by Michael King
Frank Sargeson launched his writing career by working on a relief gang one or two days a week, and spending the rest of the week growing fruit and vegetables, fishing and writing. He considered himself fortunate to have escaped being an office ‘work slave’.
He also observed that economic difficulties had the curious effect of turning people towards a ‘country way of life: you see numbers of relief workers and sustenance people providing for themselves by forgetting about their specialised jobs and developing … a Crusoe-like resourcefulness. These people have learned to put up with inconvenient baches, to keep and milk cows, to grow their own vegetables … Do they know that sow thistle and kumara leaves taste as good as cabbage and spinach? Or that some of the seaweed round our coasts is as good to eat as Irish dulse … [The Depression] can’t have been without its benefits.’
The Depression had another effect which Sargeson said he had not expected, but found stimulating: ‘[A] great variety of people [were becoming] very conscious of the miseries and hardships which were inflicted on people, and inflicted unjustly, because it was through no fault of their own that they suffered.’ Combining with others to address these injustices put ‘a sort of comradeship into life which may have been [there] at one time, but which I think [had] been lost.’ Sargeson found this comradeship in part through reading and writing and meeting other writers who shared his preoccupations, such as Roderick Finlayson and A. R. D. Fairburn, and in part through joining the Young Communist League.
A small but influential number of New Zealanders – no more than 300 – joined one or other branches or denominations of the Communist Party as a result of experiencing the Depression, thinking analytically about its causes, and wanting to help ensure it would not recur (‘breathes there a man with soul so dead/ who was not in the ’thirties red’ ran a parody of Walter Scott not long afterwards). They included Sargeson, poet R. A. K. Mason, Connie Soljak and Peter Purdue (who would marry), Connie Rawcliffe (later Birchfield), Elsie Freeman (later Locke), and others. Most of these people, including Sargeson at first, believed that the Depression was final and inevitable proof that capitalism could deliver neither prosperity nor social justice, and that it would have to be replaced by an alternative system such as communism. Russia was looked to at this time as the home and proving-ground of Marxist communism, and as the source of informed analysis of what was wrong with capitalism. Others joined communist organisations because they seemed to provide the only forums in which people could address difficult issues, such as social inequity and racism. Most drifted out of the movement once the worst effects of the Depression had dissipated. Others hung on until the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the revelations of the brutalities of Stalinism, or even until the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Those who remained faithful to a ‘party line’ beyond these events, whether Russian or Chinese determined, were few indeed.
It might have been supposed that the Depression delivered miseries enough to New Zealanders in the early 1930s. But, for some, a worse catastrophe was in store. Because New Zealand sat astride tectonic plates, it was and always had been prone to earthquakes (‘the Shaky Isles’ was a favourite term of Australians to describe their trans-Tasman neighbour). Two in the nineteenth century, in 1848 and 1855, had almost destroyed the fledgling town of Wellington. On 3 February 1931 the country’s worst recorded quake devastated Napier, Hastings and wider Hawke’s Bay. One survivor, Dorothy Campbell described it.
[We] were thrown on the ground & there we were with it heaving up & down like the waves of the sea & roaring & crashing & banging, so much so that we literally could not hear the chimneys come down or the crockery breaking … We were facing the sea & I saw an island jump … about fifteen feet out … and at the same time a reef of rocks which I had never seen before appear between the island & the mainland …
Shaking and strange marine effects were felt and seen in many parts of the east coast of the North Island. The future writer Ruth Park was in a dinghy on the inner Hauraki Gulf when the sea disappeared,
as though the water had been yanked away underneath … I saw things I had never seen before … The seagrass was all combed one way, as though the retreating water had tried to take it with it. It jumped with dying life. The air glittered with leaping fish … snapper, dogfish, mullet and clouds of sprats that had taken to the air in their hysteria. Afar, a huge ray lifted first one wing and then the other in a mad shuffle …
Napier and Hastings were left in smoking ruins and 256 people died, making the quake the worst human disaster in the country’s history.[1] Damage at the time was estimated at more than £10 million. Whole hillsides disappeared, rivers were dammed, great fissures appeared in the earth and ran for kilometres. For weeks some 30,000 people were deprived of food, water, electricity, telephones and transport. The Government, temporarily distracted from national economic woes, appointed two commissioners to oversee the enormous task of reconstruction.
