The Revolution that Nearly Was
How Aotearoa New Zealand’s progress was frustrated, and utopia mislaid
An open-access publication to be released in regular instalments.
Introduction: The Farthest Promised Land
IN 1965, my parents emigrated to New Zealand from the northern part of Ireland: an island notorious for past famines and emigration, of the kind that, for many, had seemed to bear out the dismal prophecies of the Reverend Malthus, who warned in his Essay on the Principles of Population, first published in 1798 and thereafter in five successive editions, that human population would normally tend to outstrip the carrying capacity of the land.
Also known as Aotearoa, a Māori name with poetic connotations of a long white cloud, the new land seemed to have plenty of room by comparison.
However it was known, the Aotearoa or New Zealand of that year had a population of 2.6 million, or half the population of today.
And it it seemed that there would be plenty of opportunity for the next 2.6 million here.
For New Zealand, to stick with that name for now, also had an internationally renowned track record of investing heavily to meet the demands of population growth.
In modern, industrial times, the rate of investment had become the real issue for Malthus’s theory of population. This was demonstrated by the following, rather paradoxical fact.
From the time of their last great famine, in the 1840s, many of the Irish had fled to the burgeoning cities of the eastern United States.
And to the neighbouring island of Great Britain, itself not very large but where the population would eventually far outstrip that of Ireland. Great Britain’s population grew from 10.5 million in 1801 to 37 million in 1901, while the population of Ireland declined from a peak of 8.1 million in 1841 to a nadir of 4.2 million in 1931.
The difference was that in the more populous lands to which the allegedly overpopulated Irish fled, investment in new industries created jobs, new opportunities, more efficient agriculture and the wherewithal to pay for food, imported from other regions if necessary.
The landscape of Ireland was a low-investment landscape in comparison to both Great Britain and America. Ultimately, the cause of this was a shortage of energy with which to power the new industries of the Industrial Revolution. Ireland lacked coal, and burned peat instead. As such, Ireland could not compete with the population-pull of America and Great Britain, even after we allow for the effects of British rule in Ireland, which was mostly misrule in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, at least.
Since the coming of the Industrial Revolution, Malthus’s theory has therefore demanded modification to the effect that human carrying-capacity is now something that can be greatly augmented, and expanded severalfold over a historically short period, by investment in new industries and in the energy to power them.
This modification stands apart from the other major criticism of Malthus. Namely, that in modern times, there has also tended to be a ‘demographic transition’ toward smaller families and, if anything, a birthrate that is inadequate.
By the mid-to-late twentieth century, New Zealand’s politicians and boosters had been investing in infrastructures and industries designed to increase the country’s human carrying capacity for as long as anyone could remember.
In The Future of New Zealand, the fifth series of Auckland University winter lectures (1963), the historian Keith Sinclair remarked, with regard to this issue, that:
The kind of questions I would ask are: can we conceive for our country a future more important or meaningful than success at exporting lambs or butter? . . . . Many of the founders of our state had such questions in mind frequently. Grey, Wakefield, Henry Williams, William Pember Reeves — they all hoped they were starting something important . . . Sir George Grey’s mind dwelt so continually on the idea that New Zealand would produce a great nation, that he could not debate a Bill to alter the conditions of entry into the law profession without invoking the support of our unborn millions.
Yet as Sinclair suggested, there was little place for these “unborn millions” in a New Zealand that specialised in exporting lambs or butter.
A glance at the topographical map reveals a landscape apparently even less favoured for agriculture than that of Ireland: rather more, in fact, like that of Scotland.
In a 1958 newsletter called Town Planning Bulletin №1, New Zealand’s own Ministry of Works described the landscape it dealt with in the following terms:
The old myth that we had plenty of first-class land and that there were vast areas of un-developed land waiting for the plough have died hard. Most of us knew only what we saw from the main roads passing through the plains or the fertile valleys between the hills.
Topographical maps tell a different story; but the most revealing experience is to travel by plane on our inland air routes. . . . Here and there a narrow coastal flat — too small to be called a plain — the occasional green valley with a road snaking along the middle; for the rest nothing but hills, mostly bush and scrub covered, rising to the main rugged mountain chain.
