Rupture
New Zealand has a habit of advancing from tight conservativism to innovative progression in unexpected ways
New Zealand is place of ruptures. A place where suddenly the way of things can change. Our society has this characteristic where its nature can change in unexpected ways. For instance, from being a male dominated settler society to being the first country in the world to give the woman the vote. And from being a nanny socialist state, where the government was always the answer to overnight becoming a neoliberal state where the free market is always the solution.
New Zealand’s ability to change rapidly has its benefits and is often in response to a stress that demands action. The downside though of this rapid change process is a lack of care for communities and their supporting institutions which preceded the rupture.
It is my belief the unusual strength of the top-down centralised government response to the Christchurch earthquakes is attributable to our rupturing nature. I believe an institutional coping strategy dating back to New Zealand’s colonial period where a series of two, relatively unknown ruptures, set a precedent. A fault line was created. A fault that when tension builds up to intolerable levels would rupture, again and again.
The initial ruptures date back to the colonial era. The stressor of the day was how to cope with Maori. Provinces like Otago, Canterbury and Auckland were doing well from the colonial Anglo-centric viewpoint. Canterbury, in the 25 years prior to 1876, had established the city plan for Christchurch, started schools and universities, hospitals (including the psychiatric hospital where I work), started New Zealand’s first public railway and constructed the longest tunnel through volcanic rock of its day. But other Provinces in Taranaki, Bay of Plenty and the Waikato were struggling. The Maori population was seen to be the root of the problem.
As James Edward FitzGerald the first Superintendent of the Canterbury Province stated, the choice was either to accept or reject Maori from New Zealand society.
On 6 August 1862 he made an eloquent plea for equal civil and political rights for all New Zealanders. He suggested that Maori chiefs should be brought into the administration and into the Legislative Council and that the Maori people should receive one third of the representation in the House of Representatives, subordinate legislative bodies and courts of law. He wanted to recognise the Maori King and let him be ‘Superintendent of his own province’. He declared that ‘there are only two possible futures before the Maori people. You must be prepared to win their confidence, or you must be prepared to destroy them’. He castigated the land confiscation policy as an ‘enormous crime’, opposed colonisation by military settlers and called for the withdrawal of British troops.
Colonial New Zealand could have chosen the Canadian Quebec solution of partnering with a foreign culture but it did not.
Any hope of finding a constitutional arrangement to share sovereignty between the British Crown and Maori was set aside in the 1860s. In 1862 the Crown monopoly of the purchase of Maori land was abolished and, as land-hungry colonists had demanded, unregulated ‘free trade’ of land purchases from Maori was allowed. Disputes, conflict and then war in the Waikato, Bay of Plenty and Taranaki inevitably followed. This historical process is described by Chris Trotter in a chapter titled Mr Russell’s War of his book No Left Turn. The British Colonial Office sent 18,000 imperial troopers to New Zealand. The great Southern road from Auckland to Hamilton was constructed to facilitate military movements. The war was a stalemate; neither party could land the knock-out blow. Professor James Belich in his book The New Zealand Wars attributes this to the shrewd defensive tactics employed by Maori, which prevented the troopers from achieving a quick victory. It would be decades before the Crown had full sovereignty to oversee all of the central North Island.
A second related rupture occurred a decade later, being — how to continue the ‘Anglo World’ migration to New Zealand, which the political economy of the time depended on, in the face of Maori resistance. A new strategy was required. The next generation of central government politicians provided it. Vogel led a government that abolished the provinces in 1876. Governor Grey’s 1852 constitution, which had guaranteed Provincial autonomy, was amended. This rupture resulted in the powerful centralised top-down government that we recognise today. In particular, the public tools for developing regions and urban areas would be centralised to Wellington.
The abolition of provincial governments in 1876 (P.25) saw major public works handed over to the Public Works Department, which had been earlier set up to administer the money for public works borrowed by Premier Julius Vogel. By the early 1890s the Public Works Department had evolved from a planning and supervisory body into the country’s foremost construction agency.
