New Zealand Official Yearbook 95

The oldest rocks in New Zealand are found in Nelson, Westland and Fiordland. They have been dated back to the Paleozoic era about 570 million years ago.

Almost three-quarters of New Zealand is covered by sedimentary rocks, created by the interplay of the earth movement and erosion. The most common forms of sedimentary rocks in New Zealand are sandstone, mudstone, greywacke, conglomerate and limestone. As well as the sedimentary rocks of various ages, New Zealand incorporates in its complex structure metamorphic rocks (schist, gneiss and marble), and intrusive igneous rocks (granite, gabbro, diorite and serpentine). Volcanic rocks (basalt, andesite, rhyolite and ignimbrite), are the products of the many volcanic eruptions that have characterised New Zealand's geological history.

Apparent in the New Zealand landscape today is the evidence of episodes of intense mountain building of between six million and one million years ago. During this period the mountain chains were pushed up and there was movement and displacement of the earth's crust along faults. Due to this activity well-preserved tilted fault blocks bounded by fault scarps (steep faces hundreds or even thousands of metres high) are visible in the landscape of some regions. Fault movements continue to the present day and have accompanied several major earthquakes of the past century.

Erosion has transformed the landscape during this time, carving detailed patterns of peaks, ridges, valleys and gorges. The deposition of debris has built up alluvial plains, shingle fans and other construction forms. At the coast, waves have eaten back the headlands and built beaches, spits and bars. Glaciers carved the fiords of Fiordland and the valleys occupied by most of the South Island lakes. Sea-level changes accompanied the formation, and later melting, of global glacial ice. These changes affected the erosion and deposition of the rivers and were responsible for the formation of many prominent river terraces.

Volcanic activity over the past few million years has played an important part in shaping the landscape. The largest volcanic outpourings of late geological times were in the region between Tongariro National Park and the Bay of Plenty coast. The most recognisable volcanoes in New Zealand now occur in the North Island, where a number are still active. They include Ruapehu, Tongariro, Ngaruahoe, White Island and Mount Tarawera. Others such as Mount Taranaki (or Egmont), and Rangitoto may be considered dormant at present although they are still regarded as significant hazards.

The New Zealand region is characterised by both a high density of active volcanoes and a high frequency of eruptions. Volcanic activity in New Zealand occurs within the North island and offshore to the north-east (Kermadec Islands). In the last 150 years, volcanoes have killed more people than earthquakes, yet the scale and style of historically recorded volcanic activity is dwarfed by events known to have occurred in the last 2,000 to 5,000 years.

New Zealand volcanism is recognised from five areas in the North island: the Bay of Islands, Whangarei, Auckland, White Island to Ruapehu, and Egmont. The area from White Island to Ruapehu is known as the Taupo Volcanic Zone and is by far the most frequently active. There are three major types of volcano in New Zealand:

TVZ contains three frequently active cone volcanoes (Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe and White Island) and the two most productive caldera volcanoes (Taupo and Okataina) in the world.

Deaths due directly or indirectly to volcanism (and associated hydrothermal explosions) represent the biggest single source of fatalities from natural disasters in New Zealand over the last 150 years.

Economic losses due to volcanism are trivial in comparison to those from earthquakes or flooding. However, an assessment of the sizes and styles of volcanic eruptions in the geologically recent past, coupled with consideration of the economic development of the country (especially in the central North Island), shows that the record of the last 150 years represents only a fraction of the types and sizes of hazard posed by New Zealand volcanism.

DEATHS IN VOLCANIC AREAS OVER 150 YEARS

The term volcanic crisis is used to describe the entire time period associated with a major volcanic eruption. It includes the precursors, the eruption and its aftermath. During all this time people and property are at risk.

The onset of a volcanic crisis is often predictable; the exact course of an eruption is not. Large volcanic eruptions are predictable because precursors like earthquakes, ground deformation and increased outputs of volcanic gas, can be used to infer that an eruption is imminent, so enabling some site-specific planning or mitigation.

Large volcanic eruptions are preceded by a period of days to years of high levels of seismicity, ground movements and changes to hot springs and gas vents. However, once an eruption has started, significant hazards can be present for much longer periods than with any other natural event. The eruption may be followed by months to decades of flooding, erosion and land instability. Volcanic crises differ in several ways from other natural disasters.

HAZARD COMPARISON

A unique feature of volcanic crises when compared to other kinds of natural hazards is each eruption has a far wider range of possible outcomes, each in turn with a characteristic range of threats to life and property. The major types of volcanic hazard are listed in the following table. Volcanism on a relatively minor scale (eg Ruapehu 1945) will cause disruption and damage on a regional scale, while some larger events (eg Taupo 1,800 years ago) would adversely affect the entire national economy.

Another aspect of volcanic hazards, as opposed to many other natural hazards, is that eruptions leave behind substantial quantities of material (eg 2 cubic kilometres in the case of Tarawera in 1886). This material accumulates to depths of metres or more, with serious implications for the post-eruptive recovery of affected areas.

EFFECTS OF MAIN VOLCANIC HAZARDS

In any given area, the nature of volcanic hazards will vary with:

For each volcano, a hazard map of different potential eruptions can be drawn up. Each map has a number of zones specific to a particular hazard, eg lahar, ash fall etc. The risk varies enormously over small distances depending on such factors as the topography, and the wind direction at the time of the eruption. At all of New Zealand's volcanoes, with the possible exception of Ngauruhoe, the historic record is inadequate to assess the full range of activity. Therefore, studies are made of the deposits left by prehistoric eruptions and interpretations are made of the sizes and styles of each event, together with an estimation of the age, so that the return intervals of any specific kind of eruption can be made. Such information is available to various extents for all of New Zealand's volcanoes. The probability of a future eruption from a wholly new site, or of a type of activity not represented in the past history of the volcano is remote.

Compared with some other countries lying in the almost continuous belt of earthquake activity around the rim of the Pacific—such as Japan, Chile and the Philippines—the level of seismic activity in New Zealand is moderate, although earthquakes are common. A shock of Richter magnitude 6 or above occurs on average about once a year, a shock of magnitude 7 or above once in 10 years, and a shock of about magnitude 8 perhaps once a century.

Within New Zealand at least two separate systems of seismic activity can be distinguished. The Main Seismic Region covers the whole of the North Island except Northland peninsula, and the part of the South Island north of a line roughly passing between Banks Peninsula and Cape Foulwind. The Southern, or Fiordland, Seismic Region includes southern Westland, western Southland, and western Otago. Less clearly defined activity covers the remainder of the two main islands, and extends eastwards from Banks Peninsula to include the Chatham Islands.

Shallow earthquakes, which are the most numerous, originate within the earth's crust, which in New Zealand has an average thickness of some 35 kilometres. These shocks are responsible for almost all damage to property, and are widely scattered throughout the country.

The most important system of deep shocks in New Zealand lies in a well-defined zone beneath the Main Seismic Region, stretching from the Bay of Plenty to Nelson and Marlborough. The maximum depth of occurrence is about 400 kilometres at the northern end, and decreases evenly to a depth of about 200 kilometres before the southern boundary of the region is reached.

In geophysically disturbed regions (those with both volcanic and earthquake activity), large earthquakes are rare, although small earthquakes usually accompany volcanic eruptions. Regions of active volcanism are also subject to periodic outbreaks of small earthquakes, very numerous and all of similar magnitude. These are known as ‘earthquake swarms’ and although the number of shocks may cause alarm, it is unusual for even minor damage to result.

Volcanologists use three primary techniques to establish the ‘health’ of an active volcano:

In a volcanic crisis, practical steps can be taken to mitigate risk and lessen the threat to life, but this requires accurate perception of the onset of a crisis. This perception in turn depends on a knowledge of the ‘background’ or ‘normal’ levels of seismicity, ground movement and gas flux at the volcano, coupled with ‘real-time’ determination of any significant changes from this background. In New Zealand an active volcano surveillance programme exists to define these background levels.