As a result, only about half a million New Zealanders have ever lived in our rural districts at any one time, even when the smaller towns are included.
The remainder —these days, a very considerable remainder— has been concentrated into the larger towns and the cities.
Historically, these included the ‘four main centres’ of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, though Dunedin is now only the sixth-largest metropolis in New Zealand.
How could this urban population be supported from the land alone?
Hydro to the Rescue
In practice, hydroelectricity came to be seen as a way out of the difficulty of expanding the nation’s population in an otherwise unfavourable geography.
All those mountains and lakes limited the land available for farming, a fact that became increasingly evident toward the end of the nineteenth century. Hitherto, New Zealand had been represented to prospective settlers as a land of natural abundance, with broad, flat horizons, something that was basically a lie, as settlers arriving in Wellington were perhaps the first to discover.
By the end of the century the militant American land reformer Henry George, who proposed a so-called ‘single tax’ on land and natural resource, essentially confiscatory of their market price, but with the sparing of labour and industrial enterprise as the quid pro quo, had many followers among New Zealand’s colonists.
Others favoured the abolition of freehold, in favour of outright land nationalisation and lease-back instead, as a way of similar rationing acess to land and preventing the growth of exploitative and unearned fortunes.
On the topic of a forthcoming visit by George, a settler presumably scratching out a living in one of our bonier landscapes observed, in the North Otago Times of 15 March 1890, that:
One gentleman states that no people are in more need of a lesson from the great reformer than ourselves. Be that as it may, here we are, sir, in a brand-new country, not one-tenth part populated, with hardly standing room left for the outsider. The percentage of good or middling good arable land to the whole area is insignificant; yet we can boast of even single individuals owning their 100,000 acres, more or less, of the pick of the land. They acquired it originally, probably, for a trifle, and have got it enhanced to its present value by the people and their borrowed money. (at p. 3)
Such was the crisis of the late colonial period in New Zealand, a crisis which came hard on the heels of an earlier one, at its worst in the 1860s, during which settlers had fought the Māori for many of the same little enclaves of fertility.
A second colonial crisis which, in addition to fostering the growth of a soon-to-be-famous appetite for social reform, also focused the attention of the politicians on the need to add new strings to New Zealand’s industrial bow if the cities were to keep growing without the prospect of revolution, or indeed, to keep growing at all.
Tired of waiting to receive their share of prosperity, about one-eighth of New Zealand’s settler population decamped in the late 1880s and early 1890s, mostly to Australia: a traumatic episode known as the ‘Exodus’, which further concentrated the mind of official New Zealand.
A book which gives rise to the mindset of New Zealand in the Exodus era is “Taken In”: Being a Sketch of New Zealand Life, by ‘Hopeful’, first published in 1887.
When it came to being taken in by the earlier sorts of colonisation-boosters and their myths of abundance, there was, strictly speaking, nothing new about this even in 1887.
As far back as the late 1840s, which is to say at the very beginning of the days of organised British and European settlement, those stepping off the boat in Wellington had already begun to complain about the evident absence of the broad acres they had been promised.
They hadn’t come halfway around the world merely to explore the modest possibilities of Petone and the Hutt Valley: though it was rumoured that if they hiked over the mountains, some more good land might be found in the Wairarapa, or the Manawatū.
Amid the subsequent Exodus crisis and unrest among those who remained, there suddenly appeared an almost literal deus ex machina: the promise of a considerable hydroelectric resource, to be put to work by way of the latest inventions of Messrs Tesla and Edison, et al.
In 1904, William Hall-Jones, New Zealand’s Minister of Public Works and later, briefly, Prime Minister, compared his country’s hydroelectric resource to the entire industrial steam-engine horsepower of late-Victorian Britain, and found that New Zealand came out on top.
This changed everything. For a start, the carboniferous capitalism of the Northern Hemisphere had to pay for every kilo of coal and oil and gas that it used.
