market after Britain entered the European Economic Community and was affordable only because it was part of a British deal with the Yarrow shipyard to build seven RN, Chilean and RNZN Leanders at less than the cost to save shipyard jobs in Scotland. During the late 1970s, proposals for a modified Hamilton-class cutter with less range or the RN Type 21 frigate with similar anti-submarine capability to a Leander but with a smaller crew and with less AW, AA, and AD. Both these proposals and others for full combat Dutch and USS Oliver Hazard Perry frigates were rejected by the Muldoon government and in the early 1980s, a number of retired naval officers and political scientists like Helen Clark and Robert Miles were seriously debating and writing papers and articles, suggesting options such as RN OPVs, the Castle-class and the USCG's WMEC Bear-class. The navy was interested in some of these ideas, but only for the option proposed by the 1978 Defence Review of acquiring 2 OPV vessels to patrol the expanded EEZ and free the Leanders for other uses and for replacement of the inadequate and worn out Lake-class patrol vessels. After the election of the Lange Labour government, thinking on alternatives to frigates for the RNZN had moved towards purpose-built designs rather like the Irish Navy's Eithne patrol corvette, a sort of 1,800-ton high endurance corvette with Leander-like helicopter hangar and pad or small Meko 100–140 designs rather different from those built for Argentina. After the nuclear ships crisis and other events, the acquisition of some Anzac frigates was virtually certain, because the key Labour MP Jim Anderton, either accepted the Anzac ships as a necessary increased self-defence capability with the securing of a nuclear-free policy or tacitly agreed not to oppose it like Helen Clark. The new most touted off-the-shelf options in 1986–88 (the Castle and Bear-class vessels) were no longer possible, as the Scottish shipbuilders had closed and development of the Bear cutter option into a stretched vessel was effectively impossible after the ANZUS impasse. The New Zealand government's planned acquisition of the Anzac-class frigates was a major point of debate and contention: researcher Peter Greener claims that it "was possibly the most strongly debated defence purchase of the century". In New Zealand at the time, "frigate" was a dirty word, and attempts to make the replacement of the old navy ships more palatable to the