Experiences at recent large volcanic eruptions like Rabaul (Papua New Guinea) and Pinatubo (Philippines) show that it is possible to make enormous savings of human life during volcanic crises. On the other hand, Nevado del Ruiz and El Chichon show that poor planning results in major loss of life. A major feature of mitigation is public education. An informed, knowledgeable population makes intelligent decisions and ‘self-evacuation’ was a key feature at Rabaul and Pinatubo.

The principal tool to accomplish this in New Zealand is the Yellow Book series of the Ministry of Civil Defence. Communities exposed to frequent volcanic hazards evolve simple measures to limit risk. One example is Whakapapa village, Mt Ruapehu, where posters and brochures detailed precautions against lahar hazards on the ski-fields, and a lahar warning system is regularly tested as a precaution.

1995 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1945 eruption at Mt Ruapehu—the largest North island eruption this century. Several organisations and communities are using this to promote an increased awareness of volcanic-hazards in New Zealand. Activities include a special issue of Tephra by the Ministry of Civil Defence; public lectures and old newsreel viewing at Taupo Observatory; public lectures, an open day and civil defence exercise on the Whakapapa Skifield (co-ordinated by DOC, Ruapehu Alpine Lifts and Ruapehu District Council); community education and school colouring competition by Taupo District Council; the Caltex Volcanoes and Giants exhibition at Auckland Museum; and other activities organised by Auckland Regional Council.

The day-to-day weather is mostly determined by a series of anticyclones and troughs of low pressure in the westerlies. Consequently New Zealand weather is changeable, typically with short periods of a few days of settled or unsettled weather. At times the westerly regime breaks down and there are cold southerly outbreaks (with snow in winter and sometimes spring), or northerly intrusions of warm, moist air when tropical depressions move southwards into New Zealand latitudes in the summer.

The main mountain chain which extends much of the length of the country is a major barrier to weather systems approaching from the west. Consequently there is a marked contrast between the climates of regions west and east of the mountains, and this is much greater than north-south climatic differences.

The surrounding ocean means that New Zealand largely has a ‘marine’ climate—except in Central Otago, which most nearly approaches a ‘continental’ climate (dry with hot summers and cold winters).

Many parts of the country are subject to extremes of wind and rain, giving rise to wind damage to buildings and forests, and flooding as depressions with their fronts pass close to or over the country. The rugged terrain is an important factor in the enhancement of the wind strength and/or rainfall.

Temperature extremes are mainly confined to places east of the main ranges. High temperatures usually occur in warm north-westerly wind conditions due to the so-called föhn effect. These high temperatures are often followed by sudden falls in temperature as a cold front moves up the east coast of both islands.

1994 was an extreme year for climate in New Zealand. It was the driest year ever in eastern Northland and Hawke's Bay, where in places records began last century. For most, 1994 was a very sunny year. It was not as cold as either 1992 or 1993.

The El Niño weather phenomenon, which waned over the summer of 1993–94, strengthened during autumn and then persist for the remainder of the year. Unlike 1992 and 1993, the El Niño was presented without the influence of volcanic aerosols from the Mt Pinatubo volcanic eruption. The El Niño pattern was one of the main reasons for 1994's climatic extremes.

Westerly and south-westerly airflows occurred with their highest frequency over New Zealand since measurements commenced in 1917. Anticyclones, which bring dry settled weather, occurred more often over south-east Australia and to the north of New Zealand. There were few moist north-easterly airflows, which bring higher rainfalls to northern and eastern regions.

When the air pressure is abnormally high in the Indonesian region, it is correspondingly low in the South Pacific and vice versa. This phenomenon is called the ‘southern oscillation’. When southern oscillation episodes occur, the usual weather patterns in the southern Pacific, including New Zealand, are significantly altered.

An index, called the southern oscillation index, has been constructed using pressure recordings from Tahiti and Darwin. Usually there is a lag of some months between a major excursion of the oscillation, either positive (La Niña) or negative (El Niño), and a characteristic weather regime developing. The period of the southern oscillation is very irregular, varying between about two and 10 years with an average period of three to four years. However, once established, significant El Niño and La Niña episodes can last six to 12 months or more.

In general, very negative values of the oscillation index (El Niño's) are associated with an increase in the frequency of southerly winds over New Zealand in winter, south-westerlies autumn and spring and westerlies during summer.

The most significant El Niño this century occurred over the spring and summer of 1982–1983, when the oscillation index reached its largest negative value this century and rainfall was well below average in Gisborne and Hawke's Bay.

The latest El Niño event (1991 through 1994), along with other oceanic and atmospheric influences, was a major factor contributing to the extremely low rainfall in the north and east of the North Island during 1994.

The graph shows three-month running means of the southern oscillation index (SOI) to the end of 1994.

Ozone depletion and thinning of the global ozone shield have reached a record low in the last two years, with the level of ultraviolet light increasing over New Zealand during spring. Over Antarctica, the ‘hole’ in the ozone layer had improved only marginally from that of 1993, when it was the worst on record (88 Dobson units). The Dobson figure is a measure of the number of ozone molecules above the earth's surface.

When most people encounter reptiles or amphibians in New Zealand, they have little knowledge of what they are looking at. What people describe as the ‘common garden skink’ varies considerably from region to region, as New Zealand has 27 species and one introduced species of skink. At 350 mm the Chevron skink is the longest species, and one of the world's rarest. Its numbers are thought to be fewer than 3,000.

Geckos are less commonly encountered, however, they are surprisingly numerous in the wild. Of the 20 plus species known to occur in New Zealand, all are endemic, and all give live birth to young, usually twins. There is only one other live-bearing species in the world (from New Caledonia), all other species of gecko lay eggs. Because of their excellent camouflage, eyesight, hearing and ability to move fast over short distances, they are rarely seen.

Frogs that are heard calling throughout New Zealand are actually three Australian species introduced by acclimatisation societies in the 1890s. However, New Zealand does have at least three species of native frogs, none of which have a call. They also miss out the free-swimming tadpole stage, emerging from their eggs as small froglets. Unlike other frogs, New Zealand frogs have no ear-disks behind their eyes, have ‘tail wagging’ muscles, and several other features that place them as among the world's most ancient frogs.

The most famous of all reptiles in NZ are undeniably the 60,000 tuatara, which now only occur on offshore islands. Tuatara are represented by two species Sphenodon punctatus, and Sphenodon guntheri (which occurs only on Brothers Island). There are only 300 individuals of the latter making it one of the rarest forms of reptile on earth. The tuatara are often referred to as living fossils, because of their ancient origins. However, tuatara are aggressive predators, ambushing prey with spectacular bursts of speed and strength.

Practically all species of reptiles and amphibians are not just native to New Zealand, they are endemic, i.e. they occur nowhere else in the world. Their origins are thought to be late Jurassic, around 140 million years ago making them some of the most ancient species in the world.

Four species of marine turtles regularly visit the northern coasts of New Zealand, including one of the worlds’ most spectacular, the leatherback. Leatherback turtles are the heaviest reptiles on earth (the heaviest specimen weighing in at 961 kg), and are truly global in their distribution. Sightings range from off the northern coast of Norway in sight of pack ice, to further south than Stewart Island. The increases in sightings in New Zealand waters over the last two decades, are in the face of the population declines, and are a result of warmer sea temperatures.

Several sightings are made each year of two species of highly venomous sea-snakes. They are most probably involuntary travellers, washed outside their normal tropical distribution by adverse weather and sea currents.

