Historian Alan Ward, photographed in 1994. In this 2009 lecture, he reflects on the legacy of the first Labour government, his own upbringing, and the need for a reappraisal of the legacy of colonisation. A transcript is provided below.

Transcript

I would like to reflect further on the situation of New Zealanders generally in the 1930s. Where had the inevitable incorporation of New Zealand in the global capitalist economy got us all? In fact the situation of the common people, Māori and Pākehā alike, was pretty miserable. The great depression had produced massive unemployment. Epidemic and endemic diseases were widespread and medical services were often not readily available, or affordable. Houses were draughty, damp and poorly heated, breeding grounds for tuberculosis and other diseases. The situation was considerably worse, proportionately, for Māori, who still had not acquired full immunity to new diseases, and whose housing was generally poorer than that of Pākehā, but it was very bad for many Pākehā too.

However, by the 1940s there was light at the end of the tunnel. Or rather a cluster of lights. Their names were Michael Joseph Savage, Peter Fraser, Walter Nash, Bob Semple and Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana. The leaders of the first Labour government were social democrats whose profound humanism drove their conviction that rather than the common people being made to serve the economic system, the economic system must serve the interests of the people. It should provide them all with a ‘decent living’, as Nash put it. The role of government was to secure social justice, to make the common people, including Māori, more ‘equal in the field’ with those who commanded greater wealth. So the Labour Party, in alliance with the Rātana movement, set about reducing unemployment, extending medical services, building state houses, bringing secondary education to rural communities, providing a minimum wage and paying child endowment – the ‘family benefit’ – to mothers, in order to put bread on the tables of the most marginal people in New Zealand. This was to be funded partly from a new ‘social security tax’ and partly from deficit budgeting.

The Labour/Rātana social welfare revolution was opposed by English capitalists and officials. Walter Nash went to England in 1936 to negotiate the long-term marketing agreements for primary produce which underlay the ‘guaranteed price’ payable to New Zealand farmers – a key measure to stimulate the rural economy. While he was there, Treasury officials and bankers told him in no uncertain terms that they were unhappy with the New Zealand government’s deficit financing (Keynesian economics, if you like). In particular they objected to the Social Security Bill that the Labour government was drafting. But Nash and his colleagues defied the British. Years later, Nash told Professor Keith Sinclair, his biographer, that one of his proudest recollections was of when he told the English officials. ‘We are going to pass a [Social Security] bill’. And they did.

That was the defining moment that made this nation. I know that Gallipoli was hugely important, and the Somme, Alamein and Monte Cassino; all hugely important for the blood sacrifice of New Zealand soldiers. But the defining moment when New Zealand truly became not only an independent nation, but a humane nation, was when the first Labour government defied the English politicians and financiers and passed the Social Security Act. The story is set out in chapter eight of Professor Sinclair’s biography of Nash, and it ought to be compulsory reading for every New Zealand student.

The first Labour government did not set out to introduce many programmes specifically for Māori (although it supported Apirana Ngata’s land development schemes), and it has subsequently been criticised for that. But the Labour programmes, designed to reach the disadvantaged, reached Māori and Pākehā alike. They brought life and hope to struggling families.

That, at least, is how it seemed to me, as a weedy Pākehā kid, kept alive through several crises by the medical services of the state, educated at one of the rural district high schools set up under Labour, thence with assistance from state bursaries to Gisborne High School and on to university. It was this education and training that from the 1940s helped many of those on the margins to become more ‘equal in the field’ with children from more prosperous families, to fulfil our potential and, hopefully, to make useful contributions to society.

That process embraced Māori and Pākehā kids alike. While a bus collected me and others, including Māori, from a village called Waipāoa, other buses were collecting kids from villages at all points of the compass. The Māori names resonate – Whatatutu, Puha, Kanakanaia, Ōtoko. At school, Māori and Pākehā mixed amicably in class and in the sports teams. We danced together during wet lunch-hours when the girls insisted on turning a classroom into a dance hall. When I went as a boarder to Gisborne High School, I shared a dormitory with boys from the East Coast with names like Maurirere, Reedy, Mackie and Hovell. Māori students from the Poverty Bay flats went on to Gisborne High School too. It was all starting to happen for rural New Zealand children.

There was something else which brought young Māori and Pākehā together in those years, and that was music. That was the great era of the country dance halls. and in Turanganui-a-Kiwa the musicians were mostly Māori. At the ‘Welcome Home’ dances at the end of the war the pianist was likely to be Lena Ruru, whose wonderful music and ebullient personality will never be forgotten in the district; and if we stuck Brylcreem in our hair, borrowed dad’s car and got to the army drill hall in Gisborne, the musicians were likely to be Bill Kerekere’s band from Waihirere, or Ray Zame’s band with Sandy Hovell on saxophone. Then, as a country schoolteacher I found myself one mid-winter’s night in 1960 at the big hall in Stratford, in the lee of snow-covered Mount Taranaki, where a huge crowd from miles around danced to the music of the Howard Morrison Quartet.

I relate these anecdotes because I fear that we are sometimes inclined to forget that we have shared so much, Māori and Pākehā together, in good times and in bad, and will inevitably continue to do so.

There were historical wounds below the surface though, not least in Taranaki – wounds which had been festering for a century and needed to be lanced, and remedied as far as possible. Hence the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal and 30 years of hearing of historical claims for breaches of Treaty principles by the Crown. Probing old and deep-seated wounds is painful. But it was necessary.