The person most responsible for trying to revive the fortunes of the country as a whole, however, was Gordon Coates, first as Minister of Works and minister with responsibility for unemployment and subsequently, from January 1933, as Minister of Finance. Coates tried to explore more imaginative ways of addressing the problems that Forbes had simply allowed to accumulate. As Michael Bassett notes, he ‘introduced his Small Farms (Relief of Unemployment) Bill to help [put] workers on to the land, and later in the year [1933] Parliament passed his Reserve Bank of New Zealand Bill which established a central bank – partly state-owned, partly private – to assist banks to pool their reserves and to take over the issue of banknotes.’ Coates also set up what would later be called a ‘think-tank’, a group of bright young left-wing economists, R. M. Richard (Dick) Campbell, W. B. (Bill) Sutch and Horace Belshaw, who gave him alternative advice to that available from the Treasury. It was their recommendations that led to the creation of the Mortgage Corporation of New Zealand to help farmers refinance their loans at lower interest rates. Subsequent measures were introduced to ‘reduce farmers’ overheads in the hope of restoring profitability to the rural sector’, and so to the whole economy.
These measures did produce beneficial results. But Coates’s political allies were suspicious of the personnel in the think-tank and appalled at what they regarded as the minister’s excessive state intervention in economic matters. William Downie Stewart, whom Coates had replaced as Finance Minister, complained that ‘the Prime Minister is too passive and the Minister of Finance too active’. As far as Forbes was concerned, that was a fair judgement.
The only thing that would ‘solve’ the Depression and the problems it brought, of course, was the recovery of export prices. And by 1935 that was well under way and the number of unemployed was already dropping. This salvation came too late for the Coalition Government, however, which had exhausted the patience and the confidence of too much of the electorate. Labour, by contrast, bore no responsibility for the failed policies of the preceding years. And, with the death of its firebrand orator Harry Holland on the slopes of Taupiri mountain in October 1933 – he was attending the burial of the Maori King, Te Rata – the party was now led by Michael Joseph Savage.
‘Mickey’ or ‘Joe’ Savage, as he was variously known, was no threat to anybody. Australian-born, he had entered Parliament in 1919 and proved himself a sound if unimaginative worker for his Auckland constituents and his party. His socialist credentials were impeccable – he had first stood for Parliament in 1911 under the banner of the old Socialist Party – but his appearance and mannerisms and emphases disarmed the paranoia of those who were not socialist. Indeed, his definition of social security was ‘applied Christianity’. His colleagues had elected him leader in Holland’s place because of his benignity, and because they could rely on him to represent their body corporate in the most faithful, predictable and platitudinous manner. The real sources of power in the party for policy-making and discipline were former syndicalist Peter Fraser and former shopkeeper and commercial
traveller Walter Nash, the ‘money man’. But it suited them as well as the Labour caucus as a whole to have Savage out front, being everybody’s favourite bachelor uncle. Labour no longer planned to smash capitalism, as it had wanted to do two decades earlier. Like the electorate at large, it wanted to make capitalism work better. In particular, it wanted to ensure that, in a country with the rich food resources of New Zealand, nobody would have to go hungry, or without work, education or health care. Labour was promising a benign socialist millennium to match its benign leader. And the electorate was now ready to take the party at its word.
In November 1935, therefore, the Labour Party won the election delayed by the Depression in a landslide: 55 seats, counting the Ratana members who would soon join their caucus. The Coalition, which had contested the election as the National Political Federation (and would in May 1936 become the National Party) won 19. A new conservative Country Party took two seats and there were four independents. Labour was in office for the first time, and with a powerful mandate for change. And change was what the new Government would deliver, on a scale unprecedented in New Zealand’s history up to that time.
