Robert Muldoon
Robert Muldoon was prime minister of New Zealand for nine years, from 1975 to 1984, the accountant from Auckland who won the election of 1975 with a television campaign of cartoon dancing Cossacks warning that Labour's pension scheme would bring communism, governed as his own finance minister with a control of prices, wages, interest rates, rents and the exchange rate that ended in a freeze on all of them, borrowed for the Think Big energy projects that were meant to make the country independent of imported oil, let the South African rugby team tour in 1981 and split the country in two months of street battles, and called a snap election in June 1984 while drunk on television, lost it. He refused for three days to devalue the currency as the incoming government asked while the reserves ran out. He was born in Auckland in 1921, brought up by his mother and grandmother after his father was committed to an asylum, served in the Pacific and Italy, qualified as a cost accountant and was elected for National in 1960. He was finance minister from 1967 and party leader from 1974, a short, scarred, combative man who called his opponents by their weaknesses and was called Piggy by his, and whose ordinary bloke, the voter he spoke for, was the tradesman who had bought his house and feared the unions and the young. The government of 1975 abolished the compulsory superannuation scheme and put in a universal pension at sixty that is still the largest item in the budget. The oil shocks and the loss of the British market broke the economy that Seddon had built, and Muldoon's answer was more of the same state. The carless days, the wage and price freeze of 1982, the Clyde dam, the synthetic petrol plant at Motunui and the aluminium smelter, paid for with borrowed money that doubled the public debt. The Springbok tour was a matter, he said, of the right to play sport. The riot police with batons outside the grounds at Hamilton and Wellington, and the flour bombs from a light aircraft over Eden Park, were the country's worst civil disorder of the century. He lost in July 1984 to Lange's Labour, which floated the dollar within a week of his giving way, and sat on the back benches until his death in 1992, appearing on stage in the Rocky Horror Show as the narrator.
- Lived: 1921 CE – 1992 CE
- Nationality: New Zealander
- Roles: prime minister, politician
