No Left Turn, by Chris Trotter, Random House, Auckland, $36.99.
“Power and the People”, New Zealand Listener, 25 August 2007
Review by Nicky Hager
Books of history can be dull and dry, recounting old facts that feel like they no longer matter, or alive and compelling, helping us to understand the world we live in today. Chris Trotter’s book No Left Turn is a fine example of the engaging kind. He has written a political history of New Zealand that is refreshing, intelligent and enjoyable.
This needs to be said straight away because, if you judged the book by its cover, you might well decide to pass it by. The cover features a melodramatic red splash of blood over an old black and white photo of marching workers and police. Written on the blood is the dogmatic-sounding subtitle, “The distortion of New Zealand’s history by greed, bigotry and right-wing politics”.
But don’t be put off by the cover. This is not a partisan history of radical trade unionism or some such limited readership project. It is the kind of thoughtful writing about politics of which New Zealand needs more.
The book begins in the first days of European settlement, describing the vision of the New Zealand Company men whose names – Lambton, Majoribanks, Lyall, Hutt, Molesworth – are immortalised around Wellington. They envisaged a Little England, with the social and economic structures (and inequalities) transferred to the new land, and fortunes to be made by acquiring and onselling Maori land. A New Zealand Company director wrote early on that “we have always had very serious doubts” that the Treaty of Waitangi was “anything but a praiseworthy device for amusing and pacifying natives for the moment”.
But most settlers who risked the 19,000 kilometre voyage to New Zealand “were determined that the injustice, exploitation and poverty they were leaving behind should find no purchase in these new lands”. This is why New Zealand’s first “recognisably modern or democratic” election in 1890 produced the Liberal government. Responding to people wanting a different society, the government introduced old-age pensions, worker protections and votes for women, and began purchasing and splitting up large landholdings for smaller farms.
These early steps towards an egalitarian society were stalled in 1912 when wealthy interests regained control through the government of William Massey, after whom the university is named. Massey was backed by the business community and squads of baton-weilding special constables, recruited from the reactionary Farmers’ Union to suppress protest and dissent.
Thus develops book’s central theme: that New Zealand’s history reflects “the epic struggle between the progressive aspirations of settlers who came seeking a better life and the greed of those who sought to replicate the worst aspects of British culture in a new setting.”
Each era of this struggle is described in vivid stories. In the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, we meet the extraordinary Albert Ernest Davy, inspiration for all unscrupulous political activists and PR people since. First, Davy used electioneering techniques he had learned in the US to get the business community’s favourite, Gordon Coates, elected as prime minister in 1925. Just two years later, business interests didn’t like Coates’ economic interventions and policies such as family allowances and paid Davy to unseat him.
Davy was paid 1,300 pounds (roughly $200,000 in today’s money) by Auckland timber merchant JWS McArthur for the service. “Since Davy had been careful to take with him copies of the Reform Party’s membership, canvassing and donation records, this was not quite the daunting assignment it appeared to be,” writes Trotter. Then in 1934 Davy was paid 1250 pounds for three years by dairy export magnate William Goodfellow to get rid of Coates again. Now Finance Minister in a Depression-time coalition, Coates’ efforts to control the Depression economy clashed with Goodfellow’s commercial interests. But this time Davy’s machinations went spectacularly wrong, splitting the right-wing vote. Albert Ernest Davy helped guarantee the historic 1935 election of the Labour Government.
The book contains unexpected and original perspectives. For instance, it rejects the usual left-wing criticism – popularised by John A. Lee – that the Labour government of Michael Joseph Savage, Walter Nash and Peter Fraser sold out its socialist beliefs. “The fundamental mistake that Lee made in 1935, and countless other social democrats have made since,” Trotter writes, is assuming that becoming government is equivalent to gaining state power. But enormous powers still reposed in the state bureaucracy, professions, news media and “most importantly, the owners of the banks, insurance companies, stock and station agents, shipping companies, factories, warehouses, shops and farms.” Essentially, Labour had to pursue its goals without taking on fights that would just bring down the government.
As it was, business interests tried to destabilise the government as the 1938 election approached. They sent large quantities of money overseas and hostile news media wrote stories about the country going bankrupt. Labour headed off the capital flight by announcing foreign exchange controls, to which “the response of Labour’s opponents was venomous”. On election morning, the Dominion editorial said “If the socialist government is returned to power your vote today may be the last free individual vote you will ever be given the opportunity to exercise in New Zealand.” However many ordinary people wanted Labour’s policies and returned it with an increased majority.
The book is interesting for understanding the roots of modern-day politics. The 1938 election reveals the dishonourable origins of the National Party, established to fight the creation of a welfare state. Its crude election red baiting included a pamphlet saying “Mother! Do you want your child to drag out an existence as a wage slave of a socialist state… at the whim of a dictator?” It was the party of the special interests that saw social security for the Depression-battered population as an unacceptable threat to profits.
The same struggle between egalitarian values and private wealth continues in each subsequent period. I found most memorable the chapter on 1940s Labour plans for Auckland, built around efficient rail networks and extensive high-quality public housing. Fraser, accused of grey socialist dictatorship, encouraged artists and adventurous architecture and established the symphony orchestra.
Then the National Party became government in 1949. Railway was stopped, driving encouraged and Auckland became a “paradise for property speculators”. The 1950s were an era of social conformity and the “one-dimensional man”. Instead of becoming the “Stockholm of the South Pacific”, Auckland became the Los Angeles. It’s a poignant lesson in how political ideologies and vested interests shape our cities and lives.
You probably won’t agree with every idea and interpretation. I don’t. For instance, the analysis of the mid-1980s nuclear dispute is just wrong, a result of unwisely using Michael Bassett as his main source. But overall it is an excellent, readable, thought-provoking book; more useful for understanding New Zealand politics than, for instance, Michael King’s classic but wider scoped history of New Zealand.
And by the end the subtitle seems reasonable. It is the story of the distortion of New Zealand’s history by greed, bigotry and right-wing politics. It focusses on issues of undemocratic power and influence that are still at the heart of many political problems today. It’s a story that goes on and the better we understand it, the better we can deal with our own era.