As George Orwell was to note in his 1937 non-fiction classic The Road to Wigan Pier, millions of coal miners were the “grimy caryatid[s]” on which nearly everything non-grimy was erected, the true Atlases holding up the industrial world of the Northern Hemisphere. And none of this came cheap.
On the other hand, once New Zealand’s hydroelectric stations and their transmission lines were built, its industries and cities would have their power very nearly for free.
In the words of Hall-Jones’s Public Works Superintendent, Peter Seton Hay, New Zealand’s hydroelectric resource would “remain as a national asset as long as the climatic conditions and the mountains endure.”
On top of that, the industrial civilisation of the Northern Hemisphere also faced the prospects of the eventual exhaustion of its sources of energy, or of suffocating on the local pollution it generated.
Even in those days, people worried about such matters: especially local air pollution, already a major problem in many industrial cities and major metropoles. This was the source of what the Victorians called ‘London fog’, for which more accurate name would have been London smog.
It was at around the same time that the dangers of global warming began to be advertised in terms not that different from the settled science of today; though global warming was admittedly a remote prospect at the time, not really noticeable for another century or so.
A Vast Future
For all these reasons, it seemed that New Zealand was in a position to leapfrog the nations of an older, more carboniferous capitalism into an entirely new era of sustainable, economical, and smokeless modernity.
To borrow Abraham Lincoln’s expression, an urbanised, hydro-industrial order was to lie at the heart of a ‘vast future’. By contrast, a New Zealand dominated by farming and fighting among half a million rural inhabitants was seen as the New Zealand of a brief, colonial, past.
It was with our vast hydro-industrial future in mind that, in 1925, a New Zealand Government advertisement prepared for the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition of 1925–1926, advertised New Zealand as the “Future Manufacturing Centre” of the Southern Hemisphere.
The ad offered “Special Inducements … for the Establishment of Industries.” That was to be a feature of our policy for most of the twentieth century.
At the beginning of the same decade, a pseudonymous writer named ‘Dionysus’ wrote that the colonial image of New Zealand, as a land pre-eminent in rural exports and muscular rural pursuits of the kind that also bred pre-eminence in oval-ball football, was starting to become an anachronism:
Pre-eminence in Rugby football and dairy products is not enough. I want to see our scientists, our artists, our writers (when discovered), encouraged so that they might put New Zealand’s name on the map as a country which produces ideas as well as butter-fat, as a nation that has spirit as well as population and area.
That was in 1921. Four years later, on learning of the appointment of a new Prime Minister known for his modern leanings, Joseph Gordon Coates, the otherwise staid New Zealand Herald editorialised, on 29 May 1925, that:
All is yet molten, mercurial. There are more departures to make than precedents to follow. To have a history may be an old land’s glory and safeguard: to make history is a new land’s perilous employment.
Both these passages were rescued from obscurity by the abovementioned Keith Sinclair. The one by Dionysus is reproduced in Sinclair’s last scholarly book A Destiny Apart: New Zealand’s Search for National Identity (1986), at p. 48, while the Herald editorial is quoted in the epilogue to the 1980 edition (perhaps others) of Sinclair’s History of New Zealand, at p. 330.
The Revolution that Nearly Was
And so we come to the central contradiction, or paradox, of modern New Zealand. Our present population, of more than five million, a significant proportion of it domiciled in an Auckland of 1.7 million, is a population that earlier generations would only have thought possible in a modernised and, above all, heavily industrialised New Zealand, whether this industry was smokeless and sustainable or otherwise.
And yet New Zealand remains only lightly industrialised. A comparison with Denmark, which has a similar population these days and which is itself regarded as lightly industrialised by northwest European standards, reveals this fact at once.
While the Danes manage to produce a similar worth of farm exports from their much smaller but flatter country, they do not define themselves in terms of Lurpak butter and Danish bacon.
On the other hand, ‘pre-eminence in Rugby football and dairy products’ remains, or has once more become, the chief metric of our nation’s success, even though today it represents nothing more than a failure of development.
It is in this sense that we can speak of a ‘revolution that nearly was’, a breakthrough into an industrial modernity of a new and renewably powered kind that ultimately failed to stick for a variety of reasons that I will be going into in the chapters to follow. These reasons included the fact that, after a while, we began to run out of sites for hydroelectric dams that weren’t controversial, in the manner singled out by John Hanlon’s 1973 eco-anthem Damn the Dam.
