politics – Page 3

The Great Depression and Collective Memory

June 1, 2017 1 Comment

Cybèle Locke

The Broken Decade: Prosperity, depression and recovery in New Zealand, 1928–39, by Malcolm McKinnon (Otago University Press, 2016), 556 pp., $49.95

In this magisterial account of the 1930s Depression, Malcolm McKinnon aims to disturb the historical orthodoxy which depicts a conflict between the powerless and powerful – ‘We and They’ – ‘in which the “little guy” finally wins’. The first Labour government transforms the conservative political climate of the early 1930s into a ‘collectivist and interventionist one’ after 1935. McKinnon begins in 1928, which enables an exploration of the continuities between Joseph Ward’s expansive pre-Depression policies and those rapidly introduced by the Labour government during its first term in office. [Read more…]

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…]