It was 30 years ago today. Former Cabinet minister Michael Bassett would go on to describe the anticipation, the nervous excitement, in his book Working with David: Inside the Lange Cabinet: "During the last days of March 1987 ministers held on to their hats, hoping that the first day of the SOEs wouldn't result in too many April Fool's Day jokes."

April 1 was a Wednesday. Did it turn out to be funny? Not really. As Bassett writes, within a week of the radical conversion of government departments into State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), 4732 people had taken voluntary redundancy and another 100 went for early retirement. That is close to 5000 redundancies in one week, largely in small town and rural New Zealand.

"In all, 19,133 departmental workers in Lands and Survey, Forestry, the Electricity Division, Civil Aviation, State Coal and the Government Accommodation Board were affected by the changes," Bassett wrote.

Files Political reformers David Lange, left, and Roger Douglas peruse a copy of Douglas' book Towards Prosperity.

Then-deputy prime minister Geoffrey Palmer predicted it would be the biggest change in New Zealand public sector history. He was right. It came as a kind of blitzkrieg. Then-finance minister Roger Douglas argued that it had to happen quickly. Bassett: "Speed was enormously important to managing change. As [then-minister of labour, state services and State Owned Enterprises] Stan Rodger would observe years later, sometimes there were so many rabbits loose in the field that opponents of change weren't sure which to try to shoot."

READ MORE: Speaking for the generation born after Rogernomics

Act fast and keep them guessing. In the 1980s, this was called Rogernomics rather than neo-liberalism, the term we would now use for a winding back of the state and development of commercial models to replace it. The purpose of the State Owned Enterprises Act was "to strip government trading departments of their social objectives and turn them into profit-making standalone businesses," as an online history of the State Services Commission puts it.

JOHN HAWKINS/FAIRFAX NZ Tourists on the Southern Scenic Route, which was developed during the mass redundancies of the 1980s.

Douglas had been strongly ideological when he pushed the ideas in a book called There's Got To Be A Better Way! He asked, "Are government departments necessary? Are they doing the job? Can they be trimmed? Be ruthless with the answers."

John Patterson of Christchurch remembers those days. He was living in Invercargill where he was the district building supervisor for Lands and Survey, which was set to be disestablished on April 1, 1987. Some of it became the Department of Survey and Land Information; another chunk merged with part of the former Forest Service and became the Department of Conservation.

There was more to this than paper-shuffling or a rebranding of the public service in a brave new commercial environment. The image that has come down to us is of a grey, Gliding On-style world of cardigan-wearers on long tea breaks who must suddenly face a harsh but necessary reality. But the truth was more complicated.

IAIN MCGREGOR/FAIRFAX NZ John Patterson found that lessons learned during the upheaval of mass unemployment came in handy after the Canterbury earthquakes.

"People think of state servants as being in an office," Patterson says. "But they were coal miners and forest workers as well. You get a place like Tuatapere where the forest workers were laid off – it affects all the shops and pubs, the whole place."

The narrative from Wellington was that the public service was padded and inefficient. Thirty years on, this has remained the dominant story about the reforms of the 1980s.

The government was pouring money "straight down the drain" by subsidising State Coal Mines, Douglas said in an interview published in the Waikato Times on the most inauspicious of days – April 1, 1987. He claimed that every State Coal Mines employee cost the country $122,000 a year.

"They said the Forest Service was way over-staffed," Patterson says. "Well, it was if you want to take it on a commercial basis, but it was over-staffed because prior to that, the Forest Service was taking people who couldn't get a job. You're better planting trees than sitting on the dole. If you look at everything from the accountant's balance sheets, it was inefficient."

In many ways, 1986 was worse than 1987, Patterson remembers. He was chairman of the Public Service Association (PSA) in Invercargill, which made him a kind of "father confessor". People who worried about the then-rumoured overhaul of the public service poured out their worries and concerns. As ever, certainty – when it eventually arrived – was better than doubt.

"The tensions grew. I remember one day in our own office, two women who were friends were nearly at blows. That's when I started to realise that people worry far more about what they don't know than what they do. When they do know, they can cope."

Patterson was one of the victims of the restructuring when Lands and Survey vanished into history. He finished on March 31 and started with the Social Impact Unit on April 1. The unit's role was to monitor the effects of restructuring on communities and individuals, and to identify needs. "That was pretty unique, really."