The study of reptiles and amphibians is called herpetology. Herpetologists still have a long way to go before it is known how many species of reptiles and amphibians actually occur in New Zealand. Five new species have been revealed over the last five years, and more than 25 forms require further investigation before proper classification can be made. However, as of March 1995, the official figure are:

The main threats to species survival include habitat destruction, and prediction by introduced mammals, particularly rats and cats.

Reptiles and amphibians make up New Zealand's second largest group of species protected under the Wildlife Act. It is illegal to hunt, kill, sell, dispose of, or have in possession any protected species, without authority from the Department of Conservation.

New Zealand has the most diverse seabird fauna of any country (76 species). Almost a third of all the native bird species depend on the ocean for food—the feeding zones of some extending as far south as the Antarctic continent. The extensive coastline and many islands, offer a huge variety of habitat, from estuary and mud-flat to rocky cliffs and boulder bank. The ocean itself is marvellously rich—there are about 400 different marine fish resident in the waters around New Zealand as well as various species of seal, dolphins and porpoises. Thirty-two species of whale have been recorded and three of the largest (sperm, humpback and right) regularly migrate here in spring and autumn.

The most widespread and complex type of forest in New Zealand is a podocarp (conifer) broadleaf association. It is generally found at lower altitude and is characterised by the variety of species, a stratified canopy and an abundance of vines and epiphytic plants. Beech and kauri forests, in contrast are much simpler in structure. New Zealand's beech species have close relatives in Australia and South America and the five different taxa here have exploited habitats from valley floor to mountain tops. Kauri, true forest giants, dominate only in the warmer climes to the north.

Some of the most specialised of plants are those occupying the alpine zone. A remarkable 25 percent of all New Zealand's plants can be found above the treeline. Ninety-three percent of all the alpine plants are endemic (compared with 80 percent for the rest of the higher plants). Snow tussock herb-fields are one of the most distinctive elements in this cold, windswept environment. Remarkably long-lived, larger specimen's may be several centuries old. Like beech trees they seed infrequently but in profusion.

A definitive feature of New Zealand's land based plants and animals is their degree of specialisation and narrow habitat requirements (eg takahe/tussock grasslands; blue duck/fast flowing rivers and streams). This specialisation, and the adaptations which make New Zealand's wildlife so unique, render them extremely vulnerable to introduced predators (such as rats and cats) and competitors (such as deer and possums) and loss of habitat.

The arrival of people in Aotearoa/New Zealand heralded times of rapid change. The introduction (intentionally or accidental) of exotic plants and animals and the modification of habitat radically affected populations of native species. In the period following the arrival and expansion of Maori, forest cover was reduced and some 34 species became extinct including moa, the adzebill and the flightless goose. In the much shorter period of European settlement the area of forest was further reduced to around 25 percent of the land, 10 more birds became extinct and many more are threatened. The number of species introduced has escalated (since 1840 over 80 species of mammal, bird and fish and more than 1,600 plant species) in many places totally changing the landscape and ecology.

The ancestors of Aotearoa's earliest inhabitants are thought to have reached the western Pacific some 4,000 years ago, and gradually made their way along the Melanesian chain of islands. Long ocean journeys became possible for them with the introduction of the sail and the invention of the outrigger, which stabilised canoes in rough seas. They reached Fiji and Tonga by about 1,000 BC, and in this area many of the distinctive features of Polynesian social organisation and language developed. About 2,000 years ago there was a further eastward movement to the Society, Marquesas, and Cook Islands, at the heart of the Polynesian triangle. Probably from this region, the most isolated parts of Polynesia were settled—New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island. There has been much controversy as to the nature of, and reasons for, undertaking such long ocean voyages. Some were accidental, after canoes were blown off shore. At other times, refugees from defeated tribes or over-populated areas may well have set off into the unknown, confident that they were likely to make a safe landfall somewhere. Knowledge of stars, currents, bird migrations, and the signs of distant land was such that the possibility of controlled journeys over even thousands of kilometres cannot be discounted. The canoe or canoes which brought the first successful colonists to Aotearoa must have carried men and women, dogs, rats, vegetables for cultivation and a variety of tools and ornaments. Such a well-equipped expedition is unlikely to have been completely accidental.

Polynesian people, known today as Maori, were living in New Zealand by about the 10th century AD. They had come in one or more groups from the same general area of eastern Polynesia, known to them as Hawaiki. There are traditions of numerous voyages from Hawaiki, and of a number of famous canoes, whose occupants were the founders of tribal groupings which remain distinctive today. Some of these stories probably refer to migrations within New Zealand and a few to voyages elsewhere in Polynesia. After the initial period of settlement there were probably few or no continuing contacts with the outside world. Maori culture developed characteristics which reflected both its Polynesian roots and its new physical environment.

There is no convincing evidence to support ingenious theories that New Zealand was the landfall for one or several long-forgotten European voyagers before the 1640s. It seems clear that the first arrivals from overseas for several centuries were the members of a Dutch East India Company expedition commanded by Abel Tasman. He was sent to find the Great South Land which was supposed to balance the land mass of Eurasia in the Northern Hemisphere. On 13 December 1642 he sighted ‘a large, high-lying land’ which he named Staten Land. It was the west coast of the South Island of the soon-to-be-renamed ‘New Zealand’. Tasman anchored a few days later, and lost four men when local Maori interpreted an exchange of trumpet fanfares as a prelude to battle. Sailing away up the west coast of the North Island, he did not again attempt to land, and so found none of the ‘treasures or matters of great profit’ which were the object of his voyage. Aotearoa was now represented by a jagged line on European maps, but Tasman's experience did not encourage explorers or fortune-seekers to follow in his wake.

Europeans did not return until 1769. This time those seeking the mythical southern continent were British, the expedition's ostensible purposes were scientific, and its leader was the great explorer James Cook. On his first visit he circumnavigated New Zealand; his published journal and the reports of the scientists and artists on board made it known to the outside world. He returned in 1773–74 and 1777. There were misunderstandings and violence: a Maori was killed at Cook's first landfall and, in 1773, 10 of his men were killed and eaten at Queen Charlotte Sound. But he persevered, finding most encounters characterised by mutual curiosity and eagerness to barter. His respect for the Maori as ‘noble savages’ excited European imaginations, and foreshadowed attitudes which were to be important later.

Other explorers soon followed, the Frenchman Jean de Surville only two months after Cook first arrived. By ill-treating the local inhabitants, he set the scene for the blunders which three years later led to the deaths of his countryman Marion du Fresne and some two dozen of his crew. Julien Crozet, du Fresne's second-in-command, massacred about 250 Maori in retaliation. Further expeditions under the Englishman Vancouver, the Frenchman D’Entrecasteaux, and the Italian Malaspina (leading a Spanish fleet) ensured that New Zealand was not again forgotten in Europe.

Soon after a penal colony was established at Port Jackson (now Sydney) in 1788, commercial exploitation of Aotearoa's resources became practicable. New Zealand became, in economic terms, an offshoot of New South Wales. In 1792 the first sealing vessel in New Zealand waters left a gang at Dusky Sound in Fiordland. Americans soon played a major role in sealing, which was mostly carried out in the far south. It reached a peak in the first decade of the 19th century, after which over-exploitation brought a shift in the focus of activity to the newly-discovered sub-antarctic Campbell and Macquarie Islands.

Deep-sea whaling in New Zealand waters began in 1791, and remained important for about half a century, reaching a peak in the 1830s. Most whalers were American or British. Increasingly whaling vessels called at New Zealand harbours, notably the Bay of Islands, for rest, recreation, and replenishment of supplies. While whalers’ visits were usually brief, they became frequent enough to have a significant impact on local Maori communities. From 1829 bay whaling stations were established around the coasts of the South Island and the southern half of the North Island. These bases were usually quasi-permanent, and often became focal points for European settlement.

