MikeB4:

 

He was a whiskey fueled nut case that came within a whisker of ruining this nation. The government had circa 30 days funding remaining and at risk of not being able to pay the public service payroll and defaulting on debt repayment. The country was on the brink of bankruptcy.

 

To make matters worse he drove a Rover 3500, unforgivable.

 

The Rover thing is pretty terrible tbh.

But what would you do in his case? His answer to global economic headwind was to try and make the country more self-sufficient and develop infrastructure. The difference between his mob and the current lot is he actually spent the money to try and do it, and it didn't pan out. If it did, NZ could have been a Norway or a Finland, but that's not how it went down.

I'll also note the whole devaluation crisis was caused because he didn't trust the advice coming out of Treasury that Lange was getting, and drew on his considerable experience to refuse to devalue. In one of his books - I can't remember which one - he made a pretty convincing case that he thought Treasury were off their nut and pointed to the later reforms as evidence that Lange was better at dressing up what he was being told as fact than the Treasury were at putting together sound advice. I can't recall whether he explicitly said it was done with the aim to curry favour with the new PM-elect but I believe he strongly suggested it. Hard to believe he would be a beacon of state sector neutrality now and then, but that's a much less sexier anecdote than drunkenly calling a snap election. Ironically, he and Clark shared a lot of traits as leaders but Muldoon is always held up as some sort of bogeyman.

I can't defend the abysmal abuses of executive power, but just note that his interventions in the economy were made on principal and actually carried out. Currently we have a minister handing out Government money and telling industry players to vote for him if they want it to continue, with little scrutiny or oversight from the PM, and that's pretty much it.