What is New Zealand for?

What is New Zealand for?

A few years ago I encountered a possibly true story about an Englishman who loses his way on a walking tour of Ireland.  So he calls at a nearby cottage and asks the way to Dublin.  And the Irish cottager replies: “Well sorr, if I was settin’ out for Dublin I wouldn’t set out from here”.

I’m less interested in whether that story’s true or not than I am in its value as a metaphor applicable to our own society, what road we think we’re on, and where is it we think we’re going.  Where and what, if you like, is our mythical Dublin and how do we get there?

Almost all societies have a myth by which they live.   By that I don’t mean something that isn’t true.  Social myths are the facts of a society with their truths rationalised and which make up its guiding vision – the idealised objective which as a society its members are trying to achieve.  More recently the American social philosopher Richard Slotkin has defined the same thing as “stories, true, untrue, and half true that provide an otherwise loosely affiliated people with models of patriotic action.”  

It’s rare to every now and again encounter a society which doesn’t have an articulated metaphorical Dublin they’re setting out for, even if they fool themselves into thinking that they do.

New Zealand is a place of that sort.  We tend to speak of ourselves in terms of process rather than outcomes –we’re pragmatic, or can-do, or open and friendly towards strangers, and believe in equity and justice for all – but the closest we have come so far to spelling out what we have to an objective is in a perceptive remark made by our contemporary historian James Belich, who says: “No-one ever came to New Zealand to be worse off”.  That’s true, and it’s a place to start in sorting out our goals, but it doesn’t get us very far because it doesn’t tell us what people mean by that.

There are two major identifiable reasons why we are in this situation.

The first is simply that we are the world’s youngest society.  Until less than about a thousand years ago no human beings lived here.  Everyone who lives here today is either an immigrant themselves or descended from someone who came here within that time frame.  That includes the tangata whenua.  Those who rail against more recent immigrants are simply calling their own ancestors names.  We haven’t yet got over the fact of our arrival and decided what it means to be here.

The second reason is that we are one of the very few nations in the world which hasn’t got around to having a written constitution.  By that I mean a fundamental and collectively arrived at law which describes our public governing arrangements and which takes precedence over all other of our laws, which are then measured against it, and ruled inoperable or disallowed if they don’t pass that test.  The only other two I can identify are Britain and Israel.  The former because they invented the whole idea of constitutions, and have provided a model for all parliamentary democracies since, so they don’t see the need to have one, and the latter because trying to define the extent of their state and who it includes, and who it leaves out, is far too problematical, or even dangerous, to contemplate – as we’re seeing at present.   

So while we have certain laws – even one called the Constitution Act – which define our institutions and which include a Bill of Rights Act, taken together they don’t make up a fundamental law because we can ignore them or change them whenever we take it into our heads to do it.  A classic instance is the change we made by simple majority to our electoral system from first past the post to MMP just a few decades ago, which happened with some debate but also with relative speed and ease.  There are several earlier instances, such as abolishing our second parliamentary chamber in 1949, or extending the franchise to adult women in 1893. 

Fundamental change of that sort would be inconceivable in most countries with written constitutions.  In the United States for example, they spend enormous amounts of political energy, and in the process sometimes generating much more heat than light, debating the meaning of a set of objectives set two hundred and fifty years ago in a completely difference social, economic, and political context to decide whether or not those objectives impose a veto of inconsistency on contemporary laws passed by state or federal authorities.  Their classic case is provided by the constitutional right to bear arms, which made sense in the face of the need to confront the tyranny of George III in 1776, but ends up in an attempt to assassinate a major political candidate in 2024.

But by being possessed of what one of our politicians once described as the fastest law making gun in the west, we run the risk of acting in ways which irrevocably define the purpose of our society without adequate debate, or even actually realising that’s what we are doing.  

Let’s go back to our notional Englishman trying to find his way to Dublin.  I believe that as a society and without really meaning to we have created three different and irreconcilable Dublins that we’re trying to get to.  Not only that but we are engaged in a heated argument about the significance of where we have set out from.  The key to untangling the muddle we have got ourselves into as a result is through paying far more attention to our history as a nation – no matter how short lived – than we have done to date.  Because in a very real sense if you want to know where you’re going, you have to know where you are, and that in its turn implies that you have to know where you’ve been.  Luckily for us we have a convenient starting point for conducting that exercise.  It’s called the Treaty of Waitangi – or if you prefer te Tiriti o Waitangi – although that already gets you into trouble because they don’t quite say the same thing as one another.