Flax was seen as an important commodity from Cook's time. It was the intended economic basis for several abortive colonisation schemes. A boom in flax exports from the late 1820s proved to be short-lived, but it did result in more settlers joining the bay whalers and the already well-entrenched missionaries. Scraping flax was very laborious work, and the ropes and cordage made from it varied in quality. Timber was the next major primary product, with exports reaching a peak about 1840. Mills were opened around the richly-forested northern coasts, most notably around Hokianga Harbour, where a number of European timber millers settled, and a shipyard was established in 1826. Agricultural exports also increased. Potatoes (introduced by Cook or du Fresne) and pigs (landed at the orders of Governor King of New South Wales in the 1790s) were being traded with visiting ships by the early 1800s. From this time wheat and maize were cultivated by Bay of Islands Maori. By 1836 it was said that New Zealand was ‘becoming a perfect granary for New South Wales’. Missionaries had introduced horses and cattle and set up demonstration farms. Bay whalers and other traders also grew crops and ran stock.

New Zealand's first mission station was established at Rangihoua in the Bay of Island in 1814, under the auspices of the Church of England's Church Missionary Society. The man most responsible for its formation was Samuel Marsden, senior chaplain to the New South Wales penal colony from 1800 until his death in 1838. An entrepreneur as well as a stern propagator of the faith, he was a successful breeder of sheep and cattle, pioneered grape growing in New South Wales, and owned mills and ships. Under his supervision the society's mission at first comprised men with practical skills, who were encouraged to engage in trade. Indeed they had no choice, as the first station was on a site too poor to support even subsistence agriculture. The community barely survived isolation, internal squabbles, and the uncertain patronage of local chiefs. Preaching the faith did not really begin until the determined Henry Williams arrived to set up a new station at Paihia in 1823. The establishment of a farm inland at Waimate in 1831 was followed later in the decade by the expansion of Anglican missions southwards as far as the Waikato, Rotorua, and Gisborne, and (in 1839) to the coast north of Wellington. From 1827 Maori language translations of the Bible were made, and the teaching of reading and writing in Maori was emphasised. The Wesleyans had opened a mission in the Hokianga area in 1823, and also set up stations further south in the 1830s. A Roman Catholic Marist mission, led by Bishop Pompallier, began in Northland in 1838. From the mid-1830s many Maori converted to Christianity. Movements which blended Maori and Christian ideas also developed, such as that of Te Atua Wera/Papahurihia in the Bay of Islands-Hokianga area. They were part of the adjustment of traditional social patterns to new realities.

It is difficult to assess what effect the presence of Europeans—around the coasts and venturing into the interior in the last few years before 1840—had on the indigenous inhabitants. Areas such as the Bay of Islands and the Hokianga, where contact with Europeans was greatest, underwent in a few decades changes which had taken centuries to transform Europe. Maori society was resilient and able to adapt to the revolution in technology and ideas with which it was confronted. The European impact varied greatly. In the Bay of Islands there was an intermittent Pakeha (non-Maori) presence from the 1790s, and permanent settlers from 1814; these numbered several hundred by 1839. In contrast, areas such as the Urewera mountains had not been visited by Europeans when British sovereignty was declared.

European diseases seem to have first reached epidemic proportions in the 1790s. The Maori initially had no immunity to them, and they were made more vulnerable by their communal lifestyle. Dysentery, diphtheria and influenza took many lives in the following decades. But some of the world's most lethal diseases, including yellow fever, typhus and cholera, were not introduced, and by 1840 immunities to the more common types of sickness were beginning to develop. Some health problems resulting from Pakeha presence were very localised—alcoholism and prostitution were confined to the few zones of intense contact. Other effects were widespread. European-introduced animals were both a source of food and rivals for scarce resources, while new plants such as potatoes and corn eventually became staples of Maori diet. The ability to purchase desired European goods depended on income-generating activities which often necessitated debilitating labour, such as raising commercial crops, felling and transporting timber, and stripping flax. Sometimes whanau or hapu moved to unhealthy lowland areas to be close to now-valued resources. New fashions in clothing, such as the wearing of European suits or blankets, regardless of their unsuitability in hot or wet weather, also increased susceptibility to sickness.

The nature of Maori warfare was altered by the introduction of muskets in the early 1800s. These were first used in small numbers as close-combat weapons. By 1818 the northern Ngapuhi confederation—because of geography the pioneers of much social change in the the existence of a three-party system was to lead to much greater fluctuations in seats won than in voting patterns.

Political instability reflected economic uncertainty. Soldiers had returned to promises of a ‘land fit for heroes to live in’—the state would put them on farms, or at least provide loans for this purpose. But government resettlement policies further fuelled a rise in land values initially sparked by wartime-guaranteed markets. Between 1915 and 1925 some 40 percent of occupied land was sold. Rural prosperity ended abruptly in 1921–22, when export prices fell sharply. In response, the government legislated. The Meat Export Control Act 1922 established a board to handle beef and mutton exports, and a 1923 Act regulated dairy exporting. Massey's successor as Reform Party leader and Prime Minister, J Gordon Coates, was responsible for the Rural Advances Act 1926, which created a new section of the State Advances Department to grant rural first-mortgage loans, and also for the Rural Intermediate Credit Act 1927. Coates’ government implemented a substantial public works programme, building hydro-electric power stations, railways and roads. It also introduced a child allowance in 1926. Once again, a purportedly conservative administration was expanding the state's economic role.

Urban wage-earners, whose incomes were cut during the 1921–22 slump, looked to Labour to protect their interests. Labour now had to modify its radicalism to expand its appeal. It could not hope to govern without rural votes and so could no longer advocate land nationalisation. Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with Coates’ leadership grew among businessmen who resented his promotion of state activity, and farmers who had looked to him to break the bitter cycle of falling returns, fixed mortgage repayments, and increasing costs. The temporary beneficiaries of this disillusionment were the Liberals, who (renamed United and again led by the now ageing and ailing Ward) won more seats than either of their rivals in the 1928 election by opting for the old policy of borrowing for development. But, as export prices plummeted, depression deepened and borrowing proved impracticable. In 1930 United and Reform formed a coalition which comfortably won the 1931 election. This government moved to assist farmers through a 25 percent devaluation of the currency, a series of mortgage adjustment Acts and lowered freight and interest rates.

Giving priority to defending farmers’ incomes worsened conditions in the cities. Most wages and salaries were cut by 10 percent in both 1931 and 1932. Such savage deflation in an already contracting economy led to an eighth of the workforce being unemployed by 1933. Government determination that the jobless should earn the meagre relief provided under the 1930 Unemployment Act (which levied a special tax on all males aged over 20) resulted in labour-intensive make-work projects and the establishment of spartan camps for single men in isolated areas. Sporadic outbreaks of violent protest in the main cities in 1932 were blamed by Prime Minister George Forbes on a ‘lawless minority’ and Communist agitation. His response was the Public Safety Conservation Act, which empowered the government to proclaim a national emergency and take Draconian steps when public order was thought to be endangered. ‘Disloyal’ public servants, including those who protested against wage cuts, could now be dismissed under the Finance Act 1932. Resentment of the government became widespread.