Labour’s intentions had been signalled in 1934 by the pamphlet Labour Has a Plan, written by the party’s most articulate and eloquent publicist, returned serviceman and MP John A. Lee.[2] New Zealand could be made the centre of a new civilisation, Lee proclaimed. A Labour Government would ‘use our own physical resources and amplify the progressive genius that has been dormant in these past decades and erect the new socialist state that will once again cause New Zealand to inspire the world …’
The new Government set out at once to institute a series of measures – some symbolic, some substantial – to meet the expectations its propaganda and its victory had raised. A Christmas bonus was issued immediately to the unemployed. The Labour caucus voted unanimously to nationalise the Reserve Bank. Old age pensions were restored and increased. Teachers’ colleges, closed as an economy measure, were reopened. Secondary education, like primary, was made free of charge. A state-owned radio network was established and parliamentary debates broadcast for the first time. Farmers got a guaranteed dairy price. Industrial arbitration was restored and union membership made compulsory; this led to the formation of a new Federation of Labour with a sound financial and membership base from which to represent workers nationally. The Arbitration Court was instructed to introduce a 40-hour week for some categories of worker and provide a minimum wage capable of supporting a married couple and three children (the assumption remained that the primary role of women was that of homemaker). A state housing scheme was launched, initially administered by John A. Lee, with the goal of providing for every New Zealander what Walter Nash called ‘a home fit for a Cabinet minister’.[3] And the Reserve Bank was instructed to finance this scheme with interest-free credit.
The Coalition Government had managed to balance its budgets in the three preceding years, and the incoming Government found it had inherited a surplus. This it spent largely on public works schemes which, along with recovering export prices and the slow return to prosperity, helped to soak up the previously unemployed. The former Red Fed organiser Bob Semple, now the snappily dressed Minister of Public Works and of Transport, was one of the characters of the Labour cabinet and never at a loss for a dramatic gesture. In the Ngauranga Gorge, he symbolised the new administration’s optimism and the power of machinery over the pick and shovel by getting into a bulldozer and wrecking a pile of wheelbarrows. In Parliament, he frequently had MPs almost collapsing with laughter at his pungent epithets (‘snivelling snufflebuster’ was one, and ‘the honourable member doesn’t so much speak as open his mouth and let the wind blow his tongue around’).
The Government’s crowning achievement, however, was what Savage told delegates to the 1938 party conference would be social security ‘from the cradle to the grave’. The Social Security Act, passed by Parliament in September 1938, gave the country a virtually free health system (covering doctors’ visits and hospitalisation), a means-tested old age pension at 60 and universal superannuation at 65. This package was received rapturously by Labour’s supporters, and by some who would now become Labour’s supporters (such as most Maori electors). As Erik Olssen has written, ‘the extent of the change which occurred … is difficult now to recapture. Savage and his Cabinet appear[ed] to have put New Zealand back on its true course as the most advanced and humane society in the world …’
There would be unforeseen problems in future years: an erosion of the Government’s subsidies to general medical practitioners, an inability to bring dentistry into the free health scheme, an explosion in the costs of public health, particularly those associated with hospitals. Eventually, the effectiveness of ‘big spending’ would be questioned and concerns raised about the extensive intrusion of government into the lives of its citizens, along with a fear that welfare states sapped individual responsibility and initiative. But in the late 1930s social security was valued so highly because it helped erase recent memories of genuine hardship and it seemed a fulfilment of a social blueprint which the Labour movement had been developing for more than two decades.
