After nine long years in the political wilderness and 40 heady days back in power, by the end of its frenetic two-week first session in Parliament late in 2008 - much of it under urgency - John Key's National-led Government had firmly set its course.
The new regime plainly meant business.
In those early days of office, and riding high on the euphoria that accompanies electoral victory, Mr Key and his colleagues set about their work with a will.
Yet while it was driving its stakes into the ground, mapping out the terrain of future legislative campaigns, the electorate at large was more concerned with the enveloping recession that had struck so suddenly and calamitously that year, which threatened livelihoods, superannuation funds, the value of houses and had settled blanketing banks of dark cumulonimbus over the Land of the Long White Cloud.
It was, also, almost Christmas and many had already tuned into another channel: presents and summer holiday plans, what could and could not be afforded that year, making the best of a bad lot; and of course the summer's cricket series against the West Indies.
That is to say, the recession, while an unpleasant welcome mat for any incoming administration, also had its silver lining.
It overshadowed, at least temporarily, the unfolding incremental building blocks of what was to come.
Still, for students of politics, the signs were all there.
Some were minor and matters of relatively insignificant political "up-yours"-manship, done because they could be - a sort of gleeful reprise of the infamous Michael Cullen taunt "We won, you lost, eat that!" This was not to be unexpected: an opposition that had spent nine years raking its fingernails on the panes of executive power had suffered many small humiliations.
A degree of blood lust was understandable and some of the reverses that were signalled in those first weeks were so inspired.
A Families Commission conference was canned because $200,000 sounded like a lot of money.
Tyro Social Development Minister and former solo-benefit mum Paula Bennett allegedly had not even read the detail in papers surrounding it, but saving the taxpayer $200,000 of bureaucratic talkfest in those straitened times was a gift to the feisty newcomer.
In education, introduced standards in primary schools would lead, as predicted, to league tables, "white flight" and the accelerated ghettoisation of schools in low socioeconomic areas.
Higher fines for parents of truant children simply piled up the uncollectable debt - predominantly upon beneficiary and single-parent households.
New Health Minister Tony Ryall reinstated the troubled Hawkes Bay District Health Board in a peremptory move that would come back to haunt him.
He should not have been surprised.
The issues that put the board and health delivery in the Hawkes Bay into crisis in the first place had not been addressed.
And the decision to fund the breast cancer drug Herceptin for 12-month treatments was popularly received, even if it heralded the eventual deregulation of the pharmaceutical buy-and-supply function - previously undertaken by Pharmac - for the country's health boards.
It was only when it became apparent to an enraged electorate that the competitive disadvantage of boutique as against bulk buying would ultimately profit only the pharmaceutical giants and their agents, and that once-common drugs could only be afforded through expensive health insurance policies, that a reversion was contemplated.
But there were more indicative foundations laid in those first 40 days.
The National-Act New Zealand arm of the new Government signalled a return to the traditional alliances on several fronts, and in so doing began to repeat some of the mistakes of its predecessor: hurried legislation.
The 90-day trial period for new employees sailed through the House, although not without some spirited resistance from the Opposition, and pointed academic commentary from the sidelines - prophetically warning of the dangers of such haste.
The Government's new tax Bill won favours from employers around the country for reducing their KiwiSaver commitments, but puzzled others who found their research and development programmes undermined by the loss of tax credits.
But it was in the area of climate change that the Government signalled its most radical intent: the terms of the promised review of the Emissions Trading Scheme went so far as suggest an interrogation of the science of climate change itself; and there was the removal of incentives on sustainable biofuels and the end of a moratorium on fossil-fuelled electricity generation.
It would prove to be the overriding legacy of the Key Government - taking New Zealand from creative world-leading advocate to climate-change denying laggard.
The full implications of this reversal would only become fully apparent some years later, not least in the tourism industry as the sixth Labour government attempted to rebuild the clean, green image that had previously served it so well, and which the National-Act coalition's obeisance to unfettered commercial interests had so casually dismantled.
- Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