Waihi goldmine, over whether workers should accept arbitration under the 1894 Act, eventually ended amid police-backed violence. In 1913 a ‘lock-out’ on the Wellington waterfront led to a general strike by watersiders, seamen and coalminers. This was defeated after thousands of middle-class and farmer ‘special constables’, supporting the regular police and sustained by logistical backing from the military, fought with unionists on the streets of Auckland and Wellington. Clearly unable to overthrow the government by direct action, the militants turned to more conventional politics. A total of six ‘Social Democrat’ and Labour MPs were elected in 1914, and in 1916 a Labour Party was formed. If any one cause united Labour supporters behind their new party, it was opposition to military conscription, which was introduced in 1916 as New Zealand troops began to suffer the torments of the Western Front. The ‘Great War’ also marked the development of a sense of national identity in many New Zealanders. Since 1870, when dissatisfaction with Imperial troop withdrawals and declining prices on London markets had led to talk of secession and alliance with the United States, Pakeha New Zealanders had taken for granted a position of loyal subordination within the British Empire. Remoteness from its centre was offset by the guarantee of security provided by the Royal Navy, and the facts of economic dependence. Throughout the period from 1875 until World War II, roughly 80 percent of New Zealand's exports were sold to the United Kingdom, and at least half its imports came from that country. Failure to join the Australian federation (created in 1901) was in large part an acknowledgment that New Zealand's most vital interests lay elsewhere. The ‘colony’ was officially renamed a ‘dominion’ in 1907, but this was seen as recognition of autonomy rather than full nationhood.

Wartime support for Britain modified attitudes of dependence. The 6,500 volunteers who went to the South African War (1899–1902) saw themselves as superior mentally and physically to their British regular-force counterparts. The experience of World War I—103,000 New Zealanders served abroad, and some 18,000 died, out of a total population of little more than a million—reinforced claims of military excellence. These were enhanced by achievements such as the heroic assault on Chunuk Bair in August 1915, during the Gallipoli campaign, and the role of the New Zealand Division in helping stop the German advance in the spring of 1918. Although Massey claimed (unconvincingly) that in signing the Treaty of Versailles he did not act as the agent of a sovereign state, many New Zealanders felt they had earned statehood. The country was now a minor colonial power in its own right, having annexed the Cook Islands in 1901 and bloodlessly conquered German Samoa in August 1914. Prowess at the ‘national sport’ of rugby football had also become a source of (mostly male) patriotic pride after an all-but-undefeated tour of the British Isles by a representative team in 1905–6.

War had widened domestic divisions. While farmers profited from the commandeer system, under which the British government guaranteed purchase of New Zealand's main exports, the cost of living rose in towns and cities, and by 1919 real wages were lower than at any time since the turn of the century. The Protestant Political Association, which claimed to have 200,000 members in 1919, vigorously opposed ‘Rum’, ‘Romanism’ (i.e., Roman Catholicism) and ‘Rebellion’ (i.e., the Labour Party). Massey won his first decisive electoral victory in 1919. Reform now had 46 seats to the Liberals’ 20 and Labour's eight. But the government had won only 36 percent of the vote, and Labour's share had reached 24 percent. Throughout the 1920s was much improved, the secondary system expanded, and technical education introduced. Activity in all these areas (and in others, such as health) required many more civil servants. In the past, government ministers had made most appointments, and controlled much of the day-to-day administration of ‘their’ departments. This became impractical as the functions of the bureaucracy grew more specialised. From 1913 appointment on merit, job classification and standardised procedures were the norm. As in other western economies at this time, wage and salary earners made up an increasing proportion of the workforce.

By 1900 the Liberal Party had a mass organisation as well as strong leadership. The Liberal-Labour Federation united regional associations through a national council and annual conferences. For the first time ordinary people could become members of a political party. But, while the Liberals remained dominant in Parliament after Ward became Prime Minister on Seddon's death in 1906, social and economic forces gradually split the alliance between urban wage-earners and small-to-middling farmers which sustained them in power. As they became more established, small dairy and mixed farmers grew more critical of the government which had in many cases given them their start on the land. Demand for the freehold became a rallying cry. Free trade, unrestricted access to Maori land, and freedom from government regulation and from the spectre of socialist trade unionism, were other demands. The New Zealand Farmers’ Union, launched in 1899, spread especially rapidly in newly-opened North Island districts. Its leadership soon comprised established as well as struggling farmers, and increasingly it supported the new Reform Party, led by William Ferguson Massey, which also gained the backing of protection-dependent urban businessmen after dropping free trade as party policy.

Meanwhile, urban workers grew disenchanted with the government as their share of the country's growing prosperity diminished after 1900. Real wages fell as the Arbitration Court delivered more miserly and belated award increases. In addition, up to 10 percent of the workforce continued to be intermittently or seasonally unemployed. Although this was much less than the one-third comparably affected in Edwardian England, rising national income was clearly being distributed unequally. Both the arbitration system and the political alliance, which had produced it, were called into question. Radical socialists formed a Socialist Party, and (in 1909) a Federation of Labour urged member unions to refuse arbitration and take direct action to achieve radical goals. Many leading militants had come from Australia, where an Irish-dominated working-class culture had developed nationalist, anti-British characteristics. In the decades around 1900 there was much movement of labour between New Zealand and Australia as economic conditions fluctuated. Many sheep-shearing gangs followed a regular seasonal route through both countries.

The Liberals failed to gain a clear majority in the 1911 election, and in 1912 enough Members of Parliament crossed the floor of the House to bring down the government. Massey now led a Reform Party government which in effect offered a more efficient administration of the Liberals’ heritage. He moved first to defeat the challenge from the left. A 1912 dispute at the 1900 a living could be made from a few hundred sheep or a handful of dairy cattle. Subsistence farming, widespread in the 19th century, now declined. Farming became a business, and increasingly a family business, as mechanisation reduced the number of rural labourers.

Townspeople profited from an expanding rural economy. Urban workers also benefited from legislation sponsored by the Liberals’ first Minister of Labour, William Pember Reeves. The Factories Act 1894 provided for regular inspection of factories, closely regulated the conditions of employment of women and children, and restricted the working week in most industries to 48 hours. The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1894 set up a mechanism for peacefully settling industrial disputes, and in the process elevated unions to equal status with employers in the bargaining process. Disputes not resolved by negotiation were to be settled by a central Arbitration Court, whose decisions were binding. Registration of unions was voluntary, and direct collective bargaining remained an option. But the collapse of unionism after 1890 made the new system appear attractive, and most unions sought the recognition offered. Union membership soared from some 8,000 in 1896 to 57,000 in 1910. Reeves was not present to witness this growth of the labour movement. In 1896, unable to win support from his colleagues for a new round of radical legislation, he became Agent-General in London. His departure left urban wage-earners without an effective voice in the government, which was now dominated by the populist improvisation of Seddon, McKenzie, and Colonial Treasurer Joseph Ward (a latter-day Vogel).

Although 1890 came to be seen as a watershed year in New Zealand history, its significance was less apparent at the time. A general election resulted in a fragile majority for the loosely-organised team supporting Liberal leader John Ballance, who differed from Premier Harry Atkinson chiefly in proposing a graduated land tax which would encourage large landowners to reduce the size of their holdings and allow more small farmers on to the land. In Dunedin and Christchurch, increased awareness of political issues among wage-earners after the defeat of the Maritime Strike had electoral consequences, with the return of candidates sympathetic to labour. In rural electorates, by contrast, abstention from voting remained the most typical form of political activity. The abolition of plural voting had reduced the direct political power of those who owned property in several constituencies, but there was still a ‘country quota’ which gave rural voters 28 percent more strength than was justified by their share of the total population.

Ballance became assured of a viable majority in the House only after Atkinson alienated a number of members by stacking the Legislative Council with new appointees, in a bid to establish an unassailable majority there. The conservative ‘Continuous Ministry’ at last left office, leaving a legacy of constitutional controversy which did much to unify the Liberal alliance. Ballance now sought to make his own appointments to the Upper House. After two years’ argument the British Colonial Secretary instructed New Zealand's Governor to acquiesce. This ended the Governor's substantive role in politics. An Act set a seven year term (as against tenure for life) for future legislative councillors and reduced the Upper House to the effective status of a debating chamber (it was finally abolished in 1950). These events, together with the extension of the franchise to women in 1893—a result of the unwillingness of the new Liberal leader Richard John Seddon to alienate a powerful feminist-temperance alliance—gave New Zealand politics a markedly more democratic appearance.