What this also means, however, is that there is potential to re-animate our former progress on the basis of wind and solar power, both of which are extremely abundant in relation to our population: a point that I make forcefully in a September post called ‘Powered by Aotearoa’.
In the meantime, our condition has dwindled somewhat, toward the Argentina-like condition of a nation from which great things were once expected in 1900, but which ultimately failed to live up to the hype.
A condition which would be worse yet and even more like that of Argentina if it were not for the fact that we still only have just over five million people.
This limits the Malthusianism of our outcome, as compared to what things would be like if we had, say, ten or fifteen million by now. That is a population that has been urged by immigration-boosters of more recent times, such as the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research in 2014, in a paper called Scale Up or Die. As one journalist wrote, regarding that proposal, in 2014,
With just 4,447,369 of us rattling around in 268,000 square kilometres of this green and pleasant land, there’s plenty of space for everyone in New Zealand.
Space for our traditional quarter-acre empire, for the bach, for the lifestyle block, for all those sheep, for beer and cheese commercials to mythologise our great rural existence.
However, as the Ministry of Works observed in 1958, a glance at the topographical map or out window of a plane tend to dispel any notion that rural abundance can underpin such growth: as does a graph of rural stagnation versus urban population growth since 1900.
Almost self-evidently, from the foregoing discussion, a larger population can only be accommodated in urban areas: it also demands urban investments, in infrastructure, jobs, and houses. Yet, while immigration has contributed to strong population growth in recent decades, from 3.3 million in 1990 to 5.2 million today —with a significant gain even in the last ten years — what is striking is that investment in the cities has lagged well behind what is needed.
This has led to suspicions that while New Zealand’s population growth in earlier times was attended by a ‘high road’ strategy of heavy investment to defeat the shade of Malthus — a high road of heavy investment in all things, from housing to renewable energy for industry — the population growth strategy of more recent decades has been a ‘low road’, Malthusian one, that primarily generates windfalls for landlords and exploiters of superabundant labour.
But if so, how has this low road been rationalised and ‘sold’ to the public? I will address this question in the next section.
Modernity Refused: A New Shade of Green
The idea of New Zealand as a sort of refuge from the worst excesses of Northern Hemisphere industrialism still survives. But within the context of our present malaise, this idea no longer survives in its earlier form: that of a new kind of industrial society powered by renewable energy.
Instead, it survives in the completely anti-industrial and anti-modern forms in which contemporary slogans of ‘clean green’ and ‘100% Pure’ New Zealand are framed.
This myth exists alongside the parallel — indeed, resurgent — myth of pre-eminence in rugby football and dairy products. Each of these versions of a rural or anti-industrial myth of New Zealand identity reinforces the other, to foster a generalised refusal of the challenges posed by urban population growth, whether we are speaking of the need for more industries, or the need for more houses.
A curious flight from urban realities was already evident, in that sense, by 1990, a flight sufficient for the critic Francis Pound to observe, in issue #55 of Art New Zealand, that “refusal of the city and . . . worship of rurality” had come by that date to constitute the “genre of the advertisement . . . the corporation and the state.”
As Erin Mercer also writes in a literary essay with the interesting title of ‘Shot at and slashed and whacked’, published in 2017,
If the settlement of New Zealand in the nineteenth century relied on rendering it as a pastoral paradise, then the present moment sees it represented in similarly idyllic terms through the 100% Pure New Zealand campaign established by Tourism New Zealand. In spite of the overwhelmingly urban nature of the New Zealand population, 100% Pure New Zealand uses a range of images representing the country in terms of pristine natural environments, including the sort of sublime mountain peaks and glassy lakes that characterise nineteenth- century propaganda and literature. Interestingly, this vision of New Zealand entirely omits any form of industry . . .
We have, in a sense, come full circle in our heads, returning to a colonial pattern as if people like Hall-Jones had never lived, but unfortunately on a higher and as such more Malthusian plane of population.
