Again, why did chiefs sign?

  

p. 62, Michael Belgrave's Historical Frictions

"[Historian Michael] Belgrave argued* that a study of the debates that took place at the Treaty meetings revealed that they were mostly about land and religion, rather than sovereignty, indeed that these matters overshadowed everything else. ...
     "[O]ne of the most important messages the chiefs would have taken away from what the British or Pākehā advocates of the Treaty had declared was that Māori would be protected in their lands, and that this was a vital consideration for those who agreed to sign ...
    "Belgrave argued that while the Treaty was made in a world in which Māori remained dominant, the chiefs were acutely aware that times were changing and they felt vulnerable, and that in these circumstances they believed it made sense to sign the Treaty and hoped that the British Crown would uphold the promises it had given ...
    "He held that a properly historical account revealed ... [that] by the time the Treaty was made, Māori had adopted, adapted and adjusted [to] the European ideas they had encountered ...
    "[T]he ‘modern’ interpretation of the Treaty [however] — which he attributed to those he called ‘non-historians’, thereby obscuring the role that academic historians, most of all Claudia Orange, had played in its creation — ... had become so preoccupied with the texts that it had become blind to matters of context. ... 
    "[T]he worldview that informed [chiefs'] understanding of it in 1840 had become opaque to contemporary readers because of an undue focus on the written texts. In and of themselves, he held, the texts were extremely limited sources on which to base any historical interpretation ... [and so] the story the Tribunal had been telling was more or less a fiction or an invented history ..."

~ Bain Attwood, from his 2023 book A Bloody Difficult Subject

* In his 2005 book Historical Frictions: Maori Claims & Reinvented Histories, esp. pp. 46-66

"Why, when they were so strong, did Maori invite the British in?"

 

Sources here.

"The view that the Treaty has become the straitjacket of Maori history is the starting point for the present study. ... 
    "When Europeans stepped into the southern dawn, the people who had thought of themselves as constituting the whole human world found that they were one of its fringes. ... Assertive and risk-taking in cultural personality, Māori fought to eradicate their fringe status by pursuing modernisation, including the political modernisation that would create a path to the Treaty ground. .... The question then becomes why, when they were so strong, did Māori invite the British in? ...
    "Because Māori society [had been] organised around the chance of war, the initial effect of the introduction of muskets was indeed the expansion of tradition. Serial wars followed from the idea of their possibilities. Soon enough, however, war became an agent for its own collapse. Nga Puhi’s raids were predatory larks, fought for neither territory nor strategic advantage. ... 
    "[T]he terror of the gun [had] caused social disruption analogous in principle to that of current world ethnic strife. From Auckland to Whangarei was empty. The Hauraki tribes fled inland, and Ngati Kahungunu to the tiny edge of their vast territory. Modern Taranaki was deserted, and some of its displaced people virtually exterminated the Chatham Island Moriori. Ngati Toa, forced into pre-emptive migration, ravaged the south — the list is representative but not exhaustive. Similar things had occurred in the history of most tribes, but there is no previous evidence of near-total war. A detached modern historiography lists battles, but makes the musket wars events without real effects. Yet the wars were a modern catastrophe for Māori, not a traditional one. ...
    "In the 1830s northern Māori sought meaning in their post-contact experience through understanding how the foreigners ordered their world. This was a period of rational and intellectual response to European culture in which Christian teaching became a political primer for change. Consciously replaying the conversion of the barbarians, the missionaries taught that peace was the condition of political and social modernity — that is, of a European-style society.
    "This impacted heavily on culture, because tribal histories were almost exclusively histories of war. Fighting was central to the social identity of Māori. [It set] up peace as the condition of modernity ...
    "Their attention to the missionaries, and subsequent support for a treaty with the British, was not without history, but a response to lived change. By this reading, then, a possible basis of Māori citizenship was rational choice.
    "The rationality of the chiefs has been obscured by the rationality of the British side of the Treaty, which entirely dominates the literature."

~ Lyndsay Head, from her article 'The Pursuit of Modernity in Māori Society'

First Labour's State-Housing Story is a Con

THE SATURDAY AFTERNOON OF 18 September 1937 was warm and clear as a furniture truck pulled up outside a new house in Miramar. Greeted there by a crowd of cabinet ministers, a Prime Minister, 300 onlookers and a small gaggle of press photographers, doors were opened, cameras were loaded, sleeves were rolled up, and the crowd was treated to the spectacle of four cabinet ministers and one parliamentary undersecretary bump their way inside the house with a handful of furniture for the new house’s selected tenants. 