Liberal legislation at first focused on land issues. The Land and Income Assessment Act 1891 imposed a modest, and modestly-graduated, tax on unimproved land values. This tax was a minimal imposition on prospering pastoralists, who sold up (when they did so) because rising land prices made it worthwhile. In 1892 Minister of Lands John McKenzie offered Crown lessees an optional 999 year lease without revaluation—freehold tenure in all but name. By 1907 more than 5,000 Crown tenants had taken up some 1 million hectares under this tenure. These measures fostered Liberal support in the countryside, and in the 1893 election the party doubled its rural representation. The Advances to Settlers Act 1894 offered state loans to (non-Maori) settlers at reasonable interest rates. Its chief beneficiaries were not new ‘bush farmers’, but established farmers who could borrow to make improvements.

The success of these policies was much enhanced by a steady rise in export receipts after 1894. This income allowed the government to borrow for public works construction, land purchase and loans to farmers, and enabled farmers to service their mortgages from increased earnings. By the end of the 1890s the full impact of refrigeration was bringing significant economic changes. In 1901 there were nearly 5,000 dairy farmers, and by 1911—when they totalled one-third of all farmers—there were three times as many. The trend towards intensive farming was firmly established, as small-scale production became commercially viable. By

A credit squeeze in 1878–79 ushered in some 15 years of economic stagnation, during which export and import prices and wages all fell roughly in proportion. Burdened with the overseas debts incurred in the 1870s, New Zealand remained dependent on the ability of a depressed British working class to buy its primary products. The most promising development was the beginning of frozen meat exports with the voyage of the Dunedin to the United Kingdom in 1882. This trade grew slowly at first, but by 1892 meat exports exceeded £1 million in value annually, second only to wool. Experimentation produced new breeds of sheep, which provided good quality mutton as well as wool and were suited to the country's dryish pastures. In 1882 New Zealand's first dairy factory opened at Edendale in Southland. Exports of dairy produce also grew slowly, with banks reluctant to finance small farmers’ production of perishable butter and cheese. Mechanisation in processing was paralleled by technological innovations in farming itself. Horse-drawn reapers and binders began to replace men. Traction engines and mechanical threshing mills appeared in the 1880s, as a boom in wheat production saw exports peak at more than £1 million in 1883. The introduction of shearing machines in the late 1880s further reduced the demand for rural labour.

Other products enjoyed fluctuating fortunes. Most important in Auckland ‘province’ (provincial identity long outlived the institutions themselves), timber processing became the country's largest manufacturing enterprise between 1875 and 1885. A substantial export trade in kauri timber was vulnerable to erratic prices, as was the ‘poor man's industry’ of extracting kauri gum (resin) deposits. Coal was exported from Westland from the mid-1880s. Urban manufacturing continued to grow until about 1886, after which the availability of cheap imports brought a decade of decline. Local manufacturers received some protection in 1888, when the Atkinson ministry imposed a 20 percent tariff on imported goods which competed with locally-made products. Not for the last time, a conservative government proved willing to use the power of the state for economic ends. The low-cost, low-wage conditions under which New Zealand industry operated were highlighted by the report of the 1890 ‘Sweating Commission’, which revealed exploitation of women and children in industry. The failure of the 1890 Maritime Strike by seamen, watersiders, miners and railwaymen emphasised the relative weakness of urban labour in a mainly rural, export-dependent economy.

The wars of the 1860s had brought both unprecedented Maori unity and new divisions. Alliance with the Pakeha had offered some tribes the opportunity to settle old scores. While some kupapa fought defensive actions on their own soil, others ranged across the North Island in a manner reminiscent of the large war parties of earlier in the century. Co-operation and resistance continued to be twin motifs of Maori response to the Pakeha for several decades after overt warfare ended.

The operations of the Native Land Court, established under the Native Lands Act 1865, which permitted the leasing or purchase of land from Maori named in the court's certificates of title, efficiently parted Maori from much of their remaining land. In the 1880s land in the King Country itself began to come before the court, and this paved the way for its purchase. Construction of the Auckland–Wellington railway through Ngati Maniapoto territory symbolised the end of an autonomous Maori zone. By 1892 less than one-sixth of the country remained in Maori ownership, and a quarter of that was leased to Europeans. Most Maori-owned land was rugged and bush-clad. Maori were now only 7 percent of the population;

New Zealand colonists with capital, and from the early 1850s many crossed the Tasman themselves to take up cheap long-term grazing leases. Grey reduced the price of rural land in 1853, ostensibly to help small farmers. The main effect, however, was to allow run holders to consolidate their holdings. By the mid-1860s many had secure tenure. During this ‘golden age’ of pastoralism, overseas prices for wool rose steadily, and sheep numbers increased from 750,000 in 1855 to 10 million in 1870. Wool was king, and the pastoralist came in some ways to resemble Wakefield's rural gentleman: pre-eminent economically, socially, and politically in his domain. But the scale of pastoral farming was very different from the intensive agriculture Wakefield had envisaged. Much of the work (eg, shearing) was seasonal and undertaken by itinerant labourers; station homesteads were often quite primitive, and usually far from neighbours. Transience and loneliness thus accompanied economic growth.

The quest for wealth from a second staple product—gold—brought more hardship and isolation in the 1860s, even as the population rose rapidly. Beginning in 1861, a series of gold rushes transformed Otago virtually overnight. The province's population increased five-fold (to 60,000) between 1861 and 1863. Then the main focus of activity shifted to the west coast of the South Island, where by 1867 there were 29,000 inhabitants in an area almost unoccupied three years earlier. Mining declined rather quickly in Otago, more slowly in Westland. From the 1880s expensive dredging techniques revived the industry in both regions. The ‘diggers’ had profited less than had merchants, bankers, and farmers. Farmers had also benefited from the influx of British troops during the Waikato war. Briefly, their provisioning was one of the colony's main sources of income. Equally briefly, small mixed farms became profitable.

In the 1860s, while the European population of the North Island rose to 97,000, that of the South Island soared to 159,000. Unequal growth brought political change in 1865, when the capital was moved south to Wellington and the South Island gained 13 additional parliamentary seats. Otago was transformed from an obscure Presbyterian outpost into the foremost commercial and industrial province, with a quarter of the colony's Pakeha population producing one-third of its exports. Secondary industries, largest in Otago and Auckland, manufactured a wide range of products for local markets. The larger towns now contained groups of artisans and labourers with some capacity for combined action. In Dunedin the unemployed demanded relief work as boom turned to slump in the late 1860s.

The Otago-based businessman and politician Julius Vogel became Colonial Treasurer in 1869, and dominated political life until his departure for London in 1876 as Agent-General (a post which combined diplomacy and business promotion). When he took office the income-generating British troops had almost all left and the colony had just survived the severe military crisis of 1868–69. Dependence on world commodity prices had proved to be a mixed blessing, since receipts for wool and gold exports had slumped. Faced with the prospect of a serious depression, Vogel persuaded his cabinet colleagues to approve a programme of public borrowing to finance growth. Twenty million pounds were borrowed in a decade, mostly from Britain. The role of the state grew; there were four times as many civil servants in 1877 (some 7,200) than a decade earlier. A large publicly-owned infrastructure of transport, communication, and other services was established. The 230 kilometres of public railways in 1873 became 1,840 kilometres by 1880. One-third of public expenditure in the decade to 1881 went on roads and bridges, which had more practical effect than railways in improving communications in most areas. Also, 6,500 kilometres of telegraph lines were built in the 1870s (their construction had begun for military reasons in the previous decade). Expensive harbour projects were undertaken around the country, and there was a boom in residential, business, and public building. Government spending in 1872 was said to be 13 times that of Canada on a per capita basis.