Two Growth Eras Compared
To reiterate, today’s refusal of modernity and the city was not always the order of the day in New Zealand.
At the time my parents arrived, New Zealand’s population was growing at a record pace. Between 1952 and 1973, just twenty-one years, this country’s population grew by 50 per cent, from two million to three million.
Such rapid population growth might have been expected to put a strain on society. And yet that was not the case.
For in those days, rapid population growth was paralleled by equally rapid expansion of hydroelectric power resources, industry, and, indeed, every kind of investment needed to ensure that the population was fully employed, fully housed, and thus not susceptible to another Exodus. I will go into these investments, in more detail, in Chapter 1, ‘“The Next Million:” Planning for Growth in the 1950s and 1960s’.
Something similar to the old Exodus would eventually recur in the 1970s as the country was hit by a series of external shocks. This resulted in a relatively flat spot in the national population growth curve between 1975 and 1990. This nearly flat spot rather handily divides New Zealand’s post-World War II era into two periods of rapid population growth, separated by fifteen years and a neoliberal economic revolution.
A neoliberal revolution, or more accurately a counter-revolution against earlier norms, that was known locally, at the time, as Rogernomics, after New Zealand’s influential 1984–1988 Minister of Finance, Roger Douglas, one of whose slogans, advocated in a 1980 personal manifesto called There’s Got to be a Better Way!, was that the most important minister in government was the ‘Minister in Charge of Killing Things’. For every new programme, Douglas contended, three old ones should be cut. And taxes could also then be cut, accordingly.
And so, the two eras of rapid population growth after World War II were met with very different policy regimes: the first still bearing the imprint of hydroindustrialisation and deliberately high and sustained levels of investment, which were if anything stepped up to meet the challenge of a 50% growth in population in only 21 years, while the second fast-growth era was also an era of retrenchment and austerity.
Though the Rogernomic emphasis on austerity and cutting back on investment was born, in part, out of the period of slow population growth, which obviously reduced the need for investment at the time, the problem was that the need for retrenchment then persisted, as a largely unquestioned orthodoxy, thereafter.
Underpinning the new orthodoxy was the fact that the tax cuts made in the 1980s and 1990s were hard to reverse.
To employ the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck’s expression, this was the realpolitik of the second era of rapid post-war population growth.
Though passing into history now, New Zealand’s 1950s and 1960s, the central decades of the first era of rapid postwar population growth, are recalled as halcyon years of full employment and affordable housing: part of a longer period of comparative domestic tranquillity during which the conspicuously unarmed officers of the New Zealand Police, to cite but one statistic, shot only two persons dead between 1917 and 1969.
If hydro was the technological side of our revolution that nearly was, this was its social side. A society that had, from unpromising beginnings and two colonial crises, managed to make most forms of poverty and social violence history, through a strategy of investing heavily in itself and in its population across eighty years of hydroindustrial expansion.
Not perfectly so, for nothing is perfect. But in ways that might be closer to perfection today had we stayed the course.
In this publication, I will interrogate, in progressively more detail, how New Zealand managed to combine rapid population growth with equality and security in the decades after World War II, thereby frustrating Malthus’s predictions.
And how we then allowed the return of Malthusian conditions from the 1980s onward, with attendant crime and violence.
This is a study that is primarily of interest to New Zealanders. However, as Bill Pearson noted in his 1952 essay Fretful Sleepers, “we always were a social laboratory,” with outcomes of interest to the rest of the world.
In our more progressive decades, between our second colonial crisis and the 1980s, we were regarded as something of an international role model for progressives, spoken of in the same breath as social-democratic Sweden and for the same reasons. For instance, in his book Never Again: Britain 1945–1951, Peter Hennessy notes that:
In 1945, [UK] Labour intellectuals such as Dick Crossman had their eyes on the sophisticated systems of social security created in Sweden and New Zealand in the 1930s. (p. 121)
After our 1980s neoliberal turn, we were similarly feted as an international role model once more, for neoliberals this time, until the evidence of accumulating social problems of sorts that had been all but nonexistent, hitherto, became too much of an embarrassment.