Some months ago I spoke to your Wellington branch about the Treaty, and I began by explaining that if you want to honour the Treaty, or, as I’m proposing here, to use it as our point of departure, then the first thing you have to do is to invent it.  If you aren’t used to historiography – the writing of history – then that probably sounds a bit strange, or even ridiculous, so let me explain it to you.

History exists at two levels.  First of all it’s a straightforward narrative of events in a time sequence setting out what happened over a defined period in the past and based on the evidence for that to enable those writing and reading it to understand the meaning of those events and to enable us to get a grip on the present.  That’s what most people think of as history.  But it begs an important question.  What are the significant events which to dwell, on and which are not?

That involves a second or made up meta-narrative which frames the first one, and which constitutes a structure on which the primary narrative is erected.  Quite often it isn’t even articulated but is instead inherited and taken for granted by the historians using it.  It’s what another social philosopher, Thomas Kuhn, calls a paradigm.  It’s important to be aware that there’s nothing inherently natural or superior about one paradigm over another.  All of them are social constructs, although the ones that prevail tend to be a reflection of the power structures of the society in which they are in play.  And sometimes the things which are not included will tell you more about that than the things which are.

I said a little earlier that in our short existence as a society we had invented three different Dublins that we were setting out for – by which I was actually saying metaphorically that we have three different paradigms or frameworks of meaning in our affairs, all competing to direct us to our destination, and all those, as it happens, can be identified in the agendas of the people who were present at Waitangi in February 1840.

Let me try to differentiate them.

First of all there were the Maori.  It’s now almost universally recognised that Maori culture both as it was encountered by the first Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and as it has survived the traumatic experience of full on contact and colonial invasion by those Europeans, is one of the world’s most rich and sophisticated cultures.  Among other things it had to be to have navigated itself over about three thousand years from somewhere in south east Asia right across the Pacific Ocean and ultimately down to Aotearoa during a period when European so-called navigators were terrified if they sailed out of sight of land that they’d fall over some sort of edge.  And at the end of that perilous and intrepid adventure to have adapted an essentially tropical agriculture to a temperate climate and built a variant culture out of that experience. They also developed here a highly nuanced cosmology which makes sense of their natural world and which accurately reflects the physical realities all around them.  They then flexibly incorporated many European technologies and agricultural techniques into that culture whenever they encountered them and found them useful.

The group of ariki  which the missionaries got together to hear what William Hobson had to say about handing over their kawanatanga to Queen Victoria in 1840 were, for obvious reasons, unrepresentative from a geographical perspective but they listened carefully to his explanation as translated by the missionary Henry Williams.  And when he’d finished they almost unanimously made it clear, from the single published European eye witness account we have, that, unless he’d come to redress some grievances of their own, they saw no need for what he had in mind, and he should go back where he came from.  Notwithstanding that, they signed the Treaty offered both at Waitangi and at many other places.  Why would they do such a thing given their expressed views?

This is one of the paradoxes surrounding the Treaty which has never been satisfactorily explored, but to the extent it has, the answer seems to be because mostly the missionaries – whose advice Maori generally respected – told them it was a good idea.  Not all of them note; the Roman Catholic Bishop Pompallier advised against it.  And a number of the chiefs when they discovered its implications quite quickly came to agree.  Nopeta Panakareao of Te Rarawa famously said at the time of the signing that the shadow of the land went to Queen Victoria but the substance stayed with the Maori people.  Within a year he’d changed his mind and reversed the order.  Maori retained only the shadow of the land, he said.  The substance now belonged to Queen Victoria.

The Maori protest against that was a particularly dramatic one.  They three times chopped down the flagpole bearing the British flag, and burned the town of Kororareka to the ground.  Ironically it was the first Maori signatory of the Treaty, Hone Heke, called forwards to sign by the Rev Henry Williams, who wielded the axe.  But the subsequent short, sharp conflict with British troops showed Maori that they had lost the initiative.  From that point their response to colonial intrusion was a defensive retreat.  