The 1870s was a decade of large-scale emigration from Europe. Most migrants went to America, a significant fraction to Australasia. The arrival in New Zealand within nine years of 115,000 government-assisted immigrants contributed to the near-doubling of the non-Maori population to 490,000 in 1880. Organised communities of Scandinavian, English and Irish came out under special settlement schemes. The first group were prominent in the clearing of the ‘Great Bush’ which covered much of the southern half of the North Island. This unremitting toil, like that of the railway and road builders, laid the foundations for much future development. The immediate result of Vogel's policies, however, was a substantial enlargement of New Zealand society without any corresponding strengthening of the economy. The colony had become more rather than less dependent on Britain as a source of both capital and income. By 1881 more than 90 percent of export revenue came from the United Kingdom, whereas Australia had taken over half New Zealand's exports in the 1860s. Wool had regained the status of largest overseas earner from gold.

The development of a centralised colonial economy linked by modern communications had political implications. While the implementation of ‘Vogelism’ was much influenced by regional pressures, it transformed the balance of power between centre and provinces. Provincial governments, designed in part as agents of colonisation, were now proving superfluous in this role. In 1871 the central government took over sole responsibility for immigration and railway construction. Opposition to some of Vogel's policies by provincialists in the House led ultimately to the end of the provincial system in 1876, over the protests of wealthy Canterbury and Otago. A network of county councils now joined existing borough councils, road boards and harbour boards as the units of local government. Regional education, hospital and land boards soon followed.

would gradually introduce European concepts of law. Britain had asserted since 1840 that its law applied throughout Aotearoa, but in 1860 much of the North Island was still effectively beyond government control. The war which now broke out had much to do with the contest for land, but it was also a struggle for authority over the people that the land sustained, and for mana.

Fighting began in Taranaki in March 1860, when British troops attempted to remove Te Atiawa tribespeople from land at Waitara which the Crown had allegedly bought, but which most of its claimants had refused to sell. Te Atiawa were soon reinforced by the Taranaki and Ngati Ruanui tribes, and later by Kingite forces from the Waikato region. For a year the civilian Pakeha population remained virtually under siege in New Plymouth, while the British military vainly sought to engage the Maori in a decisive battle. Eventually the British embarked, under cover of a series of redoubts, on a laborious advance which had achieved no tangible success by the time a truce was agreed in March 1861. Fewer than 1,000 Maori warriors had not lost any territory to some 3,500 opponents, and were also able to keep the considerable resources plundered from abandoned European properties.

With Grey's return in 1861 the focus shifted to the Waikato. Imperial troops were steadily augmented, a military road was constructed from Auckland to the Waikato River, and the heartland of Kingite power was invaded in July 1863. British forces eventually numbered 14,000 effective troops (more than were available for the defence of England) and were led by a highly competent staff under General Sir Duncan Cameron, but they had great difficulty pushing back Maori opponents who numbered no more than 2,000 at one time. Given the inability of the Maori economy to sustain an army continuously in the field, and the many obstacles to effective inter-tribal military co-operation, the Kingite resistance was remarkably successful, but by mid-1864 the Waikato Basin had been occupied up to the Puniu River. The search for a decisive victory now led Cameron to Tauranga, where he was stunningly defeated in a frontal attack on a superbly-designed fortress at Gate Pa, but was able to partially avenge this reverse at Te Ranga a few weeks later.

The territory occupied in the ‘Waikato War’, about 400,000 hectares, was confiscated by the colonial government, but fighting was far from over. Imperial troops campaigned on the west coast in 1865-66, while colonial units and allied kupapa (pro-government Maori) fought in the east. Both opposed adherents of the new religion of Pai Marire, which combined elements of traditional Maori beliefs, Christianity and the innovations of its Taranaki prophet, Te Ua Haumene. In 1868, with Imperial forces now withdrawn from active service and ‘native’ policy firmly in the hands of the settler government, a grave crisis abruptly confronted Pakeha New Zealand. Belated attempts to implement years-old land confiscations provoked a campaign by the Ngati Ruanui chief Titokowaru, who with a few hundred warriors repeatedly defeated much larger colonial forces until dissension among his followers brought his advance to an end. Simultaneously, the Rongowhakata prophet Te Kooti Rikirangi conducted a brilliant guerrilla campaign in the Poverty Bay area after escaping with some 160 prisoners of war from exile in the Chatham Islands. He proved far less adept than Titokowaru at pa construction and defence, however, and armed support for his cause dwindled until he was forced to seek sanctuary in Kingite territory early in 1872. The zone of effective Maori autonomy had now shrunk, but it still encompassed the ‘King Country’ in the central North Island, South Taranaki and the Urewera district. Pakeha sovereignty was now an established fact, but it was by no means absolute.

The huge Grey/McLean land purchases were the basis for an expansion of European economic activity. The Canterbury settlement, whose social composition came closest to Wakefield's ideal, was for a few years the colony's best approximation to a concentrated agricultural community. Soon, however, it became the most important base for a rapidly expanding pastoral economy. From the late 1840s sheep grazing spread across the open country along the east coasts of both islands. Australian ‘squatters’ sold surplus merinos to confined to Pakeha until the 1850s. European innovations provided new ways to pursue traditional social and economic rivalries. Introduced foodstuffs such as potatoes and pigs, which could be raised in abundance with comparatively little effort, transformed the conspicuous production and ceremonial display of food—the yardstick shifted from quality to quantity. Maori participated vigorously in the colonial economy, exporting potatoes, wheat and pigs throughout Australasia, and to the Californian goldfields. Horses, sheep, schooners, and flour mills were acquired as symbols of wealth as well as means to its creation. However, Maori agricultural production declined after an 1856 slump in the market in Victoria. European farmers had the advantage of individualised land tenure and, with access to credit, could make better use of technological innovations.

The first census of the Maori population in 1857–58 put the total at about 56,000. To the toll of earlier diseases had been added the effects of tuberculosis, bronchitis and other respiratory tract infections, and low fertility caused by the previous generation's ill-health. High mortality rates contributed to the survival of belief in tapu and makutu (magic). The rituals of Christianity were widely adhered to, but for many Maori offered only partial explanations of an unsettled world.

As more European colonists arrived, questions of land ownership became more pressing. The traditional Maori practice was to reinforce claims to land by regularly using its resources. From this perspective, settlers who paid for land, built houses and planted crops were generally accepted, but people who piled goods on the shore and disappeared were not taken seriously. From 1840 Maori quickly became aware of the significance to the Pakeha of the land deed itself, and the permanent nature of the alienation which followed its transfer. Yet they offered much land for sale over the next two decades. Many Maori were anxious to have settler communities in their midst as a guarantee of long-term progress. Land sales gave a unique opportunity to vindicate claims to customary title. Tensions between claimants often made sales acrimonious. Few chiefs obstructed sales on principle, just as few were committed to a policy of selling land. The goal was rather the advantage of one's own hapu.

Extensive land purchases by the Crown during Grey's first governorship were masterminded by his able lieutenant Donald McLean. Most of the South Island was bought for only £15,000, and 13 million hectares throughout New Zealand had been obtained by 1853 at a total cost of £50,000. McLean made huge purchases in the Manawatu, Wairarapa and Hawke's Bay, while the boundaries of settlement advanced more slowly in the Auckland area. Maori tribes remained in control of a broad belt of territory stretching across the North Island from Taranaki to the Bay of Plenty and the East Coast. Grey's successor, Thomas Gore Browne, was unable to buy much land in this region, even when McLean resorted to secret deals and other underhand tactics in response to increasing settler pressure. Maori attempts to prevent land sales culminated in a pan-tribal movement, the Kingitanga, which in 1858 installed the venerable Waikato chief Te Wherowhero as King Potatau I. Its promoters hoped to end the chronic disputes by placing all Maori land under the King's mana and making its ownership subject to the decisions of his magistrates. But Maori society had no precedents for allegiance to a central judicial or administrative authority. Tribes of the Tainui confederation generally supported the King, but many others did not. The Kingitanga meant more to the chiefs, as a means of bolstering their mana—threatened by European-inspired individualism—than it did to their followers.