“Everybody is happy” oozed the state broadcaster.[1]

Prime Minister Savage himself earned warm praise for his treatment of a chair, carrying it in “without a hitch” – which “in front of some hundreds, calls for more poise and purpose than the average person can muster.” Ministers of Finance and Defence also earned praise for showing the crowd how to handle a chair, while “the coatless Minister of Public Works,” Bob Semple, also helped Prime Minister Savage “to carry in a solid-looking table.”[2] “Labour Ministers, Indeed” sang the headline in the Auckland Star­ – appearing, however, only on page six’s ‘News of the Day’ below several headlines the editor clearly considered more important, including one about “Red Tape” in laying out school playgrounds in Te Aroha, and another trumpeting the birth of a two-headed calf in Hikutaia, the second in the neighbourhood in as many months![3]

The house was conveniently located inside the Minister of Public Works’s electorate, one of eight state houses in the electorate and 500 others around the country already completed, with another 1485 under way on the way to his target of 5,000. “The only thing standing between the Government and the achievement of its purpose,” said the Prime Minister in his speech, “were labour and materials.” Those, along with “at least £16,500,000 to £17,000,000,” and he and his team of removalists would be “more confident than ever that we could do the job.”[4]

The nation was lucky enough to hear all the speeches over the newly-nationalised ZB radio network, which was compelled to drop its regular programming to carry the speeches,[5] while the Prime Minister and his team were lucky enough to have the newly-nationalised Reserve Bank on their side to help lend cheaply for the political promises. In April 1936 Finance Minister Walter Nash had assured a public wary of the nationalisation that he did not intend “to sit down and merely turn the handle of the printing press.”[6] But like every politician before or since, he lied. Between 1936 and March 1939 the Reserve Bank borrowed into existence £12.2 million for the Labour Government’s programmes – £5.6 million of this was low-interest loans for Lee & Semple’s housing programme.[7]

With improved employment, and those who had delayed marriage now affording to do so,[8] demand for rental houses had been steadily building. But supply had been discouraged by, among other things, a new rent control law which required a magistrate’s agreement before rents could be raised[9] -- just one of fifty-nine public Acts of parliament passed in Labour’s first year.[10]

The mythology is that the First Labour Government rescued a country from depression and housed a nation. This mythology is mostly bunk from first to last.

By November 1935, when Labour were elected and announced a Christmas bonus to all voters, it looked to an electorate eager for good news like salvation was at hand. 

In reality however, the Depression years here, in Australia and the UK were already over, although unemployment would remain high until the decade's end. Here and in our major trading partners,  the "classical medicine" had been applied, where “balancing the budget … was seen to have made the all-important difference.”[11] Explaining it later to the House of Commons, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain took a gentle swing at America’s free-spending president:

“At any rate we are free from that fear which besets so many less fortunately placed, the fear that things are going to get worse. We owe our freedom from that fear largely to the fact that we have balanced our budget.”[12]

So in fact, Labour were gathering in a harvest grown by others—and the crop was used to enlarge spending, to subsidise monopolies, and to inflate prices. 

And by 1938, their unsustainable boom had created their own self-made financial crisis —only rescued by war exports to a desperate Great Britain, and the unemployment crisis (which saw numbers rocket back to those of the bad years) was only remedied by a former pacificist sending men to war.

But let’s look at the myth of public housing. A story that Hans Christian Anderson would have rejected as a fairy tale for being so fantastic.

STATE HISTORIANS TELL US THAT “in 1936 it [the new Labour Government] drew up plans to use private enterprise to build 5,000 state rental houses across New Zealand.”[13]“In the 1930s under the first Labour government of Michael Joseph Savage, gushes political commentator Bryce Edwards,’ state house building was turbo-charged.”[14] Others simply called it a miracle of mass housing, crediting it all to the magic wand of St Michael. 

Depression historian Malcolm McKinnon at least provides figures, so they can be checked. “3000 new houses had been completed in 1934-35; over 4000 in 1935-36 and 1936-37; … just over 6000 in 1937-38 and just over 8000 in both 1938-39 and 1939-40.”[15]

What McKinnon and others don’t tell you, or don’t know (or don’t care to know?) is that those figures he cites are not the figures for state houses. They represent the numbers of all houses consented across the country–private and public. And there was no year in which did state house building ever approached the numbers of privately-built houses. 

Not one. Not in any year from 1937 (when state building started) right up until 1949 (when it was ended).

There was not even a year in which state-house building built more than private builders did in peak years of the previous decade.

And this was despite the country’s then largest mass house builder, Fletcher’s, working for the government and making its directors and shareholders very rich indeed in the process—James Fletcher’s “special relationship” with government quite literally paying dividends.[16] The numbers can be seen below, from Ministry of Works figures.[17] They make fascinating reading. 

