbreak, resulting in 2,300 appointments and procedures being delayed.
- 5 September: Fonterra advise Prime Minister Helen Clark of the 2008 baby milk scandal.
- 11 September: Undercover police Sergeant Don Wilkinson (47) is fatally shot in Mangere, after being discovered attempting to secretly fix a tracking device to a car.
- 8 November: John Key and the New Zealand National Party win the General Election. John Key is able to form a Government and in Helen Clark's speech she resigns as leader of the New Zealand Labour Party
- 9 November: Michael Cullen resigns as deputy leader of the Labour Party.
- 19 November: John Key is sworn in as Prime Minister
- 27 November: 2008 Air New Zealand A320 test flight crash. Air New Zealand A320 Airbus crashes into the Mediterranean during a test flight, killing five New Zealand and two German air crew.
Read more about this topic: 2008 In New Zealand
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape ... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.”
—Marilyn French (b. 1929)
“There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)