politics – Page 3

Kia Ora, Everybody!

July 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

Michael O’Leary

Parekura Horomia – ‘Kia Ora Chief’, by Wira Gardiner (Huia Publishers, 2014), 448 pp., $45

If there was ever an Apt Phrase Award about its subject in the title of a book, then this biography of Parekura Horomia, with its ringing ‘Kia ora, Chief’, would have to be in the running for top prize. However, I would also add that there is an equally appropriate catchphrase provided by ‘the Chief’ himself, in the way he readily greeted people with ‘Kia ora, everybody!’ For Horomia may have been the Chief, but he also stood with the ordinary people from whom he came. In the book, Gardiner invokes Māori politician Hekia Parata, when she worked for the ‘Chief’: ‘She remembered that he would give the same speeches over and over again, and they seemed to be well received every time – even on the third and fourth hearings, not unlike the time-honoured Monty Python skit: ‘Who’d a-thought 30 years ago …!’ [Read more…]

Keep it in the Ground

June 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

Coal: The rise and fall of King Coal in New Zealand by Matthew Wright (David Bateman, 2014), 200 pp., $39.99; Tragedy at Pike River: How and why 29 men died by Rebeccca McFie (Awa Press, 2013), 275 pp., $40.00

Poor old King Coal: nobody loves him. The SOE Solid Energy, formerly State Coal Mines, another unloved brainchild of Rogernomics, is in deep trouble. There will be no more government bailouts as the company crashes from the effects of ill-advised investments and the April Fool’s Day resignation of its chairwoman Pip Dunphy less than a year after being appointed.¹

Coal world-wide is in the dock over carbon emissions, hit by plummeting prices and a climate change disinvestment drive championed by the Guardian newspaper and others, to slow the march of mega-companies of miners and drillers across the globe.⁴ US President Barrack Obama now declares ‘we can’t burn it all’; his envoy Todd Stern agrees that fossil fuels ‘will have to stay in the ground’ to stall the inevitable rise of catastrophic global warming.² Financial Times investigative reporter Tom Burgis has called his recent book – a study of long-term multinational theft of Africa’s mineral wealth – The Looting Machine.³ Against this background, the current National government is feverishly opening up New Zealand’s marine environment and national parks to more of the same prospecting and drilling, with an eye to a new gold rush of mining and extraction. [Read more…]

Architect of a Compassionate Society

April 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

Edmund Bohan

Richard Seddon, King of God’s Own: The life and times of New Zealand’s longest-serving prime minister by Tom Brooking (Penguin Books, 2014), 584 pp., $65

At a mayoral reception during my first visit to St Helens in Lancashire in 1966, I was, when identified as a New Zealander, proudly ushered by the mayor into his parlour to admire the vast portrait over its fireplace of the town’s most famous son: Richard John Seddon, Premier of New Zealand from 1893 until his death in 1906, renowned throughout the British Empire and subsequently regarded by many as our greatest prime minister; a gigantic figure in our historiography but one around whom myths and legends clustered to all but obscure the real man.

In modern times he has earned equal obloquy for both his racism and his jingoistic imperialism from revisionists who insist on evaluating historical personalities – especially nineteenth-century ones – in the light of their own currently fashionable assumptions. In this superbly researched biography, however, Tom Brooking places Seddon firmly inside his own time and has stripped away many of the myths to reveal the man to be an even greater figure, in so many ways, than legend has hitherto claimed; and he has done that through sound, common-sense and objective analysis of facts. He has undoubtedly thrown down the gauntlet to fellow academics. Fierce, and characteristically vituperative, academic debate about this ‘King Dick’ is likely to enliven our university history departments for some time. [Read more…]

Maoriland

March 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

Nicholas Reid
Ko Te Whenua Te Utu: Land Is the Price by M.P.K. Sorrenson (Auckland University Press, 2014) 344 pp., $49.99; Beyond the Imperial Frontier: The contest for colonial New Zealand by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books, 2014) 280 pp., $49.99

Professor Emeritus M.P.K. Sorrenson is one of the people most qualified to write ‘Essays on Maori history, land and politics’, as his collection Ko Te Whenua Te Utu is subtititled. For over 30 years a leading light in the University of Auckland’s history department, he was also for 25 years a member of the Waitangi Tribunal, weighing submissions and contributing to those voluminous reports which, in his Epilogue, he calls New Zealand’s ‘largest exercise in public history ever undertaken’ (p. 299). Considering the matter of whether Pākehā can ever validly write Māori history, Sorrenson concedes in his introduction that ‘the most outstanding Maori history written in recent years’ was written by a Pākehā, Judith Binney. Nevertheless, being himself of mixed Māori and Pākehā descent, Sorrenson also claims to have a ‘personal motive’ in his long scholarly engagement with Māori politics and land ownership, ‘since I had been nurtured on stories of the alienation of the last remnants of my mother’s Maori land’.

Ko Te Whenua Te Utu comprises 13 essays, public lectures and commissioned reports, which Sorrenson has written over more than half a century, between 1956 and 2011. The earliest, from 1956, is ‘Land Purchase Methods and their Effect on Maori Population, 1865–1901’. It is modified section of Sorrenson’s MA thesis, and argues that the loss of land and disruption of the social cohesion of tribes were major causes of the decline in Māori population in the late nineteenth century. The most recent, from 2011, is ‘Folkland to Bookland’, examining the career of the nineteenth-century bureaucrat F.D. Fenton (first chief judge of the Native Land Court), who likened the loss of Māori customary tenure of land, and its transference into personalised title, to the loss of the ‘commons’ in Tudor England. [Read more…]