Does that make the missionaries as advisors to Maori who trusted them dishonest?  No, although Maori came to have understandable reservations about missionary motives in giving that advice.  But what it does illustrate is that the missionaries, whatever may have been their intentions, were the prisoners of the European thinking of their era.  If you want to understand that you’ll have to get to grips with a debate in the history of European thought known as “the problem of the savage” because it will tell you what position the incoming colonialists thought Maori should occupy in the new society the Treaty made possible.

Let me try and summarise that for you.  Until the Renaissance, European thinkers had a teleological paradigm based on the Christian Bible into which all historical and contemporary events known to them could be slotted – from the Creation to the Redemption, and to the eagerly awaited Apocalypse and Salvation.  But as European explorers and traders moved out across the world they increasingly came into contact with sometimes highly civilised and sophisticated cultures which could not in any way be fitted into that morphology.  After some centuries of debate European thinkers settled on a solution to which we still to a degree adhere.  Within the context of what is known as ‘the Scottish enlightenment’ a group of thinkers (who included the inventor of market economics, Adam Smith) based in Edinburgh, and in the person of a man called Macpherson invented what we would now call proto anthropology.

This owed little if anything to Christianity but instead proposed a schema in which humanity advanced progressively through a hierarchy of levels of civilisation, starting with hunter gatherers, and moving to settled agriculture, to the creation of urban life, to the invention of private ownership of property in land, to hierarchies of power, and finally to a market economy.  In this scheme Europeans had got there first and so were entitled to own the fruits of that achievement.  There was also a sub-debate about whether or not those people and cultures which were at an earlier stage of development were worth saving and helping become civilised, or should be assisted into oblivion.  Mostly the missionaries argued that the Maori people had souls and so they should be saved, but a pre-condition of that salvation was their progression to civilisation.  That would only happen when they gave up communal ownership of their lands, and took up private property.  The introduction of British sovereignty would have been seen by the missionaries as a long step in that direction and so their advice was: sign the Treaty.

Well – I’m sure you can see where that’s going, but just to stoke your cynicism concerning the motives of the missionaries you probably need to also be aware that Rev Henry Williams, head of the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand, translator of the Treaty into the Maori language, and a very enthusiastic proponent of Maori signing it – when the dust settled had somehow ended up with legal title to about twelve thousand acres of what had been Maori land.  It may also come as no surprise to you to learn that he promptly gave up being a missionary and became a gentleman landowner,  the head of a family which some generations on remains the largest private landowner in this country.  In fact it was blatantly such a case of self-interest that his own Bishop, George Selwyn, and Governor George Grey subsequently brought a court case against him for land grabbing.  I’m sorry to say it was unsuccessful.

Of course if you go to the Colonial Office records of the period – as the historian Ned Fletcher has recently – you’ll find that it was presented as all terribly altruistic.  The British Crown was in New Zealand in the person of William Hobson to protect Maori from the depredations of certain wicked people who had settled here already and so there needed to be the establishment of British sovereignty by consent through the Treaty to establish law and order for that purpose.  Except that when you come to look into the detail you find that the real motivation was about as far away from altruism as you could possibly get.

At which point we get to our second Dublin or paradigm.  The principal other actor at Waitangi is usually presented as the Crown and that’s who they appear to be, but once you dig a little deeper that turns out to not quite be the case, because the Crown was actually fronting for a private group of financiers called the New Zealand Company, which for various reasons outside the scope of this presentation thought that you could make money out of colonisation and that New Zealand would be a suitable field for their endeavours, provided sovereignty could be established under the Crown and the government that went with it maintained a monopoly both over land purchases from Maori and the prices on offer.

Why would the British government have been playing such a game?

Because the directors of the New Zealand Company and the British government of the day were pretty much the same people.  In particular the main player in previous and contemporary initiatives to colonise New Zealand was a man called Lord Durham or to give him his family name John Lambton (Radical Jack to his friends) who controlled a block of Members of Parliament which kept the London government of the day in power.  He was central to many of the activities of that government.  For example he was convenor of a small group of politicians who drew up the draft of the crucial Reform Act of 1832 which set the process of nineteenth century parliamentary reform on the road to democracy in Britain.  And he was chairman of the New Zealand Company.  What Radical Jack wanted he got.

