by Michael King
All these qualities were in evidence when she established Turangawaewae Marae at Ngaruawahia from 1921. In the late 1920s the coincidence of her need for further resources with Coates and Ngata’s plans for Maori cultural and agricultural development brought her into fruitful contact with the governmental and Public Service network, which Waikato had shunned since her uncle King Mahuta had sat on the Executive Council representing the Maori people (1903–09). From the late 1920s Te Puea was a national Maori figure, Turangawaewae began to take on the character of a national marae, and she had access to the resources of the state with which to achieve her objectives and heighten her mana (though some conservatives in Waikato referred to her disparagingly as ‘Mrs Kawanatanga’ on account of her association with politicians). Ngata’s land development scheme was the most dramatic example of this process – it offered a means by which Waikato Maori communities could subsist on their own territory, mainly through dairy farming, and conserve their traditional living patterns. In association with this security she consolidated a calendar of Kingitanga hui in the 1930s and 1940s which gave these communities activities to plan for and look forward to the year round.
Like other successful local Maori leaders, Te Puea was an innovator who appealed to precedent. It is difficult to judge the extent to which she chose this role or the role assumed her. What is clear is that, having decided on a course – moving to Ngaruawahia, building a meeting house, re-establishing carving and rivercraft, returning to farming – she would always find justification in tradition, most often in the whakatauki or proverbs of Tawhiao. Even when breaking with tradition – by standing and speaking in public, for example – she always made it clear that her own actions should not be taken as grounds for discarding tikanga. When she devised new programmes – such as raising money by concert tours or by inviting political participation in her hui held to open Mahinarangi meeting house in 1929 – she cloaked them with traditional Maori ceremonial so as to arouse, quite deliberately, nostalgic memories of past tribal achievements.
Te Puea’s natural aptitudes – in particular her perceptiveness about tactics and the quick-wittedness with which she wrong-footed rivals – were strengthened by her mastery of the arts of delegation and organisation. Her meticulous keeping of records ensured that she was always well informed, and often better informed than her rivals. She knew instinctively when to persist in one tactical direction and when to alter course. She was adept at extending her own talents and compensating for the skills she lacked by recruiting lieutenants to act for her in specialised ways. Her use of Maori and Pakeha mediators made valuable paths for her into both worlds to an extent she could not have achieved on her own. And at points where people were no longer useful or let her down she was rarely handicapped by sentiment: she simply discarded them.
The immediate consequences of Te Puea’s leadership can be judged by comparing the legacy she left with the conditions she inherited. She began tribal work in 1910, when Waikato were largely fragmented and demoralised. In 40 years of relentless effort she found ways for them to return to a system of rural-based extended families and communal patterns of living, influenced by traditional leadership and with a calendar of distinctively Maori cultural activities. In addition to these more general goals, she was largely responsible for the considerable measure of Pakeha acceptance that the Kingitanga had won by the time she died in 1952. She has been called ‘possibly the most influential woman in our political history’ and it would be difficult to dispute this assessment. The fact that her great-niece Te Atairangikaahu achieved such widespread support as Maori Queen and head of the Kingitanga from 1966 was in no small measure due to the precedents Te Puea had set. And Dame Te Atairangikaahu, while not as extroverted a figure as her great-aunt, further consolidated the mana which earlier leaders of the movement had husbanded so carefully.
It was while Te Puea was approaching the height of her influence that the most florescent era in national Maori affairs to that time came to an end. In October 1934 Apirana Ngata resigned his cabinet portfolio. A royal commission investigating the administration of the land development scheme had found the minister guilty, not of any major impropriety, but of disregarding accepted Public Service procedures, not adequately accounting for the expenditure of state funds, and possibly favouring the interests of his own tribe. None of these matters was criminal. But, unsupported by his own colleagues and under fierce attack from the Opposition, Ngata decided to step aside. It was a sad end to a ministerial career which had seen him at one point, in 1930, holding the position of acting Prime Minister. There would not be another Maori minister in charge of Maori affairs for a further 38 years. The land scheme itself was regarded as sufficiently successful to be carried on by subsequent administrations, however.
Throughout the period of Ngata’s ministry New Zealand had moved steadily into the grip of worldwide economic recession: the justifiably named Great Depression. Maori rural workers had begun to suffer as farmers, their income from agricultural products falling, and local bodies laid off contract and casual workers. In rural towns the small number of Maori salaried workers were the first to be displaced by staff reductions. There was a feeling in government, and among the public at large, that Maori – unlike Pakeha – could simply ‘go home to the pa’ for food and shelter. By 1933 Maori made up an estimated 40 per cent of the total unemployed and they were paid lower benefits than non-Maori.
The situation was relieved after the election of the first Labour Government in 1935. One of its first measures was to abolish the unequal benefit rates. And the expansion of economic activity in the late 1930s brought a degree of temporary prosperity to the land development scheme and created additional employment in rural areas. The introduction of social security benefits greatly increased the spending power of extended families with their provision of additional income for children and for the aged. Labour also modified earlier requirements that had made it difficult and sometimes impossible for Maori without adequate documentation to secure child allowances and old age pensions. A study in one district noted that ‘From the Maori [social security] has removed some of the grinding poverty which has been … the major anxiety of their lives.’
