by Michael King
By the time Ballance was mortally ill in 1893, Seddon’s gusto and his grasp of parliamentary procedures made him the obvious choice to be acting Premier. He then outmanoeuvred his rivals who wanted the Shetland Islander Sir Robert Stout, twice Premier previously, to succeed ‘the Chief’, as Ballance had been called. But Stout was out of Parliament and, by the time he was returned in a by-election, Seddon had agreement from his caucus to lead the party into the 1893 general election. When the party increased its majority, winning 51 of the 70 European seats, Seddon was able to portray this result as an endorsement of his leadership ‘by the people’. The whole episode was typical of the man, who referred to New Zealand as ‘God’s Own Country’ and who established the tradition of the populist Prime Minister who would, if the occasion demanded it, appeal to ‘the people’ over the heads of his own parliamentary colleagues.
Because of his success in 1893, and the subsequent electoral success of the party under his leadership, Seddon’s position as leader was never again under serious threat until close to the end of his life, when he was suffering from overwork and ill-health and was under some pressure from backbenchers to dislodge the time-servers in his cabinet. In the medium term, however, he strengthened his position by removing potential rivals such as Reeves or by ensuring that others, such as Stout, never entered his ministry.
Seddon was all in favour of the Liberals’ programme of reform, especially of land laws and the public service. But unlike Reeves, for example, he was cautious about how far such measures should be taken. A good example of that caution, and of the non-ideological nature of the Liberals’ approach to government, is women’s suffrage. The granting of votes to New Zealand women in 1893 would come to be seen as one of the most celebrated achievements of the Liberal Government, but it was achieved without the active support of government ministers and in face of opposition by some of them, including Seddon.
New Zealand men over the age of 20 had been given the vote regardless of property qualifications in 1879. In being excluded from that franchise, as one historian has noted, women were classed with ‘juveniles, lunatics and criminals’. The cause for female suffrage was taken up by the New Zealand Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) led by, among others, the highly intelligent and persuasive Christian socialist Kate Sheppard. Sheppard and her co-workers were convinced that if women had the vote there would be a national majority in favour of a prohibition on the sale of alcohol; they also believed that the welfare of women and children in general would be uplifted and safeguarded if women could vote and be represented in Parliament.
After failing to secure the passage of a women’s suffrage bill in 1887 (Seddon was the MP primarily responsible for its defeat), the franchise department of the WCTU, of which Sheppard was director, took two petitions to Parliament, in 1891 and 1892. They were signed by more than 9000 and 19,000 women respectively. The WCTU also persuaded a former Premier, Sir John Hall, to introduce another women’s suffrage bill into Parliament (Hall, a conservative, did so believing that, given the opportunity, most women would vote against the Liberals). The 1891 bill passed the House of Representatives but not the Legislative Council. Influenced by his wife, Ellen, vice-president of the Women’s Progressive Society, Ballance was in favour of the bill but thought its effect should be delayed so as to give women time to be ‘politically educated’ before they cast a vote.
The measure finally passed both Houses of Parliament in September 1893, after Ballance’s death, and after the Liberal ministers opposed to it had absented themselves from the House of Representatives. It became law on 19 September, when New Zealand became the first sovereign state in the world to give women the vote (and, it could be argued, the most democratic state in the world, given that suffrage had already been extended to Maori and Pakeha men). Seddon sent a telegram to Kate Sheppard conceding defeat and associating his government with the change (‘trust now that all doubts as to the sincerity of the Government in this very important matter [have] been effectively removed’). After winning the next election in November 1893, the Liberals were prepared to embrace the measure with greater enthusiasm.