These new social problems have ranged from homelessness, foodbank use and the emergence of a huge urban underclass, through to a greatly increased level of fatal shootings by the New Zealand Police: this last statistic a kind of litmus-indicator, perhaps, of the general level of violence and tension in society.
Once almost unheard of, happening only once every twenty years or so and as such less frequently, in the same era, than the occasionally fatal results of assaults on the police themselves, such shootings now tend to happen several times a year. Still much less common per capita in New Zealand than in the USA, such shootings are nonetheless also, on the same basis, one-and-a-half times as common as in riot-torn France.
Other consequences include a widely reported infrastructure “omnishables,” as Tova O’Brien puts it, with a backlog of some NZ $200 billion as measured by authoritative, official sources. The same issue is highlighted in an 8 March 2024 Combined Trade Unions report called Investing in a Growing Population.
Changing Identities
A sudden rush of media interest in our currently anaemic levels of investment, and their inadequacy in relation to population growth, follows decades of near-silence about the issue.
It puts one in mind of Hegel’s dictum that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Which is a pithy way of saying that political wisdom, and the impetus for reform, are often born from hindsight.
The essential failings of an era start to become more and more obvious as that era’s historical day draws to a close and the shadows lengthen.
Up to now, the “refusal of the city and . . . worship of rurality” which Pound identified has also helped to distract us from our investment shortfall: a shortfall which is mostly urban in its implications given that we are nearly 90% urban as a people.
We have, indeed, been encouraged to stand with our backs to the city, to its traffic congestion and potholes, housing shortfalls, lack of good jobs, and general tattiness, and gaze outward into the countryside instead.
Re-ruralisation on the cultural plane made it easier to neglect the city. At the same time, growing problems in the city create a mental market for rurally flavoured escapism.
The relationship between the material realities and their cultural projection was, thus, reciprocal.
At mid-century, things were quite different: not only in the material sense of the level of investment relative to population growth, but also in cultural terms. That is to say in terms of how New Zealanders have defined themselves.
And in particular, how the Pākehā, the native-born British-and-European settler majority — whose identity as a people has naturally been somewhat newly-minted and unstable — have defined themselves. Who are these Pākehā, exactly, and what are their core values?
After the radicalisation crisis of the the late colonial era, it seems that most New Zealanders came to assume that the values of the Pākehā, by that stage already somewhat distinct from the Briton, were primarily those of equality and a fair go.
“In the 1950s and 1960s,” wrote the sociologist Claudia Bell of the settler majority, in a 1996 book called Inventing New Zealand: Everyday Myths of Pākehā Identity, “terms like ‘clean and green’ were never heard. The favoured ideological myth was that of egalitarianism” (p. 12).
Of course, the scenic and outdoorsy aspects of New Zealand, and the possibility of creating a refuge from the worst excesses of a carboniferous industrialism, were never entirely overlooked.
But Bell is more right than wrong. Her claim is corroborated by the historian W. H. (Bill) Oliver’s contemporary entry on ‘History, Myths in New Zealand’ in the official, 1966, Encyclopaedia of New Zealand.
In the 1966 Encyclopaedia, Oliver contended that an egalitarian myth with its roots in the radicalisation of the late colonial period, a myth he called “the myth of the non-possessors,” had been the dominant principle by which the Pākehā defined themselves throughout the first two thirds of the twentieth century:
The myth of the non-possessors can account for the whole of New Zealand history from Grey’s premiership (1877–79) to the present day. Indeed, the myth is still in the process of formulation: “the quest for equality” is its current designation.
If, as Pearson said in 1952, we always were a social laboratory, it is clear that we remain so in the 21st century. For, above all, New Zealand affords the almost unique opportunity to compare and contrast two eras of rapid population growth that have taken place under quite different policy settings, with quite different outcomes, and in ways that also have been attended by changing myths of identity among the Pākehā, and perhaps across the entire nation, as well.
I have lately returned to Medium publication, after mostly limiting myself to comments and building up a store of new content, to be published over the weeks to come (readers may also wish to refer to ‘Powered by Aotearoa’, which came out last September.)
