Campaign to return Sir Robert as leader

Press, 27 May 1985, Page 12

Campaign to return Sir Robert as leader

PA Hamilton A campaign to have Sir Robert Muldoon returned as leader of the National Party drew a capacity crowd to a public meeting in Hamilton on Friday evening. Sir Robert was the star attraction, and more than 800 people paid ?5 each to hear him speak at the Waikato Racing Club’s centennial lounge. He shared the stage with a previously unknown Frankton snack bar proprietor, John Rowe, who brandished letters from people throughout the country backing his efforts on behalf of the deposed leader. The seeds for the meeting were sown early this year when Mr Rowe began a petition calling for Sir Robert’s return to the party leadership, advertised on a blackboard outside his snack bar. Hundreds of people signed the petition which prompted

Mr Rowe to ask Sir Robert to go to Hamilton for a meeting — which, in the event, coincided with the party’s Waikato divisional conference, addressed yesterday by Mr McLay, who was elected to replace Sir Robert last November. In his introduction to the meeting, Mr Rowe said he had never been a financial member of any political party, but believed Sir Robert should again lead the country. “If there is a split in the National Party, it happened on the very day they put Sir Robert out as leader,” he said. Mr Rowe then read excerpts from a series of letters from people supporting his campaign — and Sir Robert opened his address by saying that most of his own mail was “very similar to what has been read out.” “I’ve only got one objective in these next two years — to get rid of this Labour Government, and I want

you to help me do it.” Immense damage had been done to New Zealand by “economic incompetence run by departments of State to an extent I have never seen in this country as far back as I can go.” The Labour Party had no policy when it went into last year’s snap election, but “picked up the main threads of their policy” from the Treasury and the Reserve Bank within 24 hours of the election, he said. Sir Robert attacked the national debt, the internal deficit, goods and services tax, rising prices, high interest rates, the Family Care package and other aspects of the economy, claiming that the Government was “doing terrible things to us at every kind of level. “They’ve tried to do too much, and tried to do it too fast, and have done so much damage that no Government could repair it within a year or two.”