by Michael King
Dissatisfaction with the country’s system of compulsory arbitration had become especially strong. It had spawned the formation in 1909 of the first Federation of Labour, a national confederation of unions that grew out of the New Zealand Federation of Miners. The Liberal Government’s much-vaunted Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, which had come into force in 1894, required unions to register in order to qualify for its protection. It operated at two levels. Local conciliation boards (later ‘councils’), with equal employer and employee representation and an independent chairman, ruled on disputes in their own districts; if either side refused to accept a board decision, the dispute was referred to the Arbitration Court, whose judgements were binding. The latter was made up of a judge, who acted as chairman, and one representative each of unions and employers.
For a time the system appeared to work well. It stimulated the formation of trade unions and eliminated strikes from the New Zealand industrial scene for eleven years. Workers seemed generally satisfied, as early court decisions, often upholding union submissions, improved wages and conditions. In 1906, however, there was evidence of dissatisfaction with the arbitration system among some unions. That year Auckland tramway workers went on strike to protest against the unfair dismissal of one of their members. In 1907 there were twelve strikes, and twelve more in 1908. By 1910, 240 workers were on strike, and this rose to 1089 in 1911, 2985 in 1912 and 13,871 in 1913.
For posterity, the most significant of the early strikes was in 1908 at the Blackball Mine on the West Coast of the South Island. This was led by Pat Hickey, a fiery and charismatic New Zealand-born miner who had worked previously in a coal mine in Utah, where he joined a union affiliated to the International Workers of the World[2] and learnt that ‘class warfare was inevitable, class solidarity essential, and revolutionary industrial unionism the only defence and hope for the “wage slave”’. The Blackball strike originally aimed to increase the miners’ ‘crib’ or mealtime underground from 15 to 30 minutes. It represented a challenge to the arbitration system since Hickey believed that the most satisfactory results could be obtained by direct industrial action. The miners’ union was fined for striking illegally, but none the less kept its members on strike. After three months the employers relented. They increased ‘crib-time’ to half an hour and reinstated miners who had been dismissed for organising the strike.
This outcome encouraged a belief in the value of direct action among some unionists who felt that the arbitration system was too slow, too cumbersome, or downright unfair to workers in its decisions. Miners’ unions from all over the country met to form a national federation, with Australian immigrant Bob Semple of Runanga as president and Hickey as secretary. The following year this organisation became the Federation of Labour, opened its membership to all unions and elected Paddy Webb, another Australian import, as president, while Semple became the national organiser paid to travel around the country calling on unions to de-register from the Arbitration Act. The federation took over the Shearers’ Union journal The Maoriland Worker and turned it into a national socialist paper under the editorship first of Bob Ross and then of Harry Holland, both of them Australians by birth. Pat Hickey turned out to be the only New Zealander prominent in a movement that would be dominated by unionists born elsewhere, including the Scottish-born Peter Fraser, who arrived in New Zealand in 1911 and was working for the Federation of Labour by May of that year.
Shortly after Fraser’s arrival the federation showed its syndicalist inclination by promoting the concept of ‘One Big Union’. This was based on the IWW doctrine that workers would gain control of the economy by gaining control of industry. All the craft unions and workers yet to be unionised would be organised into about eight large unions based, according to one model, on agriculture, mining, transport, distribution, manufacturing, construction, printing, journalism and the Public Service. Each sector would have a departmental headquarters, and all eight would be co-ordinated from a central headquarters. The debate over this concept was the major issue in socialist circles and publications in New Zealand in 1911 and 1912.
The two events which, more than any others, were to put syndicalism to the test were the Waihi and waterfront strikes. Both turned out to be disasters for the radical trade union movement. In Waihi, the goldminers had affiliated to the Red Feds, and the advocacy of Bob Semple on their behalf had won them improved pay and working conditions. This led a majority of the union to vote for withdrawal from the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act so they would have the right to strike. One group in the union, the engine drivers, however, decided to form their own union and register it under the Act. This led the miners to fear that such registration would be used to force all workers in the mine back to arbitration. The miners threatened to strike unless the company sacked the engine drivers. The company refused and the miners went on strike. The company responded by closing the mine.
By the time the Reform Government came into office in July 1912, there was considerable disorder in Waihi caused by the conflict between the Red Fed supporters and the so-called ‘scab-unionists’ (those who continued to work despite the calling of a strike). When the company reopened the mine and employed only members of the newly formed ‘scab-union’, several battles ensued in the streets of the town. Massey, after consultation with his Attorney-General, Alexander Herdman, and the Commissioner of Police, the authoritarian John Cullen, sent in the police ostensibly to restore order, but in fact to crack down on the striking unionists. In one of the resulting mêlées, the miners’ union hall was stormed by police and George Frederick Evans, a Red Fed supporter, was clubbed to death after he had allegedly shot at one of the attacking constables, thus becoming New Zealand’s first martyr to industrial action. The newly registered union then conducted a ‘campaign of terror’ against the Red Feds, who were eventually run out of town. This brought the dispute to an end.