Among those to benefit most spectacularly from all Labour’s measures – in social security, education and housing – were Maori. Up to the 1930s, typhoid fever, dysentery, diarrhoeal and respiratory diseases took a disproportionate toll on the tangata whenua population. In 1938 the Maori death rate per 1000 people was 24.31; that for non-Maori 9.71. The Maori infant mortality rate was 153.26 per 1000 live births, as against 36.63 for others. No real progress was made in reducing these figures until the Labour Government’s health and housing reforms had begun to take effect, and until Maori health became the responsibility of the Health Department’s district health officers. This last measure succeeded because it presented ‘a direct challenge to bring the state of Maori health to a standard more comparable to that of Europeans, and medical officers could no longer look to anyone else as being responsible for doing this’.
If one individual was responsible more than any other for improvements in Maori health it was Dr Harold Turbott, first as South Auckland medical officer and later as Director of School Hygiene. Turbott lobbied the Labour Minister of Health – and later Prime Minister – Peter Fraser for special appropriations for Maori health projects. His most efficacious programmes were providing water tanks and privies for Maori homes, and persuading Maori on a wide scale to seek treatment for tuberculosis and to accept a degree of isolation for this treatment, often in well-ventilated portable huts provided by the Health Department. Turbott also directed district health nurses towards a greater degree of preventative work, especially with children, and he developed good working relations with local leaders such as Te Puea Herangi.
The combination of all these measures, along with the general lifting of Maori incomes in the post-Depression years, brought spectacular improvements in Maori health over two decades. The death rate for tuberculosis dropped from an estimated 50 per 10,000 of population in 1933 to 10.6 in the early 1950s and 3.82 in 1956–60, by which time antibiotics had become available to treat the disease. The incidence of typhoid fell away and infant mortality rates dropped, though not as spectacularly. The general life expectancy for Maori rose from 46.6 years for men and 44.7 for women in 1925–27 to 57 and 59 by the mid-1950s.
Labour’s education policies also had beneficial effects for Maori. Up to the 1930s, Maori education in both state and denominational schools reflected the ideology that had animated Apirana Ngata’s land development schemes: that the future of Maori was to be worked out in rural areas. This view had been reflected in a major policy statement by the Director of Education in 1931: ‘[The] best means for [Maori] to realise the full benefits of civilisation is through the cultivation of land … These considerations lead us to the final conclusion that … we should provide fully a type of education that will lead the lad to be a good farmer and the girl to be a good farmer’s wife.’
A c
onsequence of this policy, which ignored the achievements of the Young Maori Party generation of leaders, was that the curriculum in Maori schools emphasised agriculture and (to a lesser extent) manual and vocational training for boys, and domestic skills for girls. Few Maori pupils moved beyond primary level (about 8.4 per cent in 1935, compared with nearly 60 per cent of all pupils), most of them defeated by the absence of Maori-oriented secondary schools, by the need to pay fees, by the requirements of the Proficiency exam (which was a condition for entering secondary education) or by parental discouragement. At this time too Maori parents and grandparents were discouraging children from learning the Maori language. The widespread belief – among Pakeha and Maori – was that proficiency in English would make upward social mobility for Maori more likely and better prepare youngsters for a world in which Maori culture was going to be a diminishing influence. This was the era when the number of native speakers of the language began to diminish sharply.
Educational opportunities for Maori improved dramatically under Labour. Expenditure on education as a whole was greatly increased, rural schools were consolidated and their facilities improved, and school transport added. Secondary education was made free, the Proficiency exam abolished and the minimum school-leaving age raised to fifteen. The Government also built native district high schools for the first time, which placed greater emphasis on vocational training than on farming skills. As a result of these efforts, the number of Maori at secondary schools increased to 30 per cent of those eligible by 1951 – still not satisfactory, but a considerable improvement on the 1935 figure. Further progress would have to await the Maori movement into towns and cities over the following decades.
By the time the 1938 general election fell due, the Labour Government was, for the time being, indefatigable, even though the National Party was now better organised and had a new leader in Southland businessman Adam Hamilton. Labour’s share of the vote rose 10 points to just under 56 per cent. Though it lost some seats, it gained others and ended with 53 to National’s 25. Independents held the other two.