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During the local body election campaign that year, the Green Party in Wellington
launched a petition to the local council asking it to support the establishment of a Bank of
Wellington. However, signatures were very much harder to obtain for this petition than
they had been for that opposing the sale of Trust Bank in Christchurch in 1996. As a result,
the Green Party suggestion died a natural death and no bank materialised. It was all just
too difficult.
Many other efforts to establish regional banks in New Zealand were made during
the 1990s. Bruce Dyer in Nelson set up a Nelson Regional Community Bank Committee,
and campaigned to raise NZ$15 million to start a bank. Some noises were also reported in
Hawke’s Bay, and in Selwyn District, a small local authority in North Canterbury, efforts
were made to start a bank linked with an American firm that ran a community bank. The
New Zealand branch of the Commonwealth Association for Local Action and Economic
Development, Commact Aotearoa, organised a successful seminar on community banking
in Wellington in 1999 and brought an executive from Bendigo Bank to describe their
model. And, of course, there has been one major success story of a New Zealand­owned
bank in recent years: Kiwibank.
Kiwibank
During the 1999 election campaign, the Alliance Party promised to establish a People’s
Bank using as its base New Zealand Post, one of the few state­owned enterprises that had
resisted privatisation.
Jim Anderton, leader of the Alliance, told voters that 10,000 jobs had been lost in the
banking sector between 1995 and 2000 through the loss of virtually all our banks to
overseas ownership. 34 In 1998, ANZ­Postbank, ASB Bank, National Bank and Westpac