When the storyboards were first shared with Muldoon, there was something missing.<\/p>\n
There were cartoons on the six o\u2019clock news last Sunday. TVNZ and Three both festooned their bulletins with the Dancing Cossacks, stars of a notorious 1975 National Party election ad which decried the then Labour government\u2019s \u201cdangerous\u201d compulsory superannuation scheme, warning that it portended a ghastly plan to nationalise everything. \u201cAnd you know what that\u2019s called, don\u2019t you?\u201d went the voiceover, as a procession of animated cossacks kicked their way across the frame, communistically.<\/p>\n
The cossacks were wheeled out on Sunday evening because a few hours earlier the National Party of 2026 had pledged to make KiwiSaver compulsory. The policy, which got a standing ovation at the party conference in Lower Hutt, prompted numerous commentators to recall those cossacks. The Act Party nodded to them in a message to members. Even Winston Peters got into the groove, with a bit in parliament suggesting the Greens\u2019 attitude to public ownership of land made them \u201cdancing tussocks\u201d.<\/p>\n
In that party political broadcast of 51 years ago, Muldoon, then leader of the opposition, sits solemnly at a giant desk in a sepia office. \u201cOn becoming the government, National will immediately abolish the Labour superannuation scheme,\u201d he says, as the camera tracks urgently out. And so he did.<\/p>\n
The law he chucked out, which lasted just one year, had largely been designed by an MP called Roger Douglas, who would later become a polarising finance minister. Had it remained in place, Douglas told me last year, \u201cit would [today] be worth hundreds of billions of dollars of savings \u2013 we\u2019d be like Aussie or Singapore\u201d. In 2007, Brian Gaynor judged that Muldoon had made \u201cthe worst economic decision by any New Zealand government in the past 50 years\u201d.<\/p>\n
But Muldoon had delivered on a promise after winning in a landslide, aided by a Labour government still reeling from the death in office of Norman Kirk and fired up by a campaign that combined the venomous counterpunch of Muldoon with the Hollywood sparkle of the studio behind The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo.<\/p>\n
The dance of the cossacks<\/p>\n
The Cossacks commercial, leaning into cold war anxieties, was one of a series of seven dreamed up by Michael Wall, founder of the bolshy young advertising agency Colenso, to take advantage of an exciting new technology that was sweeping the country: colour television. The Sydney office of Hanna-Barbera, the animation studio famed for their burgeoning cartoon empire, had been in touch with the agency suggesting they work together. They were swiftly enlisted to add a bit of sizzle to scripts Wall had already written to accompanying footage of Muldoon bestriding the country.<\/p>\n
George Chapman, party president at the time, later wrote that it was clear they were on to something. \u201cAs soon as I saw the material, I knew Colenso had struck oil. Mike Wall\u2019s proposal was that each three-minute television broadcast would start with one minute of cartoons identifying the weaknesses in Labour\u2019s policies, with the rest of the time being spent on putting our case over \u2026 The concept was perfect for our purposes. We could literally laugh the Labour Party out of office!\u201d<\/p>\n
For the ad taking aim at Labour\u2019s retirement saving scheme, Wall sketched out scenes that included caricatures of the Labour Party, woebegone housewives and the New Zealand landscape lathered in dastardly red. But when presented to Muldoon, the storyboards for what would become the most famous TV commercial in New Zealand political history, the Dancing Cossacks, were missing one thing: dancing cossacks.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Wall and his colleagues had thrown the idea around but didn\u2019t think it would fly. \u201cWe thought nobody would let us put them in,\u201d said Wall, in an interview last year for the second season of the Juggernaut podcast<\/a>. Muldoon signed off the cossack-less version, and then, \u201cas I was leaving his office, I said to him, \u2018You know, we had thought we might put some dancing cossacks in there\u2019. And he said, \u2018Put them back in, lad, put them back in.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n