It’s a toss up.
Ranking New Zealand’s finance ministers is unavoidably contestable. Reasonable people argue about who was the most transformational, who handled crisis best, who built the most durable institutions. The top of the list looks different depending on what you weight.
The bottom of the list does not. Two names sit clearly below the rest, and the case for each is straightforward enough that the only real disagreement is which one ranks last.
Sir Robert Muldoon held the finance portfolio from 1967 to 1972, and again concurrently with the prime ministership from 1975 to 1984. Grant Robertson held it from 2017 to 2023. Different eras. Different failures. The same end result. Each left the country materially worse off than they found it, and each handed his successor a substantially harder job than the one he had inherited.
Sir Robert Muldoon, 1975 to 1984
Muldoon inherited a difficult position. The world had moved against New Zealand. Britain had joined the European Economic Community in 1973, severing the country’s privileged access to its largest export market. The 1973 oil shock had quadrupled the price of imported energy. The long postwar commodity boom was over. Stagflation was global, and most developed-country leaders of the era ended their tenures with ugly economic records.
That partial defence is real. It does not save him.
The single most consequential decision of his career came in his first weeks in office. Norm Kirk’s Labour government had legislated a contributory compulsory workplace superannuation scheme that would have started building a national savings pool from 1975. Muldoon dismantled it. The famous television advertisement showing Cossack dancers warning that compulsory super would let foreigners control New Zealand was campaign material for the 1975 election that brought him to power.
Australia kept its equivalent scheme. The Australian superannuation pool is now over A$4 trillion. The New Zealand equivalent started from zero in 2007 when KiwiSaver launched. The compounding cost of that single decision, taken in the first weeks of a nine-year tenure, runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars in foregone national savings. No other New Zealand finance minister has taken a single decision that large and that destructive.
He replaced the cancelled scheme with a universal pay-as-you-go pension at age 60, unfunded. It was politically irresistible and fiscally disastrous. Fifty years later it is still distorting Crown accounts and is the principal reason the Cullen Fund had to be built in 2001.
The macroeconomic record across the nine years that followed was as bad as anything in the modern OECD. Inflation peaked above 17 percent in 1980. The currency was devalued repeatedly. The 1982 to 1984 wage and price freeze required an actual bureaucracy to police prices and distorted every market it touched. The carless days regime of 1979 was symbolic of the broader interventionist instinct, requiring households to nominate a day each week when they could not drive their car.
Muldoon refused to allow the Reserve Bank to operate at arm’s length, preferring to direct monetary policy himself from the Beehive. Treasury and Reserve Bank officials of the era have since described being afraid to give him honest advice. The 1989 Reserve Bank Act, which created the inflation-targeting framework that gave New Zealand decades of price stability, was passed under David Caygill specifically as a reaction to what Muldoon had done with monetary policy.
Net public debt rose from around 5 percent of GDP when he took office to roughly 35 percent of GDP when he left. Gross public debt rose much more. By 1984 the country’s foreign reserves were effectively at zero, the Bank of New Zealand was technically insolvent, and overseas commentators were comparing New Zealand’s sovereign credit position to Argentina’s. The snap election that ended his career was reportedly called while drunk. He then refused to authorise the post-election devaluation that the incoming government needed to stabilise the situation, triggering a brief but genuine constitutional crisis.
The strongest partial defence of the record sits in the Think Big energy projects. The surviving infrastructure — the Clyde Dam, the Methanex methanol plants, the Marsden Point refinery in its operational decades — has earned the country back many times its construction cost over four decades, and the case for that reappraisal has been made in detail elsewhere on this site. The infrastructure is real. It does not balance the rest of the ledger. A few useful refineries and a hydro dam do not offset the cancellation of a national savings scheme that would now be worth several hundred billion dollars, an inflation pulse that destroyed real incomes, and a 1984 handover in which the country was being talked about as a sovereign default risk.
Grant Robertson, 2017 to 2023
Robertson inherited the opposite of Muldoon’s situation. Sir Michael Cullen had taken net Crown debt to zero across the 2000s. Sir Bill English had managed the recovery from the global financial crisis and the Christchurch earthquakes without losing fiscal discipline. By the time Robertson took the portfolio in October 2017, net core Crown debt was 22.2 percent of GDP, the books were close to balanced, and the institutional architecture — the Super Fund, KiwiSaver, an independent Reserve Bank with a clear inflation target — was the strongest a New Zealand finance minister had inherited in fifty years.
