At least it wasn't The Omen

Act MP David Garrett says that he took the idea of stealing the identity of a long dead baby to procure a fraudulent passport for himself from Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal (filmed by Fred Zinneman of High Noon fame in 1973). Another '70s pop-culture phenomenon that prominently featured shenanigans about dead babies was The Omen. Wiki summarizes the beginning of its plot as follows:

The infant son of Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) and his wife, Katherine (Lee Remick), dies shortly after birth in Rome. Out of concern for his wife's mental well-being, Robert is coerced into substituting the dead child for an orphan whose mother died at the same moment by Father Spiletto (Martin Benson), without telling her the truth. Katherine and Robert name the child Damien (Harvey Stephens). Shortly afterwards, Robert is named U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain.

It later emerges that Damien is the anti-Christ, and that the Thorns' dead infant son was in fact murdered (by, as it were, anti-Nuns). The plan is for the anti-Christ to be raised as a child into the friends-of-a-US-President family then, once grown, for him to use those connections to become US President, or Helen Clark, or some such thing. That plan comes to something like fruition in Omen 3: The Final Conflict, the first and only Hollywood film to have two Kiwi leads (Sam Neill and Lisa Harrow).

Coincidence? I think not. Dream bigger darling Mr Garrett: Roger Douglas stabbing someone in a cathedral, Rodney Hide drowning under ice, fending off Sensible Sentencing Trust wolves, the permutations are endless. Photoshoppers and youtube parodists, start your engines.

Update Sept 24, 2010: Garrett has resigned from Parliament and, according to the NZ Herald, claims that dark forces are at work within the ACT party. The Herald also reports that ACT MP Heather Roy, denies being behind the leaks that doomed Garrett:

'She laughed off the comments about dark forces, saying, "I think everybody might have been reading too much Star Wars."'

Wrong answer. Not dark enough. Try harder. Oh, alright....