GUEST BLOG: Tadhg Stopford – The rare Genius of Sir Robert Muldoon

Its funny to write those words, but its true.

Robert Muldoon was our last economic nationalist PM. Everyone else since has been a failure; and more so by design than accident. Just follow the money. You’ll see.

Unlike his successors, Muldoon didnt see us as a playground for foreign capital. His genius was simple: he refused to surrender economic sovereignty. He saw us as players, and he was number eight in our scrum.

He believed in full employment. Not as an abstract goal, but as a moral and economic imperative.

He understood strategic state investment builds long-term national wealth.

He knew that real interest rates (???) determine whether public borrowing is a burden or a tool for national development.

(Dont worry, trust me. We will circle back to these points another day.)

Muldoon’s Think Big projects were massive investments in energy, industry, and infrastructure. They weren’t just short-term stimulus. They were about insulating New Zealand from global shocks, ensuring energy independence, and preventing the country from becoming a raw commodity exporter under foreign control. He understood a basic truth that ‘eluded’ those who came after him:

Once you sell an asset, you lose control forever.

A lesson proven brutally true when everything he built was later privatised. In the name of efficiency. But not resulting in efficiency. In the name of public interest, but with profit extraction by foreign and corporate interests. We were betrayed from within, in a coup against economic sovereignty. Just as our investments were bearing fruit.

Because, unlike the neoliberal profiteers and useful idiots (Lange) who followed him, Muldoon had grasped the vital reality that a nations wealth isnt its budget balance.

It’s its productive capacity.

It’s its natural resources.

It’s its sovereignty.

All of which have been suffocated since.

With two exceptions ”Jim Anderton (Kiwibank) and Michael Cullen (KiwiSaver) kiwi politicians have done little to rebuild national wealth. Instead, they have hollowed it out, often under the pretence of “market efficiency”. But really looking like some version of corruption instead.

How, for example, did Muldoon’s oil refinery end up in the hands of the petrol companies? Sold off in the name of efficient markets? A smart child would see that as a cartel, a con, and a political betrayal.

Privatisation is too often just a fraud. Its not inherently bad, there are times when its useful, even necessary. But in New Zealand, it has been a wealth transfer from the public to the private, from New Zealanders to foreign capital.

The Last Great National Party Leader?

Muldoon had the guts to challenge global financial orthodoxy. To resist Rogernomics, stand up to speculative finance, and prioritize public welfare. In a very strange way, this makes the old reactionary an anti colonialist. Because we have been, and continue to be, colonised by corporations.

Muldoon’s kind of courage has been absent for too long.

Jim Bolger may have been the last good man in the National Party, and, like Caesar, he was stabbed for it. But Muldoon was the last great National Party Prime Minister.

Muldoon’s flaws? Many. His manner? Uncompromising. But his economic vision? Sound.

Muldoon was a man out of time. The bankers pets took him down. Keynesianism was killed in the west. The price of his fall? New Zealand lost control of its own future. Our infrastructure, industries, and wealth were stripped away.

And yet, in hindsight, his defeat proves he was fighting the right battle.

New Zealands task now, is to reclaim what was stolen. Who are we as a nation? For forty years, we’ve been trained not to ask that question. Because if we did, we might realise that our country isn’t actually run for us.

But we should ask it. And we should ask it urgently. Because we live in interesting times, and our Tweedle Dum, Tweedle Dee leadership seems determined to make them more interesting than we ever wanted them to be. Let’s improve things.

The power is in our hands.

 

Tadhg Stopford is a cannabis activist