Prime Minister
Muldoon had remained National's Finance spokesman when he became party leader, and as a result became Minister of Finance as well as Prime Minister--thus concentrating enormous power in his hands. He is the last to hold both posts to date. He had a reputation as combative, and many people in political positions and the media feared openly confronting him.
Muldoon led National to victory in 1978 and 1981; however, in both elections, the Labour opposition received more popular votes across the country as a whole. This ambiguous mandate did not dilute Muldoon's agenda, and he became more emphatic and autocratic as his time in power continued.
The "Muldoon Years" featured Muldoon's obstinate and resourceful attempts to maintain New Zealand's "cradle to the grave" welfare state, dating from 1935, in the face of a changing world. The country's economy suffered the aftermath of the 1973 energy crisis, the loss of New Zealand's biggest export market upon Britain's entry to the European Economic Community, and rampant inflation.
Concerned about the use of foreign exchange during the 1970s' oil crises, Muldoon supported a scheme whereby natural gas or a dual-fuel gas–petrol system could power cars. Muldoon's 1979 budget introduced incentives to encourage the conversions, and New Zealand emerged as possibly the first country to have dual-fuel cars as a commonplace sight. However, the projection that oil prices would become ever-higher did not happen during this period.
In 1980 an abortive attempt, known as the Colonels' Coup, took place to replace Muldoon with his more economically liberal deputy, Brian Talboys. However, Talboys proved a somewhat reluctant draftee, and Muldoon saw the plotters off with relative ease. No other serious challenge to Muldoon's authority occurred in his years as Prime Minister.
Muldoon became a Companion of Honour in the 1970s, and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George in 1983, only the second New Zealand Prime Minister (after Sir Keith Holyoake) to receive a knighthood while still in office.
Read more about this topic: Robert Muldoon
Famous quotes related to prime minister:
“Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life. What do you do after you are world-famous and nineteen or twenty and you have sat with prime ministers, kings and queens, the Pope? What do you do after that? Do you go back home and take a job? What do you do to keep your sanity? You come back to the real world.”
—Wilma Rudolph (1940–1994)
“The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.”
—Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960)
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“Being prime minister is a lonely job.... you cannot lead from the crowd.”
—Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925)