There have been 53 New Zealand Parliaments so far. The 39th of them was elected in 1978.
It was a parliament of 92 MPs, most of them men. The New Zealand Music Awards that year named John Rowles Male Vocalist of the Year and — after a short twelve months of legal action — the electoral court named Winston Peters MP for Hunua.
There were just 3 million of us then. In fact it was the first year since the 1940s that the population actually fell because so many people had said yeah nah fuck this and moved to Sydney.