Other major political advances for women would have to wait, however. They were not made eligible to stand for Parliament until 1919, and the first to do so was lawyer Ellen Melville in Grey Lynn in 1923. The first to be elected was Elizabeth McCombs, who won the Lyttelton seat for Labour in 1933 in succession to her husband, who had died. The first woman to hold a cabinet post was Mabel Howard, who became Minister of Social Welfare in the Fraser Labour Government in 1947. In the same decade as suffrage was achieved, however, there was a series of other ‘firsts’ for women. In Onehunga in 1893, Elizabeth Yates became the first woman in the British Empire to be elected a mayor; Emily Siedeberg became the first woman to graduate as a medical doctor at Otago University in 1896; and Ethel Benjamin graduated with a law degree from the same university in 1897 (one year after an Act of Parliament had made it possible for women to practise law). For all these gender pioneers, life was not easy. They had to endure endless jokes about the roles they had chosen and constant suggestions, if not downright accusations, that their competence was in doubt because of their sex. The very fact that they did what they did and survived, personally and professionally, was an enormous encouragement to other women to set out on comparable career paths.
For the next 40 years, however, very few women made their way into the professions. Most simply entered the workforce in the years between leaving school and marriage. Those women who did continue working in the first decade of the twentieth century were largely domestic servants in private homes or boarding houses, or worked in small factories making garments or processing foods and drink. The number in such professions as teaching, nursing or librarianship was small. As a further handicap, there was a ‘near-universal maxim’ at this time that women could not hold authority over men, and this factor further limited potential advancement in almost any job.
There was a considerable improvement in working conditions as a whole, particularly in shops and factories, as a result of labour laws introduced during the Liberal term of office. The Department of Labour was one of the new government departments of the era and was headed by possibly the country’s most able civil servant, the scholar and former surveyor Edward Tregear, who was particularly concerned about the conditions in which women and children worked. One of the most important measures on which Tregear worked with his minister, the equally able William Pember Reeves, was the 1894 Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, which set out to replace strikes with arbitration and at the same time encourage workers to belong to registered unions.[1] The need for such legislation had been highlighted by the great maritime strike, which had paralysed the movement of ships and exports for three months in 1890.
Reeves’s success in the Labour portfolio was also his political undoing. When he sought to introduce further union-friendly regulations in 1895, Seddon, uncomfortable with Reeves’s intellectual view of political matters and nervous about public toleration of the Liberals’ pace of reforms, offered his potential rival New Zealand’s only diplomatic post at this time, Agent-General (later High Commissioner) in London. Reeves accepted, and went on to have a distinguished career in England, which included becoming director of the London School of Economics and writing The Long White Cloud (Ao Tea Roa), the first intelligently analytical history of New Zealand. In this volume, Reeves explained the raison d’être for the Liberal reforms from the point of view of one who had participated in their planning and execution:
They were the outcome of a belief that a young democratic country, still almost free from extremes of wealth and poverty, from class hatreds and fears and the barriers these create, supplies an unequalled field for safe and rational experiment in the hope of preventing and shutting out some of the worst social evils and miseries which afflict great nations alike in the old world and the new.
The Liberals’ other pioneering measure, alongside female suff
rage and labour reform, was one which all cabinet members fully supported: the introduction of an old age pension. Behind this legislation was the memory of one of the ‘worst social evils and miseries’ to which Reeves referred, the British workhouse in which the indigent elderly were forced to live in spartan institutional circumstances. What the Liberals devised instead was a non-contributory pension scheme which would be available as an entitlement earned by years of paying tax – or being married to someone who had. After four years of debate and political manoeuvring, the pension was introduced in 1898. It was not universal, however (that measure would await the arrival of the first Labour Government in the 1930s). It was restricted to men and women who were destitute, and then only if that state was not the fault of the individuals concerned – in other words, if they were ‘deserving poor’. It was complemented a decade later by the country’s first widow’s pension, which saved from destitution women with children who had lost their husband, father and wage-earner.
Still another measure that would come to be seen as contributing to the foundation of the welfare state was the Liberals’ Workers Dwellings Act of 1905. This enabled the Government to buy land at Petone and elsewhere, build houses, and rent them to workers and their families. Although it was not a large-scale scheme, because of budgetary limitations, it represented an attempt to raise the standard of suburban development and to provide diligent workers and their families with affordable good-quality accommodation. It can also be seen as a precursor of the much fuller state housing scheme launched by the first Labour Government in the 1930s.