He would knock on doors across Southland. First stop: the mining communities of Ohai and Nightcaps. State Coal Mines had turned into Coal Corp overnight – it was later renamed Solid Energy. "They started by closing two mines and sacking the men who worked there."

He says that he hit Ohai just as the last union meeting was finishing and the miners were signing on to the unemployment benefit. All the men were together but where were the women? The district nurse told Patterson that they were at home crying.

Why were all the women weeping? Patterson and the district nurse got the key to the village hall and organised a meeting by phoning Invercargill radio stations. The hall filled up; he was the only man there.

"It is one meeting that will live with me forever and it was a big lesson. I learned that in a disaster of any kind, you bring the people together."

By the time he got to the forestry towns Tuatapere and Tapanui, the meetings had became known as "roadshows" and they had expanded to include representatives from the Department of Labour, Social Welfare, the Inland Revenue Department and the Housing Corporation, as well as a financial adviser for those who received redundancy payments and superannuation in a lump sum.

People were rich overnight but, then again, they weren't. Inflation was at nearly 20 per cent in 1987 and mortgage interest rates passed 20 per cent by the middle of the year. Unemployment was not high nationally but it smaller towns like Tuatapere it was at around 80 per cent, Patterson says. The 1987 stock market crash came just six months after the first wave of public service redundancies "and many people lost all their redundancy money and superannuation".

They were volatile times. While it can seem like there was a ruthlessness in laying off so many people at once, assistance was offered. The Social Impact Unit was one example. Patterson also remembers that the Housing Corporation offered to buy houses from people who had to move for a new job, which had the perverse effect of depressing the market for those who stayed behind.

He has more positive memories of the Community Employment Group created by the Department of Labour. It funded community organisations and took the kinds of chances that seem, 30 years later, to have been relatively daring. Is there a contrast between then and now?

"When you're setting up a community group nowadays, you have nearly got to employ a full-time accountant and full-time lawyer. But they were taking chances to get people up and started."

Some good things came out of this period, from the empowering of people who thought for a time they had been left with nothing. The Southern Scenic Route tourist highway was dreamed up during a meeting at Tuatapere. There was the renovation of historic buildings in Oamaru. There was Whale Watch in Kaikoura.

All of those examples suggested that tourism and related service industries might grow to at least partially replace declining extractive industries and manufacturing. People in the provinces would now produce experiences.

Revolution was permanent. Thousands more were laid off. Patterson became "the expert on unemployment" across the south.

"The steady restructuring of department after department kept going for month after month and lives were shattered, for a while," he says. "In one way or another they started getting their lives back and life went on. What got me, looking back on it, was the way people rallied around each other."

After the Social Impact Unit, Patterson helped with the Department of Conservation's first restructure, then was employed by Coal Corp as it closed further mines. The newly-formed Telecom was also "making big changes regularly and each time they got me in to help the staff they were kicking out".

He discovered that a long, cosy period of full employment in New Zealand had not encouraged the acquisition of new skills, continuing education and lifelong learning. Older workers were especially exposed when major change came. Some had no idea how to go about even getting another job. Basic CV writing skills were taught.

In 1989, the same year the Social Impact Unit was disbanded, Patterson founded the Mature Employment Service in Invercargill and was its national co-ordinator for most of the 1990s. It eventually had 26 centres across New Zealand.

"The centres were run by unemployed people helping each other," he says. "It makes life a lot easier when you find you are not on your own."

Other dates from that decade are marked. Homosexual Law Reform in 1986 prompted nostalgic articles 30 years later. Expect a flurry of stories remembering the stockmarket crash of October 1987 or the end of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But 30 years after Rogernomics? That is less likely to be recalled.

It has occurred to Patterson that the social disaster of mass unemployment foreshadowed the disaster of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes in Canterbury. The same community responses were needed: public meetings, touring roadshows of experts, shared information.

He set up an Older Generation Forum in Christchurch in 2012. He wrote in The Press that "there are a lot of skills and experience and qualifications within our age group. Some of us saw towns and cities rebuilt after World War II. In fact I started my apprenticeship as a builder as they rebuilt Newcastle in England."

As in 1986 and 1987, there was a realisation after the earthquakes that confusion or uncertainty were often the greatest enemies. People want answers, even if it is bad news.

"The older people I was working with after the earthquakes, they could cope if they knew what was going on. So 30 years on, it is still relevant.

"Cabinet said it had to happen," he says of the restructuring. "They were probably right. But it could have happened in a different way.

"Same with the earthquakes. It could have been done a hell of a lot better. But I've been saying that from the start."