Across the COVID period it rose to a peak of 37.5 percent in 2022 on the same measure, and although it eased back somewhat by his exit, the trajectory was a near-doubling against the books he had inherited. By the fiscal standard set by his predecessors, he fell well short.
The COVID period is a real partial defence and needs to be acknowledged. The 2020 wage subsidy at scale was defensible and almost every developed-country finance minister did something comparable. Most of the world ran large deficits in 2020 and 2021. Inflation in 2022 and 2023 was substantially globally driven by post-pandemic supply chains and the war in Ukraine. None of this is in dispute.
The defence stops working in 2022. Once the acute phase of the pandemic was over, fiscal policy needed to tighten in coordination with the Reserve Bank’s interest-rate response. It did not. Robertson kept spending into the inflation pulse. New Zealand inflation hit 7.3 percent in mid-2022, the highest reading in 32 years. Comparable economies that tightened fiscal more decisively after the pandemic ended up with shorter, milder inflation episodes. Australia, the obvious comparator, did better.
The core public service grew by approximately 16,000 full-time equivalents during his time in the chair, a rise of about 34 percent, much of it as permanent staff that subsequent governments have struggled to reduce without significant disruption. A series of structural reorganisations — the Three Waters reform programme, Te Aka Whai Ora, the Public Interest Journalism Fund — together absorbed something like $1.5 billion of identifiable spend across the term and have since been substantially repealed, wound back, or reabsorbed into existing departments, leaving no enduring institutional asset behind. The opportunity cost of that spend was set out in detail in an earlier article in this series.
By the time of the September 2023 Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update, Treasury was forecasting deficits over the next four years, with the projected return to operating surplus pushed back to 2026/27. The path to surplus had been delayed repeatedly across successive forecasts during the term. The country went into the 2023 election with surplus pushed years into the future. The incoming government inherited a structural deficit that has now been part of New Zealand fiscal life for the better part of a decade.
The most significant difference between Robertson and his most recent Labour predecessor is what they built with the time they had. Cullen had nine years and built KiwiSaver, the Super Fund, and Working for Families — institutions that have compounded for the country every year since. Robertson had six years and built no comparable durable asset. The COVID response itself was, by design, temporary. The structural reorganisations did not survive a change of government. KiwiSaver and the Super Fund have grown under his watch, but he did not build them.
What separates them from the rest of the list
Different eras, different failures, the same pattern. Each took the portfolio in conditions where a competent finance minister could have done significantly better, and each instead made the situation worse. Each prioritised short-term political pressure over structural fiscal health. Each left no enduring institutional asset that meaningfully offsets the cost of the failures. In Muldoon’s case there is at least the physical infrastructure. In Robertson’s case there is not even that.
The only real argument is which of them ranks last. On the absolute scale of damage, Muldoon wins comfortably. The cancelled super scheme alone is the largest single-decision error in modern New Zealand fiscal history. The 1984 crisis was uniquely severe by developed-world standards. Nine years gave him time to do harm that six years did not give Robertson.
On poor stewardship relative to circumstances, the case is closer than it looks. Muldoon governed through genuinely brutal global conditions. Robertson inherited the strongest fiscal position any New Zealand finance minister had been handed in half a century, and managed within six years to take net debt back toward levels last seen during the global financial crisis. A fair grader has to weight that.
On balance, Muldoon ranks last. The compounding cost of the cancelled super scheme, the personal capture of monetary policy, the inflation pulse, the constitutional crisis on departure — these add up to a record that is worse in scale than anything else in modern New Zealand fiscal history. Robertson ranks second-to-last. Closer to Muldoon than the conventional wisdom suggests, but the gap to the next name on the list is wider still.
Neither is a partisan attack. Both Labour and National have produced excellent finance ministers, and both have produced these two. The lesson, if there is one, is that the discipline that made Cullen’s record possible — the willingness to take political damage for fiscal repair, the focus on building durable institutions rather than running structural overlays, the honesty with the public about what surpluses were for — is the standard against which the bottom of the ranking falls so clearly short.
Sources — Treasury HYEFU December 2008; Reserve Bank of New Zealand historical data; Treasury BEFU 2023 and PREFU 2023; Statistics New Zealand inflation series; Wikipedia — Robert Muldoon; Wikipedia — Grant Robertson; Newswire — Think Big Exposed; Newswire — What $1.5 billion could have done to fix New Zealand’s bank problem.
Read the companion piece — How Helen Clark and Michael Cullen Paid Down New Zealand’s Debt.
What do you think? Is Muldoon really the worst, or does Robertson deserve the bottom slot? Drop a comment below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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