.jpg)
Salient. Victoria University students' Newspaper. Volume Number 39, Issue 7. April 12 [1976]
[subsection]
Last Wednesday 10,000 Wellington workers assembled at Rugby League Park to protest the slashing of their living standards. In Auckland Prime Minister Muldoon was doing his best to draw attention away from this show of mass dissatisfaction.
In a speech to the Bureau of Importers and Exporters he indicated a future tightening up on groups who disagreed with his policies, and more importantly were prepared to do something about it.
In this article Richard Suggate analyses the speech, and its implications for the future.
Muldoons speech was the most revealing since he ascended office and confirmed those negative characteristics that had been earlier outlined by Citizens for Rowling and other election commentators.
With 100 days of presidential rule by decree behind him, and about to depart on a world holiday, Robert apparently felt free to unburden himself of his most pressing national and personal pre-occupations.
That he can be do disarmingly proud of his embarrassingly neo-lithic ideas can only be an indication of the fawning lap-dogs (so-called advisers) that surround him. Too many luncheons with top business leaders, and at the Ohariu Valley Country Club have apparently convinced him that New Zealanders want the world of the bureaucrat and monopolist.
Not only by arbitrary decision and opinion-making on bikies superannuation schemes, cats, social workers and legal processes, has he alienated previous supporters. His economic policies, to anyone with a memory, are patently nothing more than the much-criticised Labour scheme of 'borrow and hope'. The National Party edition is called 'reduce the relative living standard of the working classes by all means possible.'
One expects a certain amount of distortion in all of Muldoon's speeches, but his April 7 effort contains inaccuracies, persecution mania, sabre-rattling, jingoism, and boot-licking to such an extent that one begins to wonder whether the man is capable of making political judgement in his own interest, let alone in the national interest.