Such a major setback caused the syndicalist wing of the labour movement to withdraw, reorganise and reflect. At a so-called ‘Unity Conference’ in Wellington in January 1913, two new organisations were established: a United Federation of Labour, which supported strike action for individual disputes but not as a mechanism for bringing down governments, and a Social Democratic Party (SDP), which was to work through the political system for the ‘socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange’.
In October of that year, however, employers, fearing a continuation of ‘revolutionary’ union tactics, engineered a lockout at the Wellington wharves. When the United Federation of Labour then declared a general strike and persuaded the excluded workers to occupy their workplace, the Government recruited young farmers as special constables (‘Massey’s Cossacks’) to both protect and work the wharves and to put down trade union demonstrations. Law and order was preserved, but at a price. According to Barry Gustafson, the use of and the brutality of the special constables ‘poisoned relations between town and country and helped polarise New Zealand politics for a generation’. The general strike was called off for lack of national support.
From this point on the key figures in the Labour movement – Semple, Fraser, Holland, Michael Joseph Savage and others – began to put their energies into political rather than industrial action. And this new focus of activity led, after the most disorderly general election campaign in memory in 1914, to the formation in July 1916 of the New Zealand Labour Party, which combined all the disparate political and trade union elements into a single organisation to fight elections. The party retained the SDP goal of ‘the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange’, including the nationalisation of land, and labour representation committees as the unit of organisation and control at the electorate level. From this time on the Labour movement would work politically as a single and relatively united body.
The Massey Government was given the credit – or the blame – for the suppression of revolutionary trade union activity in New Zealand in its early years in offi
ce. In fact, however, these revolutionary tactics failed because New Zealand was largely free of class consciousness and was not a large enough society to support the kinds of syndicalist tactics that worked well on the far larger factory floors of Europe and the United States. Outside the mines, most workplaces and most unions were relatively small. Further, most members of what working class did exist in New Zealand aspired, on the whole, to join the middle class. They wanted to own their own homes, they wanted their children to receive the best possible education, they wanted the security of long-term – if possible, life-long – employment. All these objectives seemed as achievable via the policies of a conservative government as of a liberal one. And it was this perception of diminishing ideological boundaries that eventually led to a permanent coalition between Reform and Liberal. Few people in New Zealand from any background wanted to ‘smash’ the capitalist system: most just hoped to make that system more responsive to their wants and needs.
This fundamental reality accounts for the Labour movement’s joining mainstream parliamentary politics – and perhaps, if so many of the movement’s leaders had not been immigrants, they might have recognised the inevitability of this strategy earlier. It also accounts for Labour’s taking so long to achieve political power. The proportion of votes for Labour candidates under various labels in 1914 was 10 per cent. By 1919, in the first election contested by the New Zealand Labour Party, it rose to 24 per cent. But then the party made no real headway for a further twelve years. Even in 1931, at the depth of the Great Depression, when all the indicators were in its favour, it mustered only 35 per cent. Real progress was not made until the party abandoned its programme of socialisation, particularly its threat to nationalise land, and until it had convinced the electorate at large that it was not made up of fanatical reformers. By the time Labour took office in 1935 it had become apparent that the party, like most of its supporters, wanted to ‘improve capitalism, not … abolish it’.
The half-dozen independent Labour members in Parliament after the 1914 general election declined to join the Coalition Government which Massey (unwillingly) and Ward formed in August 1915. Massey had little choice. With 41 seats out of a total of 80, to the combined Liberal–Labour total of 39, the Government had a bare majority once the Speaker had been selected. It was insufficient to ensure smooth government through the war years. And so, although the leaders of the major parties ‘detested each other on personal, political and religious grounds’, they attempted to work together for the national good. The Labour MPs formed a caucus and elected Alfred Hindmarsh as their chairman, then took their place for the first time as the official Opposition. Before the next general election could be held in December 1919, delayed by the war, further influential Labour members would join the caucus as a result of by-elections: Harry Holland (who became leader after Hindmarsh died in the 1918 influenza epidemic), Peter Fraser and Bob Semple. The 1919 election brought in the man who would eventually lead Labour into office as the ‘kindly face’ of socialism, Michael Joseph Savage.
The conduct of the war, and an agreement to withhold new laws unless both major parties were in favour of them, led to virtual legislative paralysis from 1915 to 1919, when the coalition was dismantled. In addition, Massey spent a great deal of time at sea and abroad – five visits to Britain in the course of the war and its immediate aftermath. He attended meetings of the Imperial War Cabinet in London, collected honorary degrees and the freedom of ten British cities, and visited New Zealand troops in France (one of whom was his youngest son, who was severely wounded at the Battle of the Somme). On some of these expeditions he was accompanied by Ward, while James Allen, Minister of Defence, was left as acting Prime Minister.