Seen from that point of view, the Treaty becomes not a solemn compact between parties acting in good faith in the interests of one of those parties, but a piece of solemn mummery to serve the commercial interests of a third party not even mentioned in the text, and to fob off potential troublemakers in the form of the Church Missionary Society and its alter ego the Aborigines Protection Society, both of which also seem to me when you look beneath the surface to be quite willing to be fobbed off if they got what they wanted.

In saying that I should make two things clear.  That doesn’t mean that we should not honour the Treaty.  That’s a separate issue and open for debate although to be doubly clear my own long held view is that we should honour it.  The second is that there’s nothing radical about my characterising the Treaty in this way.  I’m not alone in my views; quite a lot of people thought the same at the time, including The Times newspaper.  Let me give you two other examples.  It isn’t often mentioned but in February 1840 there was a United States government exploring flotilla in the Bay of Islands.  Its commodore, Lt Charles Wilkes, became aware of the presence of Hobson at Waitangi and what he was up to.  He wasn’t personally present at the signing but he took the trouble of waylaying the chief Kawiti on the latter’s way home and quizzed him on what had transpired.  His conclusion was the same as that of Pompallier and also of William Colenso, the Mission printer who published the only pakeha eye witness account we have, that those who signed didn’t understand what the implications of it were and would rue the day.

But he also went on and said something else in his account of his voyage in which it occupies a short passage, and that was that it was commonly known that the whole proceeding had been conducted on behalf of the New Zealand Company and the important and powerful people who controlled it in London.  There is no reason why he should have said that if it wasn’t the case, and he actually finds confirmation from an unexpected source.  

Lambton died shortly after the signing and was replaced as chair of the Company by Sir Joseph Somes.  When the British government changed in 1843 and the incoming Colonial Secretary, Lord Stanley, came across the Treaty, he wrote and asked Somes what it was about.  Somes’ reply is revealing: He called it “a praiseworthy device for amusing and pacifying savages for the moment” with the obvious implication that it should be ignored because it had no legal effect.  The Treaty was in fact the portal through which nineteenth century colonial capitalism entered New Zealand where it has firmly remained since, exploiting our physical and human resources on behalf of a small, wealthy and powerful international commercial elite and with the active co-operation of a local comprador class

If it had meant what it said about protecting Maori from the depredations of unscrupulous exploiters then the next step would be to look for measures taken to effect that purpose.  But one would look in vain.  On the contrary the first thing that happened was the appointment of what is known as the Old Land Claims Commission established under the chair of a William Spain – also a close friend of the London government and its financial and commercial associates – to rule on the validity of pre-Treaty land purchases.  Most small claimants got short shrift from this body, but not so the claims of the New Zealand Company which even when the Commission itself thought them highly dubious were not overturned but endorsed, with a pittance paid in compensation despite the protests of the Maori owners who would have preferred to get their lands back.

Over the next one hundred and twenty years this process was repeated again and again by one means or another, and within the structures of the law, as enacted by the pakeha parliament, to strip Maori of their land and other resources.  By the end of that period most of it was gone and the Maori people were largely reduced to penury.  When the voluntary available supply of land ran out, for example, a fake Maori threat to Auckland was cobbled together and the Waikato lands invaded with the confiscation of many thousands of acres as punishment of Maori for being in “rebellion” against the Crown.  A Land Court was then set up to speed the process of transfer of these lands to pakeha capitalists and speculators, with vast fortunes made for a mainly Auckland based speculative land cabal.  Parallel to this in 1867 Maori were deliberately confined to a political ghetto comprising four seats in parliament from which they could not impede this process despite their protests.  By the nineteen seventies only a tiny remnant of three million acres remained in Maori hands.

How did these people who now ruled New Zealand and had their own paradigm – our second Dublin if you like – of the sort of place they thought New Zealand should be, get away with it?  The short answer is that they had the British Empire.

