James Belich
Professor, Department of History, Auckland University

It is a great privilege to address this audience. I'm afraid that I have no audio-visuals, unlike some of the previous speakers. Our universities can't quite afford this kind of equipment. But I can supply a certain amount of hand action in the hope that this will liven things up. I did manage to borrow a typewriter sufficiently to make a few notes here.

I am going to squeeze this opportunity until the pips squeak. It is rare for an historian like myself to have an audience like this one and I want to cover quite a lot of ground. I will sketch my understanding of the history of modern New Zealand since 1840 and will try to slant this summary towards what I assume to be your interests, namely, the State and that nether end of history colloquially known as the present.

My conceptualisation divides New Zealand history since 1840 into three periods. These periods overlap. You know history is like that. There are seldom clean cuts. The first period is progressive colonisation -1840 to the 1900s. The second period is recolonisation -1880s to the 1980s; and the third period is decolonisation - 1960s to some point in the future.

Progressive colonisation, my first era, was characterised by immensely fast growth. New Zealand grew, in terms of pakeha, from 2000 settlers in 1840 to half a million people by the early 1880s, in 42 years. The economic centrepiece of the progressive colonising system was something I call the progress industries. Basically, they were massive, assisted immigration schemes, frenetic public and private development of transport infrastructure, and so on. An example of the kind of leading archetype is the Vogelian rail building boom that ran at five times the rate of any other rail building in New Zealand history.

The whole thing was funded by British credit. This was extracted from London to the extent of 71 million pounds between 1840 and 1886 by New Zealand entrepreneurs who didn't ask politely, but rather whistled south Britain's spare millions, like a pack of Pied Pipers. For 71 million, of course, you should read billion in terms of contemporary social impact.

The progress industry had a number of allied extractive industries: flax, timber and most notably gold. But despite substantial gold and wool exports the New Zealand economy under progressive colonisation was a net importer of both goods and capital. Progressive colonial New Zealand was town and camp led. Settlement was led by towns and camps, not by farms. The notion that it was farm led is a retrospective myth supplied by the succeeding era, each generation writing its own history.

Progressive colonial pakeha had all the ethics of a calicivirus in their attitudes to both nature and natives. They mowed through thousand-year forests like grass; they burned hills into sheep walks where sheep could barely stagger; and they impacted massively on the indigenous Maori people who, despite a remarkable resilience and a remarkably effective resistance, were eventually marginalised.

But, ethics of a calicivirus or no, these pakeha ancestors were immensely robust and dynamic. The discrepancy between our image of straight-laced Victorian pioneers in their corsets going out alone into the wilderness to hew their yeomen farms from the bush and the reality of immense dynamism is quite striking. This is a history intriguing for its speed, not its length. Progressive colonisation began to collapse in the long depression of the 1880s and it had something of an Indian summer in the 1900s.

In this period it was replaced by its successor system, recolonisation. By recolonisation I mean a tightening of the links between Britain and New Zealand. This was against the grain of our expectations of steady progress towards national autonomy. New Zealand in the 1920s was in some respects more dependent on Britain than it had been in the 1870s. The economic centrepiece of this new recolonial system was not progress but protein. The key innovation, of course, was refrigeration, and there are a number of others in terms of shipping technology and so on. But refrigeration in 1882 was the key trigger.

In 1881 New Zealand shipped no meat, butter or cheese in frozen form to Britain or anywhere else. By 1921 it pumped 330,000 tons of protein products into Britain annually. By 1951 the figure was 500,000 tons. With its support industries - freezing works, dairy farms, transport infrastructure, shipping and so on - the protein industry dominated the New Zealand economy by the 1920s.

The direction of exports was massively towards Britain for most of the recolonial era. The percentage of exports going to Britain ran at between 70 and 90 percent. It was not until the mid 1960s that the figure dropped below 50 percent. The great meat ships formed a kind of protein bridge between Britain and New Zealand that ran both ways. Protein out and books, technology, news, ideas, immigrants and visitors back.

Recolonisation was a cultural system as well as an economic system. Under recolonisation New Zealand's collective identity was not full nationalism. New Zealand saw itself as British but its neo-colonial collective identity was not supine. It saw itself as 'better British'. New Zealand was the Britain of the south, Britain without the mistakes. New Zealand was a revised edition of the motherland in the words of the Cambridge History of New Zealand in the 1930s. The notion was that without urban vice, without pollution, without overcrowding, with select stock, with rural virtue and with a pristine environment New Zealand was Britain as it should have been.

Recolonisation reduced New Zealand's self-sufficiency and it reduced its diversity. In the end I think one has to conclude that it froze this country in a state of protracted adolescence. But it also had major benefits. It supplied a technically and culturally sophisticated society. It generated a very good uptake of new technology and a capacity to embrace innovation. It also seems to have generated a curious overproduction of talent.

