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:
“I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire—thinner than the paper on which it is printed—then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“When the course of events shall have removed you to distant scenes of action where laurels not nurtured with the blood of my country may be gathered, I shall urge sincere prayers for your obtaining every honor and preferment which may gladden the heart of a soldier.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)