Abolishing the provinces allowed gold revenue from the taxation of Otago and West Coast mining, together with a large increase in borrowing to fund a massive increase in Crown infrastructure expenditure, aimed at consolidating the Crown’s foothold on the Central North Island. This had the effect of redirecting migration, swamping Maori in the North Island, where 90% of the Maori population lived. This included many of my ancestors. The large, well-capitalised Harré family arrived in Christchurch to what was the capital of the Canterbury Province in the late 1870s. My Great Grandfather, the youngest, became an apprentice carpenter in the local township of Oxford, but the rest of the extended family headed north to Taranaki, where several of them acquired land for farms.
The downside of this centralisation process is that provincial government institutions which had sustained virile young local communities were disbanded without care or consideration. Never again in New Zealand’s history would a local community be allowed to independently build a city. The necessary political/social/economic structures had been removed. Only in a few fields were the linkages allowed to re-establish — sport being one acceptable arena.
The wrongness of the colonial approach to race relations has fortunately been recognised and efforts have been made to remedy the situation. However, the rupture between Maori and Pakeha has yet to be fully repaired. Perhaps as concerning and less recognised there remains a worryingly disconnect between decision makers at the top of New Zealand’s society and all communities at the bottom.
These original ruptures created an extreme centralisation coping strategy in New Zealand’s body politic. As such, top-down centralisation has remained a feature of New Zealand society, especially in times of reform. Whether it be the democratic pastoral reforms of the 1890/1900 Liberal government, the statist reforms of the first Labour Government in the 1930/40s or the neo-liberal reforms of 1980/90s. These have been programs conceived, enacted and delivered from the top in response to the challenges of the day — the Long Depression of the 1880s, the Great Depression, of the 1930s and Britain cutting its economic ties with New Zealand in the 1970s.
Top down centralisation in large part explains our governance response to New Zealand’s largest natural disaster. Our response to the Christchurch rebuild is considered unusual by international disaster experts in its degree of centralisation and lack of community input. Yet it is a response that has become a knee-jerk reaction whenever New Zealand is confronted by major or minor stressors. A reaction that has not been addressed within the national discourse.
Reforming periods are not unique to New Zealand but the degree of vigour of these periods is what makes New Zealand exceptional. This is particularly notable, considering that when New Zealand is not undertaking one of its periodic ruptures it is generally considered a placid and conservative place. In fact, historians such as James Belich, have written entire books around the theme of New Zealand’s ‘tight’ conformist society.
Despite the violence and trauma of the Canterbury earthquakes there was no rupture through Canterbury’s society. The way of things did not change. Tight conservatism remains. Only now in 2018 are there glimmers that progressive innovation is possible.
The way New Zealand builds its cities did not change. The strict planning rules of Canterbury was only mildly relaxed, mostly in the neighbouring Councils of Selwyn and Waimakariri. Urban sprawl of automobile dependent suburbia remained the city building model. Progressive talk from Cantabrians ‘sharing their ideas’ about their desire for a greener, denser, yet low-rise human-scale city, with more cycling and other transport options was largely ignored. Influential people continue to express that Christchurch is a provincial town dependent on agriculture. A more progressive vision that is inclusive of both urban and rural aspirations has not been articulated.
As we have seen, the original ruptures created a top-down centralisation process. This established fault line periodically ruptures when ‘tight society’ cannot cope with national stress. New Zealand needs to balance this top-down institutional coping strategy by allowing some expression of bottom-up initiative.
I believe, New Zealand needs to nurture a culture of conversation, rational debate, a pluralistic society that can manage incremental change between the top and bottom of our society to ‘release the tension’. This might mitigate future ruptures and possibly even lay dormant the original fault lines.
Further material on New Zealand’s colonial period ‘ruptures’ are available through Radio New Zealand’s excellent podcasts discussing the Maori war, governance, sovereignty and Vogel’s centralising statism that early colonial New Zealand society experienced. They tell the story through the lense of Maori War profiteer — Thomas Russell (who founded the Bank of New Zealand) and Chief Justice Prendergast and through the history of New Zealand’s main trunk railway line.