New Zealand seems to have produced more than its fair share of people in some curious trades, for example, opera singing, physics and cartooning. This talent tended to go overseas. Katherine Mansfield and Ernest Rutherford were only the flagships of the fleet. New Zealand lived as though it were highly industrialised, despite a semi-industrialised economy. Its access to London's consumer goods, products, job markets, technology, books and so on was more similar to that of Kent than of Kenya.

New Zealand culture and economy under recolonisation were part of a system, not the whole of it. The system was New Zealand British. The two parts fitted together like a neatly broken glass. To switch metaphors, the great meat ships were like the inter-island ferries of what was, in some respects, a single entity. New Zealand was London's town supply district. London was New Zealand's cultural capital.

New Zealand's decolonisation, the breakdown of the recolonial system, was involuntary. In 1973 Mother England ran off and joined a Franco-German commune.

Decolonisation was on the cards before that, of course, for various reasons. The decline of British power, even the oil shocks of the 1970s can especially be seen in this context. One of the benefits of recolonisation was access, reliable and cheap access to petroleum products underwritten by British power. Once Britain lost its dominant position in the Middle East after 1956 that guarantee could no longer be maintained. The cost of recolonisation had grown after World War II. Britain's own economy was in trouble. It was giving more and more support to its own agricultural sector. It was demanding that New Zealand import more British products in return for high exports. For example, New Zealand imported hundreds of thousands of Mini motorcars, British-made, at roughly twice the cost that Belgian-made Minis would have cost.

A key marker in the decolonisation process was the decline of the British market from 50 to 60 percent of New Zealand exports around 1960 to five to six percent of New Zealand exports around 1990. Let's make no mistake about what we're talking about here. It was not until the late 1960s that the rest of the world mattered more economically to New Zealand than did Britain.

Muldoonism 1975-84 was in a sense recolonisation's last stand. In 1982, during the Falklands War, Muldoon, Prime Minister of New Zealand, wrote an article in The Times of London entitled Why we Stand by our Mother Country. However, economic and socio-cultural decolonisation had begun before this from the 1960s.

Diversification of exports and markets and the social easing symbolised by the end of six o'clock closing in 1967 - I'm calling this section of my book, 'Letting in Le Litre'. The 1960s also saw the advent of jet travel, which again reduced the distance between New Zealand and the world, of television, and of various other innovations in communication that broadened global interaction. Ethnic and gender diversity not only increased from the 1960s, but also came out of the recolonial closet. Maori ethnic identity, for example, which had always existed, now asserted itself more. It was more in the face of pakeha State and society.

Rogernomics reforms, so-called, from 1984 may have influenced the shape and timing of decolonisation, but they clearly did not cause it. New Zealand's anti-nuclear policy was in a strange sense a proxy declaration of independence with a bewildered Uncle Sam standing in for Mother England.

That then, in brief, is my attempt to reappraise the main shapes of New Zealand history from 1840 to 2000. It took about 12 minutes. That's not too bad really is it?

So how does the New Zealand State fit into this context? Under progressive colonisation the central State beat off the competition after the 1850s. The imperial government was beaten off, the provincial governments were beaten off, independent Maori were beaten off and in a sense the central State was the heir of all three. Under progressive colonisation, especially under Vogel, the State was active, but it was not huge. State spending ran at about ten percent of GDP. Under recolonisation major growth began, slowly at first, to 14 percent of GDP by 1924. It really boomed from 1935 to 28 percent by 1949 and 41 percent by 1984. In short, State spending multiplied by a factor of four as a proportion of GDP under recolonisation.

There were various categories of State growth. There were some that were clearly unreasonable - inefficiency, over manning and inflexibility. I won't go into the details. There were also some types of growth that were equally clearly reasonable. These were demographically induced, for example, by baby booms or by death busts of the aged, which simply meant that there were more people needing education or health facilities. Changing expectations - society after the 1920s expected secondary education for its kids and after the 1960s it expected tertiary education. Technical innovation - you cannot call the need for computers in schools a financial blowout just because it increased costs. It may be that we can't afford these increases, but it is utterly dishonest to suggest that they are generated by some sort of problem within State organisation. The problem that a historian faces, of course, is that commentators at both extremes tend to suggest that either all growth was reasonable or all growth was unreasonable. Both, from an historian's point of view, are equally untenable positions.

There are other more ambiguous categories of growth. One was growth through what could be described as regulo-mania, a mania for regulation. Michael Bassett in his history of the State, The State in New Zealand, has a field day going through some of these regulations. He misses one that was legislation against cats in dairies, which remained on the books until 1972. There is no doubt that the New Zealand State under recolonisation was prone to regulation that can only be described as excessive. What seems to be intriguing and little understood about this is that it wasn't only the State that had the problem. It was also a feature of the rest of society.

What we are looking at here is a strange kind of voluntary totalitarianism induced by recolonisation. The 6 o'clock closing was not imposed on an unwilling public by a Stalinist State. It was strongly supported in referenda in the late 1940s by the public at large. Private companies policed the morality of their employees. Large New Zealand firms expected women to leave their employ when they got married, not for commercial reasons but for moral reasons.

Volunteers in the 1920s patrolled the back seats of cinemas and parks for courting couples. These weren't the State police, they were volunteer matrons. Local authorities were into regulation, too, and this is my favourite. Around 1900 a Hutt Valley local authority passed a by-law forbidding the mating of cattle in paddocks abutting the public road, for reasons of propriety.

It was not just the State that suffered from regulo-mania. Another ambiguously unreasonable kind of growth was what you might call palliative growth, that is, expansion of the State to compensate for strains in and threats to the recolonial system. The 1930s Depression, for example, was intensified in New Zealand because of our specialisation and dependence on commodities that were in turn functions of recolonisation. This required the introduction of the Welfare State to mediate between the aspirations of the New Zealand public and the diminishing returns of recolonisation, hence the emergence of the Welfare State.

New Zealand fought very vigorously in World War II, as it had in World War I. It did not fight its own war although it had a perfectly good one in its backyard. It fought Britain's war and both world wars saw so significant an expansion of the State that you could almost call New Zealand the Warfare State rather than the Welfare State. After the war, the increasing costs of recolonisation required, or seemed to require, a vast package of support for the agricultural sector of which SMPs [Supplementary Minimum Price] are the best remembered.

These were the increasing costs of recolonisation and were the attempt to maintain the system that led to the growth of the State. It is interesting that although there was some simple bloat in the State sector, most of the growth of the New Zealand mega State to 1984 was due to externally driven pressures and not internally driven ones. The shift from recolonisation to decolonisation has been concealed by myths of nationalism.

New Zealand we are told was born as an independent nation in the 1850s with the advent of responsible Government. Or it was born when it achieved dominion status in 1907. Or it earned national maturity on the slopes of Gallipoli in 1915/16. Or when national autonomy grew gradually in the 1890s or the 1930s. The multiple births of the same entity should always have made us suspicious. In fact, independent New Zealand is still in the process of being born.

Have we seen through the myths of nationalism? Do we understand the shift from recolonisation to decolonisation? Do we understand the fact that over the past couple of decades we have been going through the greatest social, economic and cultural reshuffling in 100 years of New Zealand history? There is certainly a strong sense of mega shift coming through in the nation's leadership in the 1980s and the 1990s. But there does not seem to me to be an accurate awareness of its historical shape. Does Jenny Shipley realise the extent to which she is Julius Caesar? Were the authors of Rogernomics fully aware of the historical nature of the problem they were attempting to solve in 1984?

No one has to say they partially misdiagnosed it. Regulo-mania was on the way out anyway with the recolonial system it served. The mega State was a product of the recolonial system. Restructuring was needed after the demise of that system, but the size of the State was a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The State needed surgery, but which leg? The problem itself was decolonisation. New Zealand had become a town supply district without a town, a culture without a capital. The economic implications are obvious enough.

There is a need to diversify, even more to replace the protein industry with a comparable keystone industry, which we have arguably not yet done. But the social and cultural implications are less well known. This is an era in which New Zealand needs its own cultural infrastructure. It can no longer adapt and import from Mother England. It needs its own systems of education, scientific research, television, film, music and arts. But we have no cultural Vogel. We have aspirant scientific Vogels in the form of Maurice Williamson, but Maurice I am afraid is a Vogel without the money and a Vogel without money is no Vogel at all.

Let me finish by referring to some intriguing legacies of recolonisation. There are a large number of them and I will list just a couple. One is the tall poppy syndrome, which is arguably particularly acute in New Zealand. Under recolonisation if you're a tall poppy you shouldn't have been here, you should have been in Britain.

Then there is the focus on sport. It is well known that an intense focus on sport is a way in which otherwise sublimated collective identities express themselves. Look at rugby in Wales. Wales was blended into England statistically and politically and expressed its identity in rugby. So did New Zealand. The emphasis on rugby stemmed from the fact that rugby was the most British of games, just as cricket was the most English of games. 'Better Britain' could prove itself by being better than old Britain at the most British of games.

There is also an element of recolonial legacy in the way in which we comprehend nature and culture in New Zealand. Under recolonisation we emphasise nature to attract British consumers. What New Zealand products had that British consumers wanted was the clean green pristineness of the fields in which they were made. The emphasis on nature was an element of recolonial ideology. New Zealand was Britain without the dirt. As a consequence, recolonial ideology tended to write out the robust though immoral history of progressive colonisation and it tended to write out culture and history. If you wanted culture and history you would find them at the British end of the system, not the New Zealand end.

One legacy of this is the fact that of the small minority of our school children who do history in the seventh form two-thirds do Tudor Stewart history of England and one-third do New Zealand history. Recolonisation has also bequeathed benign legacies. These include the habit of internationalism, a good uptake of technological innovation and the overproduction of talent that I referred to before, which we could arguably use rather than expatriate. But whether benign or malign these legacies can only be dealt with. The problems can only be solved and the potential can only be exploited if we understand the history that has bequeathed them to us.