The Liberals’ major programme, which they hoped would generate employment, agricultural production and continued national prosperity while at the same time adding to their support, was the closer settlement of land. They came into office with the declared intention of breaking up large estates and settling small farmers on them. In 1890 less than 1 per cent of all landowners controlled 64 per cent of freehold land. And some of the estate owners, especially in Canterbury and North Otago, had been generating enormous incomes. Robert Campbell of Otekaieke, inland from Oamaru, for example, had annual profits in good years of about £30,000.
The Government did not intend to carve up these properties forcibly, however, and the new opportunities offered by refrigeration and farm mechanisation were incentive enough for many owners to sell out voluntarily. Between 1892 and 1912, the Government bought 223 estates totalling 520,000 hectares; and they settled on them some 7000 farmers and their families. The Government also continued to open up Crown land in the North Island – much of it purchased from Maori (some 1.2 million hectares for £650,000) – and to build railways, roads and bridges to make that land accessible.
Oakley Sargeson, uncle of the future writer Frank Sargeson, was typical of the settlers who benefited from ballots for Crown land. A plumber in Kaponga, Taranaki, he entered a ballot for land north of Taumarunui in 1912. He drew a 160-hectare hill-country property near Okahukura, available for ‘lease in perpetuity’ (999 years; later these properties were made available for purchase). The land turned out to be steep-sided with pumice soil, half forested and half in bracken. To convert it for sheep farming, Sargeson had to fell the bush and clear the fern, burn over the remnants, sow grass, fence it, and finally stock it. The whole process took more than a decade of back-breaking labour.
The main architect of the Liberals’ land policy was John McKenzie, nicknamed ‘Honest Jock’, a towering Gaelic-speaking Highlander who in 1860 became part of the chain migration of Scots to Otago. He farmed near Palmerston and won election to the Otago Provincial Council in 1871. Ten years later he became MP for Moeraki and, within a short time, whip for the Stout–Vogel administration and an authoritative speaker in Parliament on land issues – his only real political interest. That expertise brought him the Lands portfolio in the Liberal cabinet and he held it from 1891 until his resignation on the ground of ill-health in 1900, which preceded his death the following year. He was also on occasion acting Premier during Seddon’s rare absences.
McKenzie’s biographer Tom Brooking credits him with introducing the Government’s graduated land tax in 1891 and with designing the Acts that facilitated the state purchase of large estates (backed by the threat of compulsory purchase to encourage the waverers). He also credits McKenzie with introducing the regulations and inspections that ensured the delivery of clean milk to dairy factories and healthy meat to freezing works and butcheries. His 1892 Land Act in particular is memorable for another reason: it ‘made the notion of the Queen’s Chain more explicit … McKenzie wanted all New Zealanders to be able to fish the rivers, lakes and coasts and to enjoy unrestricted access to forests and mountains’. This ambition sprang from McKenzie’s childhood in Ross-shire, where he had seen the properties of the lairds closed off to the common people. Oddly, though, his first-hand memories of the Highland clearances did not prevent him from taking every opportunity to part North Island Maori from their land. As Brooking notes, McKenzie’s ‘land for settlements policy assured him a place in the national hall of fame but his Native land policy widened the fracture in the New Zealand dream’.
Along with Labour and Lands, another of the Government’s new bureaucracies was the Department of Public Health, the first of its kind anywhere and another of the measures which gave weight to New Zealand’s growing reputation as ‘social laboratory of the world’. The long-running cause for the creation of this department, and for the appointment of a minister responsible, Joseph Ward, was the widely acknowledged ineffectiveness of the central and local boards of health set up by the Public Health Act of 1872. As health historian Derek Dow notes, these failed because the central boards, based on the old system of provincial government, were barred from raising funds, and the local boards had not been given effective powers. They had been expected to oversee such matters as the quarantining of vessels arriving in New Zealand with cases of infectious disease and vaccinating local populations in the event of outbreaks of disease. Other responsibilities were supposed to include ‘removal of nuisances, speedy interment of the dead, monitoring of noxious trades … animal hygiene as it affected human health [and] requiring earth or water closets to be attached to all houses in towns’.