The political consequence of this transformation was that Maori would support Labour parliamentary candidates for the next three decades; and, because of an alliance made between Labour and the Ratana movement, that meant support of Ratana MPs. By 1935 two of Ratana’s ‘Four Quarters’, his son Tokouru (Western Maori) and Eruera Tirikatene (Southern Maori), were already in Parliament as independents. On 4 February 1936, the Mangai visited the new Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, and formalised an association between their two movements in a manner that was characteristically Maori.
Ratana … placed on the table before him four objects: a potato, a broken gold watch, a greenstone tiki and a huia feather … The potato was the ordinary Maori, needing his land. The watch was the law relating to the lands of the Maori. Only the machinery of the law could repair the law. The greenstone tiki stood for the traditions and mana of the Maori. And the huia feather, the sign of a paramount chief, would be worn by Mr Savage if he would look after his Maori people. The Prime Minister accepted the proposal.
The Prime Minister also took on the portfolio of Native Affairs, as did subsequent Labour Prime Ministers, though not unbrokenly, until the era of Norman Kirk in 1972. Ratana electoral support increased as a result of the pact. Paraire Paikea took Northern Maori in 1938. And in 1943 Tiaki Omana did what most observers believed was impossible: he toppled Ngata in Eastern Maori. The Mangai’s prophecy was fulfilled, the Ratana hegemony was now complete. The alliance was cemented by the policies of the Labour Government that found favour with Maori, and by the continuing success of Ratana candidates at the polls – a consequence far more of those policies than of the calibre of the MPs.
[1] Successive late-nineteenth-century governments had been influenced by the ruling in 1877 of the Chief Justice, Sir James Prendergast
, that ‘the whole treaty was worthless – a simple nullity [which] pretended to be an agreement between two nations but [in reality] was between a civilised nation and a group of savages …’
Chapter 22
Depression and Recovery
George Forbes was perhaps New Zealand’s most unlikely Prime Minister. He was a bull-necked farmer from Cheviot who had captained the Canterbury rugby team from the position of half-back in 1892. Assessing his career, W. J. Gardner would say that his greatest political strength was an ability to go down on the ball in the face of dangerous rushes. In other words, he was tough and stubborn but not inspiring. Forbes had entered Parliament taking the Hurunui seat as a Liberal in 1908 and was party whip from 1912 to 1922. In 1925 and 1926 he was briefly Leader of the Opposition. His perceived virtues were honesty (‘Honest George’ was his nickname in farming circles), doggedness and loyalty.
His weaknesses arose from doubts about his intelligence and ability to take initiatives. His colleague Keith Holyoake, who was at one time the youngest member of Forbes’s caucus, used to say that the only reason his leader had graduated from Lyttelton Primary School was that the school had burned down. In cabinet he sometimes bamboozled his colleagues by making dogmatic but wholly incorrect pronouncements (that two-thirds of something was more than three-quarters, for example). As events would prove, in May 1930, when he became Prime Minister on the retirement of Sir Joseph Ward, Forbes was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Great Depression, already apparent for nearly two years, worsened dramatically and apparently inexorably. One historian has noted that, between 1928 and 1931, ‘export prices fell by 40 per cent. There was a consequent fall in government revenue, which shrank by five million pounds in 1930 and eight million pounds in 1931 – half the normal revenue. The government … could see only one answer and that was to balance the budget by cutting costs.’ This was Forbes’s response to the crisis, for he had taken the portfolio of Finance in addition to his prime ministerial responsibilities. Public works expenditure was slashed, and staff would later be laid off and taken on again at considerably reduced relief rates. Public Service wages were cut by 10 per cent in 1931 and again in 1932. The Court of Arbitration was given the power to lower wages and minimum rates disappeared. Old age and war pensions were cut and family allowances abolished. The result was unemployment for tens of thousands and reduced purchasing power for others. Shopkeepers began to go bankrupt as customers could no longer pay bills.
While Forbes was out of the country for the 1930 Imperial Conference in London, Parliament passed the Unemployment Act, which promised relief payments for those who registered. When he returned in January 1931 Forbes announced that there would be no pay without work. This meant that, in order to receive payments, the unemployed, regardless of their skills or former occupations, would chip weeds, make roads, work on farms, join forestry projects or participate in other ‘make-work’ schemes, many of them operating far away from towns and cities. A famous 1931 Labour Party poster shows a photograph of Richard Seddon overlooking one of the men pulling a chain harrow, a job normally performed by horses. The shade of King Dick says, ‘This! In God’s Own Country!’
When the unemployed register opened in February 1931, 23,000 put their names down at once. This number had risen to 51,000 by June. And from that point on, regardless of government policies – and possibly because of them – the number of jobless continued to rise, to a peak of around 80,000 in July 1933. Among these were 20,000 general labourers, 5000 farm workers and 7000 building tradesmen. These registrations did not include Maori or women or young men under sixteen. It is probable that, at the height of the Depression, the actual number unemployed was over 100,000, or around 40 per cent of the male workforce.