What they reveal in essence is that the story of state-housing here is a con.

Savage himself knew it was a con. Presenting the Budget to Parliament on Walter Nash’s behalf in 1939 (Nash was away beseeching more credit from unwilling London bankers) he admitted, “The operations of the department have been superimposed [sic]on the normal works carried out by private enterprise.”[18] The accurate phrase here is “crowding out.” 

Nonetheless, he could boast that “In the last year the housing construction department commenced building 3445 houses, while the total number of dwellings arranged [sic] was 8093.”[19]  The accurate phrase here is “built by private builders”—which you can yourself in the table above.

That Savage knew he had to fudge was the measure of how much he knew the programme was a con.

THIS IS A GOOD REMINDER OF the state of play in New Zealand house-building ever since we've been building houses: that the health of affordable housing is due to the profitability of private speculative builders. And that it is not until speculative builders here can get back on their feet in volume that housing today might begin to become affordable once again.

In short: Make life safe for spec builders again.

NB: The other myth exploded by perusing these tables, especially the more complete table below, is the myth that National killed the state-house programme. Despite Sid Holland’s rhetoric against it, his promises to end it were as empty as every National Party leader since.

* * * * 

THE FOLLOWING TABLE [20] shows the number of building permits issued for dwellings in New Zealand since 1925. The figures for 1925 to 1938 do not include houses built in rural areas. The figures for 1937 and later years include State Rental Houses erected.

Number of New Dwellings Consented

Year ended Mar 31     Private              Govt                Total    Total Value (£m)

1925                            5,805                                         5,805

1926                            6,850                                         6,850

1927                            7,179                                         7,179

1928                            5,690                                         5,690

1929                            5,212                                         5,212

1930                            5,747                                         5,747

1931                            3,463                                         3,463

1932                            1,555                                         1,555

1933                            1,496                                         1,496

1934                            2,649                                         2,649

1935                            2,892                                         2,892

1936                            4,140                                         4,140

1937                            4,533                    22                 4,555             11.6

1938                            5,149               1,895                 7,044

1939                            6,266               3,445                 9,711

1940                            5,816               3,870                 9,686

1941                            5,307               3,570                 8,877

1942                            4,567               2,605                 7,172

1943                            1,266                 368                  1,634             3.5

1944                            3,020               1,916                 4,936

1945                            5,446               3,255                 8,701

1946                            7,481               2,875               10,356             20.7

1947                            10,107             2,769               12,876             26.9

1948                            10,983             3,065               14,048             29.3

1949                            12,025             4,111               16,136             36.0

1950                            12,262             5,395               17,657             42.5

1951                            14,551             3,298               17,489             48.8

1952                            14,297             2,814               17,111             59.2

1953                            12,607             3,610               16,217             61.1

1954                            14,025             3,432               17,457             69.5

1955                            17,420             3,443               20,863             93.4

1956                            16,234             3,270               19,504             90.2

 

---

[1] Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision  Reference: F4372

[2] ‘Tenants Take Over,’ Evening Post, 20 September 1937, p. 10

[3] ‘News of the Day,’ Auckland Star, 20 September 1937, p. 6

[4]‘Tenants Take Over,’ Evening Post, 20 September 1937, p. 10

[5] ‘That First House Broadcast Queried: Director’s Powers – Interrupted Programmes,’ Evening Post, 24 September 1937.

[6] (Bassett, The State in New Zealand, 1840-1984: Socialism Without Doctrines?, 1998)  p. 190

[7]  ibid, p. 406n39. The Reserve Bank charged just 1 per cent for the loaned money. (Sutch, 1969) p. 239. 

[8] (Sutch, 1969) p. 239

[9]  Fairer Rents Act, 1936 (Sutch, 1969) p. 239

[10] (Bassett, The State in New Zealand, 1840-1984: Socialism Without Doctrines?, 1998) p. 188

[11 Kates (2010) p. 114

[12]Neville Chamberlain, Budget speech in the House of Commons (25 April 1933)

[13] Ben Schrader, 'Housing and government – State loans and state houses,' Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/housing-and-government/page-2 (accessed 15 September 2025).

Story by Ben Schrader, published 13 October 2011.

[14] Bryce Edwards, ‘New Zealand once led the world on social housing – it should again’, Guardian, 27 Nov 2020

[15] Malcolm McKinnon, The Broken Decade, OUP (Dunedin,2016) p. 363

[16] Frontier of Dreams, ed. Bronwyn Galley & Gavin McLean, Hodder Moa (Auckland, New Zealand) 283. Students of government subsidies should note however that Fletchers underbid on the housing build just as they underbid on today’s Convention Centre build, and were bailed out by government then as they have been now. Dividends twice over.