The completion of one of these trips, when Massey and Ward disembarked from the vessel Niagara at Auckland in October 1918, became the subject of controversy and inquiry. Also on board were people suffering from the virulent strain of influenza that was to kill 200 million people worldwide. Because it was necessary for the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister to resume their duties in Wellington, the ship was not placed in quarantine. A subsequent royal commission was to conclude that there was a ‘strong presumption’ that the Niagara brought the ’flu to New Zealand. Eventually, the country lost over 6700 people to the epidemic, a disproportionate number of them Maori. This figure represented more than a third of the casualties suffered by the country in the war, which ended the month after the Niagara’s arrival.
While political partisanship was diminished for most of the war by the existence of the coalition and the need to support the war effort, there were two major ripples across the surface of national unity. One was the Labour-led anti-conscription campaign, which resulted in four Labour MPs or soon-to-be MPs being imprisoned for sedition, among them the future World War II Prime Minister, Peter Fraser. The other was a storm of religious bigotry generated by the Protestant Political Association.
Up until the war years, most visitors who commented on religious affairs in New Zealand had been struck by the lack of the sectarianism – especially Protestant versus Catholic antagonism – that was so pronounced in Britain, the United States and Australia. Indeed, despite being a predominantly Protestant country (the Catholic proportion of the population was only around 13 per cent), New Zealand had already had two Catholic Prime Ministers, Frederick Weld and Sir Joseph Ward, and a host of other Catholics in influential political positions. In 1917, however, former Baptist minister Howard Elliott formed the Protestant Political Association (PPA) with the active support of the Grand Orange Lodge, of which William Massey was a member. It was opposed to ‘rum, Romanism and rebellion’, and it used such events and issues as the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Dublin, Joseph Ward’s Catholicism and Catholic opposition to the Bible-in-schools campaign to whip up anti-Catholic feeling. By 1919 Elliott claimed to have 225 local branches and a national membership of 200,000. The PPA campaigned on behalf of Reform candidates in the 1919 general election and were instrumental in depriving Ward of his seat and helping return Massey’s Government with a 29-seat advantage over the Liberals, the first and only time Massey won a decisive majority in Parliament. The PPA also supported the prosecution for sedition of the Catholic Assistant Bishop of Auckland, James Liston, after he had spoken in the Auckland Town Hall on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1922 about the Easter uprising. Liston was acquitted.
That incident was a last gasp of PPA-inspired bigotry, however. Britain’s granting independence to Ireland while retaining the province of Ulster in 1921 took the wind out of the PPA’s sails, and its membership went into steep decline. And New Zealand Catholics became less confident about the merits of Irish nationalism as a result of the Irish Civil War, which ran from 1922–23 and cost around 4000 lives.
Up to 1920, Massey’s administrations had been sustained largely by a prolonged economic boom. One symptom of that prosperity was the considerable amount of money the Government made available to settle returned servicemen on the land, with additional funds for land clearance and development and provision of rural infrastructure such as roads, bridges and electricity. Circumstances changed in 1921, however, when the prices Britain was able to pay for New Zealand’s primary produce began to fall and the country slid into recession. Many farmers and soldier settlers who had saddled themselves with debt to buy farms when money was readily available now found that they could not afford to service their loans. This was one of the factors which led so many ex-servicemen, including Rewi Alley and his companion Jack Stevens, to walk off the land, and which left such poignant relics in the landscape as Mangapurua’s ‘bridge to nowhere’.
Massey attempted to gain a degree of control over economic circumstances by establishing strong producer boards. But his farming and business constituents agitated for lower taxes, decreased government spending and rejection of demands for higher wages, none of which the Government could deliver. In the 1922 election Reform lost its majority. The party retained 38 seats against the Liberals’ 24 and Labour�
�s 17. Although there were now no significant ideological differences between Reform and Liberal, continuing personal antipathies prevented another coalition. And the Liberals and Labour were by this time too far apart to combine forces. So Massey retained the prime ministership, leading a minority government.
At the following year’s Imperial Conference in London, the dominion prime ministers and Britain formally recognised the right of all the dominions to conclude their own trade treaties with foreign governments. This agreement was further formalised in the Balfour Definition[3] at the 1926 Imperial Conference, which stated that the dominions ‘are autonomous communities within the British Empire equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations’.
New Zealand, represented by Massey at the 1923 conference and by his successor, Gordon Coates, in 1926, took no part in the formulation of these positions – indeed, Coates thought the Balfour Definition ‘a rotten formula’ that would serve only to weaken the ties of Empire when New Zealand preferred those ties to be intensified. The country none the less took advantage of the new interpretation of its status by concluding commercial treaties first with Japan in 1928, and then with Belgium in 1933. When the Balfour Definition was recast in the Statute of Westminster and passed by the British House of Commons in 1931, however, New Zealand, unlike Canada, the Irish Free State and the Union of South Africa, declined to ratify it.