It’s quite difficult for people who have grown up in the last fifty years to appreciate how powerful a fascination the myth of the British Empire exercised in its time. Many people genuinely believed all sorts of astonishing tosh about the existence of a superior British ‘race’ whose destiny in the world was to civilise those other unfortunate races and cultures not quite up to the British standard.  Some of the views this gave rise to now seem risible or even barely sane.  A case in point is Sir Truby King, who said in an article published in 1890 in the New Zealand Medical Journal that to be British was to be superior even to all other Europeans, including especially the French whose inferiority and decadence was proven by their tendency to enjoy art and poetry, the absence of hair on their bodies, and their belief that sex should be had for pleasure.  He said quite openly that he set up the Plunket Society specifically to ensure that we bred a strong and healthy British race worthy of its imperial responsibilities.  And such views were not unique to him although even some of his contemporaries found him a bit on the extreme side.

These ideas about the superiority of the British “race” were the official views of the New Zealand authorities and propagated through our school system.  The late educational publisher Hugh Price in a comprehensive bibliography of school text books published in New Zealand to 1960 makes a very telling observation.  He says:

“Reading a country’s school text books in history must be the quickest and most efficient way of finding out what a country thinks about itself.  The whole question of who people are and where they have come from is neatly set out in summary form, while the ideals and prejudices which are to be passed to the next generation are set out most clearly.”

Our education system propagated the imperial message as a central factor in our school curriculum.  As such it denied that we had a history of our own.  We existed only as a part of the Empire. Between 1929 and 1941 our then official publishing industry pumped out a text book called Our Nation’s Story to a total of 122,000 copies.  It was paralleled by another widely used book – 50.000 copies printed by 1930 – called Our Race and Empire.  This too proclaimed a paradigm in which we were simply Britain in the south seas.

A key component of this fetishisation of the British Empire was the adoration of the Westminster parliamentary system of government, but always presented in a curiously flat and two dimensional form.  Any suggestion that it might take a dynamic, egalitarian and democratic – or perish the thought socialist – form was never mentioned.  Instead emphasis in school and university curricula was placed on its Tudor and Stuart origins and its value as a foundation of stable government and an example to the world – unlike those unstable continentals, those vulgar Americans, or worst of all, the communists.

But the irony was within this paradigm another had been growing up all along – the third and most significant of our Dublins, and one furthermore as it developed pretty much unique to us and one or two other now post Imperial territories – Australia and Canada in particular.

The people who constitute its demographic had been here all along if you know where to look.  They appear in Lord Normanby’s written instructions to William Hobson as an important part of the justification for the Waitangi expedition.  There were, he said, a group of about two thousand British subjects already living in New Zealand “amongst them persons of bad and doubtful character – convicts who had fled from our penal settlements, seamen who had deserted their ships – and these people unrestrained by any law, and amenable to no tribunals, were alternatively the authors and victims of every species of crime and outrage.”

You can also catch a glimpse of them in Colenso’s account of the Treaty discussions when at one point they interrupt proceedings to point out that Henry Williams isn’t fully or accurately translating what the chiefs have to say in their response to Hobson.

They’re generally characterised as a rowdy, bad lot, but that’s a caricature of these people and quite unfair.  New Zealand in 1840 was a maritime frontier society, and like any other such attracted a component of people who had already brushed with the law and had no wish to meet with it again, so they made their way to places like New Zealand where the law couldn’t get at them.  The Bay of Islands could also get a bit boisterous when the whaling fleet was in and several thousand seamen deprived of alcohol and female company for upwards of a year came ashore in pursuit of both.  On the other hand however, quite a lot of the permanent residents didn’t fit Normanby’s caricature at all, and were here for wholly legitimate commercial reasons, pursuing skilled trades such as shore whaling or ship building or iron working or other associated maritime activities such as timber felling for export, or manufacturing flax into sail cloth, or associated with the supply of ships stores and provisions.  All they wanted was a quiet life and a decent living for themselves and their families.

During the succeeding half century, while the capitalists and investors who saw New Zealand as a field for their exploitative commercial activities, and who from 1856 ran the local government in their own financial interests got on with implementing their paradigm, usually at the expense of Maori, the numbers of incoming immigrant settlers who were rather more typical of the sorts of people I’ve just mentioned entering New Zealand as permanent settlers grew exponentially.  Between 1861 and 1881 556,156 people are recorded as arriving here with the intention of settling permanently. That’s quite a lot of people over a span of only twenty years, and even so is probably a bit on the low side because not all entering immigrants got recorded.  