[17] Cedric Firth, State Housing in New Zealand, Ministry of Works (Wellington, New Zealand, 1949) p. 67. Amusingly, in his book-length eulogy to state power, Chris Trotter's otherwise enjoyable No Left Turn refers to Cedric Firth as Colin Firth—perhaps after one too many viewings of Bridget Jones's Diary?

[18] NZ Parliamentary Debates 254: 884 (1 Aug. 1939)

[19] ibid

[20] Combined tabulation from Cedric Firth, State Housing in New Zealand, Ministry of Works (Wellington, New Zealand, 1949) p. 67 and (Condliffe, The Welfare State in New Zealand, 1959) p. 201. Firth’s figures run from 1925 to 1949, Condliffe’s (which are not referenced) from 1938 and then intermittently to 1956. Condliffe and Firth have the same precise totals for each similar year, but marginally different numbers for government housing. As Firth is closer to the source, and his 1939 figure tallies with Savage’s account to Parliament, I have preferred his, and calculated private numbers therefrom (correcting Condliffe’s numbers accordingly).

"The only way forward is to go back to the concept of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' " [updated]

 "It has been clear for decades that NZ's approach to welfare has gone awry. The late Roger Kerr, of the NZ Business Roundtable, once said to me, 'The only way forward is to go back to the concept of 'deserving' and 'undeserving'.' ...

    "Between the passage of the Social Security Act in 1938 and the early 1970s the percentage of working-age people on a benefit never exceeded two. Today it stands at almost twelve, with the time people stay dependent growing every year.
    "As a society we have created this level of reliance by believing and acting on a bad idea. That we must not judge others. We must not mention their faults and shortcomings. We must bend over backwards to not blame the person responsible for their own troubles. That's the kindness and compassion we are taught to aspire to. ...
    "I would vouch that the majority of New Zealanders want to help people who, through no fault of their own, need a benefit and public housing. But that willingness does not extend to people who chronically cause their own misfortune."

~ Lindsay Mitchell, from her post 'Is real change on the cards?' 

"After nearly ninety years of social security it would be reasonable to conclude that the state cannot solve 'poverty'. Indeed, the more the state does, the more the state is expected to do."

~ Lindsay Mitchell from her post 'The other side of the story' 

"Christchurch’s Captain James Cook statue survived the earthquakes largely unscathed" – but not the vandals

 

Cook statue by William Trethewey (1892-1956), 
defaced and partially repaired

"Christchurch’s Captain James Cook statue ... survived the earthquakes largely unscathed ... [but last week] his eyes were gouged out, his nose was ground off and a red cross daubed on him. To the great credit of Christchurch City Council, facial repairs have already been made, though the cross is still very visible. ...
    "[H]is voyages – and tragic death – preceded any significant European settlement by decades. Therefore, holding him to any personal, adverse responsibility here is both silly and misplaced. The same goes for a North Island tribal chief executive’s characterisation of Cook as ‘a barbarian’ when the whole ethos behind Cook’s voyages was specifically not imperial conquest but that noble Enlightenment goal (trashed by postcolonial academics in recent years), ‘dare to know’....
    "It is the vandals, not Captain Cook, who are blind. Their defacement of his statue is an emotionally immature and ill-educated act of copycat vandalism ... Smashing Cook’s face helps no one’s understanding of history and does nothing to allay the suffering of indigenous peoples as a consequence of the arrival of Europeans. ...
    "Cook must be repaired, retained and explained, otherwise our heritage is trash."

~ Mark Stocker, from his post 'Captain Cook’s Loss of Face in Christchurch'

WELFARE: "National will persist with the tinkering..."

"Right now, benefit statistics are worse than at the time of last year's election. There are 380,169 main beneficiaries — a rise of 5 percent. The number on a Jobseeker benefit is up 7.5 percent. ...

    "[I]t is long-term single parent dependence which drives inter-generational malaise - the most serious social problem the country faces. Inter-generational dependence drives under-achievement, domestic dysfunction, ill-health and crime.
    "So what is National doing?
    "The same thing it does every time it returns to power. It gets a bit tougher about oversight of beneficiaries ... They set some soft targets ... but make no mention of sole parents (who are also not required to 'check-in').
    "The last big National [Party] welfare reforms (2013) comprised ... changing benefit names.
    "The percentage of working-age people dependent on welfare is higher now than then. [Much higher]
    "There is an inertia about the numbers which is going to take some radical actions to disrupt them. But National lacks the necessary reforming zeal. 
    "National will persist with the tinkering that deflects attention and mollifies their voters while the country's historic heavy and unhealthy over-reliance on the welfare system continues."

~ Lindsay Mitchell, from her post 'Welfare - no good news'