Incident in the Capital City parodies one of the most powerful politicians in the history of New Zealand politics. Sir Robert Muldoon, former Prime Minister and Leader of the National Party from 1975 to 1984, is its central character: powerful and hard nosed. The painting is contemporaneous with Muldoon's term of office when New Zealand was experiencing economic suffering due to the hangover from the 1973 energy crisis, the loss of our biggest export market when Britain entered the EEC and rampant inflation. Combine this with social and economic issues such as the Springbok tour, trade unionism, nuclear policy and wage freezes, and you have a plethora of issues for Fomison's scorn. It was the time of Muldoon's political strategies such as ˜Think Big, which relied on pumping money into large industrial projects, hoping for a trickle-down effect, and his cradle-to-grave resolution to maintain the welfare state. He was one of New Zealand's most polarising politicians: for every one who loved him, someone else reviled him. For some he was Piggy Muldoon, whose arrogance nearly destroyed the economy and society; others were members of Rob's Mob, who revered him as an international statesman who stood up for the ordinary bloke. Singularly unchallenged, Muldoon had a reputation for being combative. He was an easy target for the comedians of the day, with his paralysed facial feature and wheezing laugh. It was easy to make fun of him, but many people in political positions and the media feared confronting him openly. Muldoon famously declared that he had left New Zealand no worse off than when he found it, and his unrepentant influence is still felt in politics today. The painting effectively parodies both the man and the issues he stood for. For Fomison, an artist on the margins of society who immersed himself in the Polynesian community, partially because of his discomfort with his own, the character of Muldoon would have been an anathema. He has shown him with his famous face atop a box, akin to a child's toy, dangling a hapless victim by its foot. Below, an unnoticed character symbolises the nation's people Muldoon was elected to protect. Is he holding the great man up, or is he huddled in his shadow? For an artist preoccupied with the darker side of life and a maker of myths, this painting is a refreshingly light-hearted poke at authority. The fact that time has passed and the characters are no longer with us, makes it no less a powerful commentary on our political and social history.