I’ve already quoted James Belich on their motives: no-one ever came to New Zealand to be worse off.  And in the first instance their dreams were fulfilled.  If you read their letters home to family and friends you’ll be aware that their first reaction to their new home was astonishment.  Not only could you get more than enough to eat here, but it was relatively easy to obtain a modest plot of land, to build a cottage on and establish a vegetable garden and run domestic livestock.  Both of those things were unavailable to most working class people in Britain, something which had motivated their emigration in the first place, so they were fairly enthusiastic about their friends and family joining them in what must have seemed a paradise.

But the idea that you could leave Britain, and go to the other ends of the earth, there to be part of a society which was free from the constraints of the one from which you had come turned out to be an illusion.  In the mid to late 1880s the world entered a major recession, and in the effects of this New Zealand was involved whether we liked it or not.  Almost immediately all of the social conditions which the immigrants thought they had escaped by coming here re-appeared in the new country – unemployment, sweated labour, widespread poverty, and social distress.  But unlike in Britain many of those who came here had the means to hand to do something about this.  During the fifty years from 1856 to the 1890 election, local voting rights had been extended for most men in what amounted to universal male suffrage.  Many of these folk had very clear ideas of the sort of society they wanted to live in and they used their votes to create it.  In the wake of a failed major maritime strike in 1890 these ordinary working people elected a radical reforming Liberal government which moved quite quickly to put those ideas into practise.  There is a long native radical political tradition in British working class culture which owes little or nothing to European Marxism but which draws on a much older set of beliefs traceable from the civil war of the seventeenth century (or even earlier).  By way of the democratic ideas of Tom Paine at one end of the nineteenth century through the Chartist movement, to Henry George and the single land tax movement at the other it was very much alive.  It was predicated on what was equitable and fair and the restoration of the natural rights that many workers believed had been lost or stolen from them.  

In practise this meant land reform, labour market regulation to ensure fair and reasonable wages, recognition of a legitimate political role for organised labour, access to free basic education for all, and the extension of the franchise to women – making New Zealand from 1893 the world’s first genuine democratic state.  Overall it generated a new political paradigm – an egalitarian and inclusive social democracy.  Liberal governments under first John Balance and then Richard Seddon became the order of the day for the next two decades.

The social groups who had ruled New Zealand to their own benefit up to that point were thunderstruck by this outcome; they though it was some sort of weird aberration or mistake.  They confidently expected that things would return to normal, that’s to say with themselves in charge, at the next election in 1893.  They were devastated when the Liberals actually increased their majority, and there were now so few conservatives in parliament that they ceased to meet as an Opposition caucus for the next ten years.

Not only that, but for the next eighty years that particular Dublin became the orthodox political paradigm governing our political affairs.  It would, however, be too much to expect that those who had previously ruled our society would take it lying down.  By 1900 they had regained their equilibrium and re-organised themselves into a new political party – Reform.  It had specific policies of course, designed to strip away support from the Liberals – freehold land tenure for small farmers in particular – but their over-riding policy was to do away with egalitarian democracy as the driving force of our public affairs.  In that connection the ideology of British imperialism proved remarkably helpful.

I trust you are aware that there is a direct line of descent from the Reform Party to the National Party even as to the circumstances of the birth of the latter.  In the wake of a major international economic crisis in 1935 our then right wing coalition government was tipped out of office and replaced by a radical reforming administration committed not just to the egalitarian and inclusive democratic values of its Liberal predecessor, but to extending them significantly into a much fuller welfare state.  The outgoing politicians were appalled; this was obviously another ghastly mistake – caused this time by their own disunity.  In 1936 they coalesced into National.  When the new Labour administration announced its legislative plans for social security to be implemented post the 1938 election they pronounced it “applied lunacy” and sat back confidently to watch Labour swept from office.  They were confounded to see Labour returned with a majority of votes.