In September 1931 Forbes told an all-party political conference that, as in wartime, the country needed a coalition government to face a common enemy, share responsibility and nurture national unity. Labour declined to co-operate, but Gordon Coates, leader of Reform, though he disliked Forbes intensely, saw merit in the proposal and advantage for his party. Thus United and Reform formed the Coalition Government, with Reform taking many of the key portfolios, including Coates as Minister of Public Works again and as minister with responsibility for unemployment. He made little headway in the latter portfolio, however, as he was up against William Downie Stewart, who had taken Finance and was no less orthodox than Forbes had been in that role. The general election in December returned the Coalition with 51 seats to Labour’s 24. But discontent with the rising number of unemployed was building.
By 1932 the vigorous Unemployed Workers Union had 13,000 members. The Communist Party had become active in this organisation and elsewhere, particularly in setting up women’s committees. In April and May meetings of the unemployed in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin precipitated riots. In Auckland, mounted police were used to clear the streets and special constables recruited to protect damaged buildings and act as a deterrent to further violence. Labour MP John A. Lee had been speaking at a meeting inside the Auckland Town Hall which, because of lack of room, had been forced to exclude thousands of unemployed waiting outside. Frustration at this exclusion had sparked the riot. Lee saw the aftermath.
Queen Street was looted from end to end. Law and order were down and out. Men were being marshalled from the navy to patrol the streets. The looters, being ordinary decent citizens moved to desperation by distress, exploded in violence and then just as suddenly disappeared, not anxious to be seen in the street of anarchy, although they would gather in Karangahape Road for a repeat the next night … If [they] had not been democratically minded they would have had the government out that week.
In Wellington, the unemployed had wanted to hold a mass meeting at the Basin Reserve.
[But] the authorities refused them. So they got permission from a private property owner to use a big vacant section somewhere up … Cuba Street way, and they were all peaceably having their meeting there when without warning the police rushed them. They came charging through the gates, over the fences and belted hell out of them … and of course the crowd scattered. Well, that incensed the people of Wellington and that night they started to flock in the thousands …
Several nights later, near the Cenotaph,
I heard a voice cry out, ‘Let’s smash the bloody town up’ … [They] started to advance up Lambton Quay belting windows with oranges or bananas and as they broke the windows, particularly of hardware shops, they’d pick up spanners and iron bars and different gear like big tools … And as they went up Lambton Quay you could hear the windows crashing, it was a horrible sound … and if you wanted to go against the crowd you just couldn’t. They just surged right up behind those rioters, right up through the Quay.
Although in every instance the number of people responsible for damage was small compared with the number of onlookers, many New Zealanders feared at this time that the country was on the brink of anarchy. Expressions of contempt and even hate for politicians were widespread: it was said of Gordon Coates, for example – untruthfully – that he was drinking heavily and had told a deputation of unemployed workers to ‘eat grass’. The Government passed the Public Safety and Conservation Act which gave the police draconian powers to detain people. But there was no further violence. It was as if the country had looked over an abyss and then decided by common consent to draw back.
Just how bad, though, did living conditions become over this period? Tony Simpson has described the Depression as ‘a grey and ill-defined monster, an unspeakable disaster’ that ‘cast a long shadow, a blight on everything it touched …’ After 1933, when the Government required at first single and then married men to go into rural work camps to qualify for relief payment, those workers often found themselves in extraordinarily unpleasant places. One such was Aka Aka, south-east of Waiuku, where the Auckland Weekly News reported:
The floors of the tent are earthen, uncovered by boarding, and on Wednesday many of them were
dampened by rain soakage. The surroundings … were very muddy. Then men bathe in the drains, wash in a horse trough, and if it rains have to don wet clothing the next day, for there is no drying room. Men recently arrived at the camp and unused to navvying may earn only five shillings a week … Nearly always they are ankle-deep and knee-deep in water, and often waist-deep.
And, of course, life was difficult for dependants living on reduced incomes. ‘[Wives] had to make do as best they could,’ wrote Erik Olssen, ‘improvising clothing out of sugar sacks, trying to feed their families, scrounging and begging. They also had to keep their homes clean and tidy to impress the voluntary inspectors who checked to make sure that families really needed assistance.’ While there was help for the poor, again they had to be the deserving poor.
The Depression was not an unmitigated disaster for all New Zealanders, however. There were some who, because of their occupations or private means, scarcely noticed its passage. And there were others who succeeded in making the experience positive, a source of adventure and spiritual or cultural enrichment. On the whole these were single men with minimal responsibilities, but not always. When Fred Miller, a South Island journalist, was laid off by his newspaper, he took his family to Central Otago for three years where he panned for gold (and, for part of that time, housed his wife and children in a cave). The motto he coined as a result of those years was ‘Pain is inevitable, misery is optional. Stick a geranium in your hat and be happy.’