The last requirement was not easily enforced because of a general absence of effective water and sewerage systems (in 1887, for example, only 10 per cent of houses in Auckland possessed water closets). The best that could be done in most places was arranging ‘night soil’ collections. Another factor that was often cited to reduce any sense of urgency in the improvement of water supplies and sanitation was the belief – wholly erroneous – that New Zealand had one of the healthiest climates in the world and was therefore less in need of sanitation measures than the crowded cities of the Old World.[2] In fact, a series of studies in the second half of the nineteenth century revealed that death rates in New Zealand towns were as bad as, and in some cases worse than, those in such cities as Manchester and London. Given that many immigrants had left Europe specifically to escape such conditions, this was disappointing news indeed.
What eventually galvanised the Liberal Government to address such problems systematically was a bubonic plague scare in 1900. The world’s third great pandemic of plague spread along the trade routes out of China in the 1890s and eventually killed more than 10 million people, most of them in Asia and India. The disease reached Sydney in January 1900, where there were 303 cases that year and 103 deaths. Auckland’s considerable trade and transport links with Australia aroused fears that New Zealand would be affected; as if on cue, the country’s first plague victim, Hugh Charles Kelly of Upper Queen Street, died on 22 June 1900.
The Government responded to this apparent emergency – ‘apparent’ because Kelly turned out to be New Zealand’s sole plague victim, though this could not be known at the time – with a Bubonic Plague Prevention Act, stiffening quarantine and other measures. But campaigners for a reformed public health system, such as the experienced bacteriologist D
r James Mason, urged the Government to take advantage of the heightened awareness of health issues by making far-reaching changes to the health system. The Government obliged. A new Public Health Act became law on 13 October 1900. It established a centralised department in Wellington with a Chief Health Officer, Dr Mason, and district health officers and offices in Auckland, Napier, Wellington, Nelson, Christchurch and Dunedin.
Mason set out the department’s priorities in his first annual report the following year. They included ‘continuous vigilance against infectious disease … sanitary issues, including water pollution, drainage and water supply schemes, the disposal of household refuse and night soil, and the control of meat and milk supplies’. He also referred to measures needed to control tuberculosis, the major cause of death among Pakeha New Zealanders (as it would be subsequently among Maori, once other diseases such as typhoid were brought under control through improvements in sanitation and housing); although it was possible to ameliorate the effects of tuberculosis, particularly by isolating victims in sanatoria or individual huts, the disease would not be eliminated until the widespread availability of antibiotics after World War II.
Prospects for a co-ordinated approach to public health improved further when the department took over hospital administration in 1909. Some of the advantages of the new system became apparent almost immediately when the country had to face its one and only smallpox epidemic in 1913; though the fact that the outbreak was confined largely to rural Maori communities limited the impact of organised vaccination and isolation programmes.
Another major health initiative during the Liberals’ term of office, though not directly attributable to them, was the formation of the Society for the Promotion of the Health of Women and Children in Dunedin in 1907. Known as the Plunket Society, after the wife of the then Governor, who was a patron and strong supporter, it was the outcome of a visionary programme for the care of infants devised by Frederic Truby King, superintendent of Seacliff Lunatic Asylum.[3] King, along with the great physicist Ernest Rutherford, was the first New Zealand-born scientist to make an impact on the wider world. Whereas Rutherford, unable to find a permanent job as a schoolteacher, had left the country in 1895 to seek further opportunities abroad and in 1908 become the first New Zealander awarded the Nobel Prize, King had trained overseas (in Edinburgh), then returned to New Zealand to make his mark there.