This taught them a lesson.  From that point they lay low whenever they got back into government, allowing the nascent welfare system to wither and atrophy through inadequate funding rather than attacking it directly, although with an occasional nudge in the direction of repeal when they got up their courage to do so.  But by the nineteen seventies prospects were not looking too good for the political Right here, and their plans to abandon the egalitarian social democratic model they had been forced to live with for the previous eighty years.  The pakeha liberal centre left had been energised by a series of issues – colonial war in SE Asia, the retreat of colonialism more generally, and in particular international opposition to the scabrous apartheid regime in South Africa, strong opposition to large corporations carving up the world for their own benefit, and a push to make the South Pacific nuclear free – which left National on the back foot.  At the same time the disappearance of the British Empire had removed their de facto paradigm, (although the United States imperium and its ideology of so-called Cold War filled the gap to an extent).  Alongside that there was a growing sense of our unique national identity, particularly among younger New Zealanders, fed by Britain joining the European Union and abandoning us as a trading partner.

Meanwhile the Maori people, despite the nineteenth century invasion and destruction of their attempts to create havens through the Kingitanga, Te Whiti at Parihaka, and Rua at Maungapohatu, and the invention of false myths – the Maori replaced the Moriori and so it was in the nature of things that pakeha should do the same to them; the Maori ‘race’ was in any event dying out – and so the loss of their land may have been unfortunate but that was how it was with inferior cultures –  had managed to not only to survive but to flourish.  As such they proved a key centre of resistance to the continuing multinational capitalist invasion.

This was despite their culture also being under full on attack.  Mokopuna were forbidden to use te reo at school, and the culture bearers were prevented from passing on cosmologies and other traditional wisdoms by such laws as the Tohunga Suppression Act.  From the 1930s on the physical link with the tribal lands remaining was also being broken by a massive demographic shift of Maori from rural to urban areas under the pressures of a capital intensive farming economy which did not require high levels of rural labour input.  There they formed a brown proletariat.  All of this was encouraged by officialdom.  As late as the nineteen sixties the official government attitude to Maori people and their culture was summed up in the smug slogan – “assimilation within two generations”.

Except that the Maori people refused to co-operate in their own doom.  Their flexible and sophisticated culture produced a new and confident generation of leaders, some of them tempered in the fire of their experience in the 28th Battalion in World War 2.  People in increasing numbers from both cultures stopped denigrating the value inherent for pakeha in Maori understandings of the cosmos, and began to encourage its positive aspects.  It was this new spirit which gave rise to the Waitangi Tribunal, and subsequent commitments to honour the Treaty in official policies and actions, a development which some pakeha found increasingly alarming.

And then something happened which many people still struggle to explain.  In 1984 an incoming Labour government widely expected to advance our society further along the egalitarian social democratic path, abruptly abandoned this political paradigm and began to regress back to the earlier model that most of the politically aware thought we had left behind towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Some people refer to this development as a coup but I think that’s rather too dramatic and self-conscious a description.  It’s more accurately described as an unfortunate conjunction of events which taken together added up to a great leap backwards.  The upshot was the resurrection of the nineteenth century political paradigm which had governed New Zealand between 1840 and 1890 and the repudiation and denigration of the achievements of the Liberal and Labour governments of 1890 and 1935 and beyond.

This was a change that most of us emphatically did not want but it has proceeded nevertheless.   We are now in some sort of political endgame which is playing out that process and in which the objectives on the part of a National government and their allies are clearer than they have ever been.  These are to revert us to a social model in which business, beyond a certain basic level is unregulated in what it wants to do, and including within this the dismantling of most of the achievements made by Maori in recognition of the limitations on capitalism imposed by the Treaty when it comes to the commitment to tino rangatiratanga and what that means in the contemporary world, and the gradual but accelerating parallel dismantling of what has been achieved for the generality of New Zealanders through our social democracy since 1890.

More generally it means that we may get to answer at last the question posed by this presentation.  What is New Zealand for?  Is it primarily a place to exploit for commercial and financial reasons to benefit a small elite who monopolise the available wealth and power, which is where we began as a colonial society, and to which it seems to be returning?  In which to extend the metaphor – there is only that one Dublin which we will strive to reach and that will be it.  Or is it a place where everyone lives in decent comfort and with respect for their culture, and where no-one is left out?  This battle between these paradigms is a continuing one in which we are all involved, whether we wish to be or not, and in which we might like to heed a saying of the Kwa Zulu people of South Africa.  “Shame on the one who is burned in their hut – come out and fight.”

Tony Simpson – October 2024

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *