Part 3: Colonisation & Settlement
New Zealand never left Britain. Britain abandoned New Zealand.
For most of their histories, both Australians and New Zealanders vied to be the people ‘more British than the British’. Probably, the award goes to the Kiwis. Unlike the Australians, who once had a robust Republican movement and in Federation exercised an independent posture, New Zealanders never really cared for independence, showing remarkably little appetite for separation from the Crown.
In 1909, at the Committee of Imperial Defence, the British Admiralty — in a sop to Australian agitation around its vulnerability to the Japanese in the Pacific — proposed independent military units to each of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Their respective reactions are instructive. Canada could hardly care less; it was protected by the American Monroe Doctrine. The Australians were delighted that after years of agitation they would have increased independent means of defence. But New Zealand was reluctant. In the words of Neville Meaney in The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901–14:
Sir Joseph Ward, the Dominion’s premier, regretted the concession to national independence. He had not shifted one iota from the ‘One Empire, One Flag, One Fleet’ position. He considered that contributions to the Royal Navy was still the preferable course.
Any deviation from being an indistinguishable part of the British Empire was anathema to the Kiwi.
In 1931, Britain’s Parliament granted full legal independence to New Zealand, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Newfoundland, and the Irish Free State. All were quick to ratify its terms except New Zealand. It took 16 years for New Zealand to ratify the Statute of Westminster, and even then Prime Minister Peter Fraser said the Bill “strengthened the ties between the various parts of the Commonwealth and ourselves in New Zealand and the Mother-country.” During the debate, National Party MP Frederick Doidge said, “With us, loyalty is an instinct as deep as religion.”
New Zealand’s moment of national awakening came when Britain abandoned her. 1 January 1973, a day historian James Belich calls “a black-letter day in New Zealand history.” Fischer writes:
It was the date when Britain entered the European Economic Community and unilaterally ended long-standing economic relations with her colonies. As late as 1950, Britain had bought nearly 70 percent of New Zealand’s exports. After Britain joined the European Community in 1973, that number fell to 7 percent. New Zealand farmers found themselves competing at a disadvantage for markets in the “mother country” as Britain and other European economies aggressively subsidized their own farmers.
Worse than the material injury was the moral one. Twice New Zealand had marched to Britain’s defence — in 1914 and 1939 — at terrible cost. And whilst neither Australia nor New Zealand hesitated in answering the call of Britain in war, New Zealand left her troops in the European theatre when Australia recalled hers ahead of the Japanese threat — a difference that subsequently caused some tension between the two allies. Now they were cast off without ceremony. The sense of betrayal was sharpest among those who had been most loyal: the more-British-than-the-British. As one New Zealand leader put it to Fischer, “We envy your Declaration of Independence from the mother country. As for us, our mother left home.”
Only in 1986 did the Constitution Act formally end any remaining UK parliamentary power.
A stranger nation than it knows
So who are New Zealanders?
According to Fischer, they are a people of fairness. Fairness did not drift down to them on the Pacific air, but was an output of who came, when they came, and what kind of mother country sent them.
National values are not chosen in the abstract. They are forged by founding conditions. America’s freedom is the morality of exit: dissenters, frontiersmen, self-funded migrants. New Zealand’s fairness is the morality of managed settlement: screened migrants, planned communities, a strong indigenous counterparty, and a mother country in throes of righteousness.
The Puritans of 1620 defined New England and the convicts and their goalers of 1788 defined early New South Wales. The men who made New Zealand were of a different breed. They were the children of Wilberforce and the Reform Act, dispatched by a Colonial Office that believed in the protection of aborigines and the principle of self-government. They came in subsidised, screened, religious cohorts — Anglican utopians at Canterbury, Scottish Presbyterians at Otago, the Taranaki Mob in New Plymouth — chosen for their character. They met not the dispersed natives of New South Wales nor the terrifying mounted Comanche of the American South West — but the Māori: a fellow seafaring warrior nation that demanded to be treated as such.
The result is a country whose self-image as a small, friendly, sheep-strewn hobbit nation belies a richer past. New Zealand is the nation that sent 40% of its military-aged men to fight for the mother country in the First World War, and got more than half of them back killed or wounded. That fought Rommel to a standstill in the desert. That named its capital Christchurch because it intended to build the Kingdom of God in the South Pacific. That was first to give women the vote. That clung to Britain so tightly it took 16 years to ratify its own legal independence. That, when Britain abandoned her, had to invent a new self in the wreckage.
That new self is still being negotiated. Its anti-nuclear stance, the still-evolving Treaty politics, the Māori urbanisation and its discontents, the recent Asian waves layering onto an old British base — all of it is a country slowly figuring out what it stands for now ‘British’ is no longer a sufficient answer. (Australia is having its own perpetual identity crisis.)
New Zealand is a place that was made by deliberately sailing beyond the sunset — by men and women who believed that they could build a better society at the literal end of the world. They mostly did.