Grey hoped to gradually transform the Maori into brown-skinned Pakeha, who would ultimately be absorbed into a predominantly European population by inter-marriage. Grey's policy would require radical changes in Maori lifestyle, which he encouraged in a variety of ways. He financed English-language education of Maori children, fostered Maori agriculture and commerce with gifts of ploughs, mills, seeds and schooners, and employed Maori and Pakeha on ostensibly equal terms in the police forces that he controlled. In his second term Grey established a scheme for local administration under which Maori runanga (assemblies) New Zealand state was at first unable to obtain much land, despite its monopoly on purchases from Maori. The latter were not eager to sell at less than a fair market price, which the state could not afford to offer them. The imposition of customs duties drove away traders and raised the price of imported goods. In 1844 FitzRoy abolished customs duties, imposed a property tax and allowed limited direct land dealings beween settlers and Maori. The practical effect of these measures was the loss of his only potential sources of substantial revenue. They were also insufficient to conciliate the Ngapuhi chief Hone Heke, who was concerned at the decline of the Bay of Islands as a centre for European trade and settlement, and at the government's efforts to diminish chiefly authority by partially replacing it with its own. Heke's quarrel was with the state alone; he wanted to preserve the valuable Maori-European economic relationship. He allied himself with the resourceful chief Kawiti, who adapted traditional pa design to successfully withstand artillery bombardment and inflicted a serious defeat on British regular troops at Ohaeawai in mid-1845. Their combined forces had the better of a 10-month campaign which ended after an inconclusive engagement at Ruapekapeka in January 1846. Heke continued to be the most powerful man in the North until his death in 1850.

FitzRoy was replaced during the Northern War by George Grey, who was to rule as Governor until 1853, and again (less autocratically) from 1861 to 1868. Backed, as his predecessors had not been, by adequate financial support from Britain, he was better equipped than they to mollify Pakeha grievances about the slow growth of the colony. The European population had reached only 32,500 by 1854, when an elected General Assembly first met in Auckland. Demands for local self-government had nevertheless been voiced since 1840. The ‘Wakefield’ settlements were led by well-educated gentry and middle-class families who expected to govern themselves. After Grey successfully argued against the implementation of an 1846 British Act conferring representative institutions, on the grounds that the state of race relations in the North necessitated his being in total control, constitutional associations in several centres agitated for elected assemblies.

The British Constitution Act of 1852 conferred a General Assembly with two chambers—an elected House of Representatives and a nominated Legislative Council—and divided the colony into six provinces (centred on the Wakefield settlements and Auckland), each with an elected provincial council and headed by a separately-elected superintendent. The vote was granted to all adult Pakeha men who met minimal property-owning requirements. Maori were in practice nearly all disfranchised. The provincial councils were barred from legislating on a range of subjects, including customs duties, currency, the justice system, postal services and marriage. The central settler government was competent to act in most areas, but ‘native’ policy remained in the hands of the Governor until 1864, and foreign policy was made by the British government. After considerable confusion, Parliament's right to appoint ministers whose advice the Governor was normally obliged to take was recognised, and in 1856 Henry Sewell became Premier and formed the first responsible ministry.

Despite the comparatively wide franchise, for several decades only a minority of European males participated in electoral politics. Until 1879 polls in which fewer than half of those who registered voted were common. Most people had more pressing concerns. A small group of men with sufficient leisure time to engage in politics easily dominated the scene; many were elected and re-elected unopposed. While there was a rapid turnover of Members of Parliament and ministries in the absence of any party organisation, there was considerable continuity in administration. A core of able men was essential for any ministry which was to last for long.

Most politicians put the interests of their own province before the colony's. Having been firmly established for several years before responsible central government came into effect, the provinces had taken over many key matters, including immigration, roading, land administration, policing, education and hospitals. In 1856 their entitlement to land revenue and a share of customs duties was confirmed. In return they accepted responsibility for colonisation and development. Wide regional and local disparities resulted. The North Island provinces, particularly Auckland and Taranaki, had little land to sell and were always short of funds. Their South Island counterparts, especially Canterbury and Otago, had ample land and were to profit from economic booms which accompanied gold rushes in the 1860s, when they embarked on ambitious road, harbour, tunnelling and immigration programmes. Wealthy provinces resented central government interference in their affairs, and southerners saw their revenues threatened by increased military expenditure in the North Island in the 1860s. Poor provinces looked to the capital for salvation from insolvency. Within each province the main towns were dominant, and little money reached outlying districts. This stimulated a desire for local autonomy which bore fruit in the creation of the new provinces of Hawke's Bay, Marlborough, Southland and, later, Westland. Except for Hawke's Bay, they conspicuously failed to prosper, and their Lilliputian crises brought the whole system into disrepute. Nevertheless, European settlers identified strongly with their own communities, and the difficulty of communication between the areas they occupied made considerable regional autonomy essential.

In the 1840s Maori were still preoccupied with their own concerns. Inter-hapu and inter-tribal competition was of paramount importance, and society remained fragmented. The very use of the word ‘Maori’, which implied the existence of a common race and culture, was mainly serious consideration, and failed to sign; Ngapuhi were resented for their role as first signatories. To further complicate matters, on 21 May 1840, while signatures were still being sought, Hobson proclaimed British sovereignty over the North Island by virtue of the treaty, and over the South and Stewart Islands on the basis of Cook's discoveries. In 1841 New Zealand became a colony in its own right, and the capital followed a shift in the balance of European settlement from its first site at Russell in the Bay of Islands to the new town of Auckland on the Tamaki isthmus, which was both strategically located and surrounded by land ideal for farming.

New Zealand Company settlements were founded at Wellington in 1840, Wanganui and New Plymouth in 1841 and Nelson in 1842. By 1845 the company had brought about 9,000 settlers to the colony. The French Nanto-Bordelaise Company had landed settlers at Akaroa in 1840. The European enclaves were ‘mere encampments on the fringe of Polynesia’; their very existence was dependent on the tolerance of local Maori. This could scarcely be relied on, as the New Zealand Company had bought land in such haste, and with such little regard for the communal nature of Maori land tenure, that war was at least threatened at each of their sites within a few years. In 1843 a number of Europeans were killed in the Wairau area when they illegally tried to arrest two Ngati Toa chiefs, Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata, for resisting the survey of land that the chiefs denied having sold. Tribespeople led by these chiefs were involved in fighting in the hinterland of the Wellington settlement in 1846; again, Maori were opposing settler encroachment onto land that the Maori held was still theirs. There were several attacks on the town of Wanganui in 1847. In Taranaki the two races teetered on the brink of war for nearly 20 years. After two official investigations of the company's land purchase, the New Plymouth settlers were left to occupy a few thousand acres adjacent to the town. The scarcity of land suitable for agriculture blighted life within the towns. Uncertainty of tenure, and the mediocre quality of much of what was available, slowed sales and led to the acquisition of an increasing number of sections by absentee speculators. The resulting underemployment of Wakefield's ‘respectable’ labourers and artisans produced recurrent poverty and unrest. Only the later settlements of Otago and Canterbury could be considered successes. Otago was established in 1848 under the auspices of the New Zealand Company and in cooperation with the Free Church of Scotland. Canterbury followed in 1850, with the support of the Church of England. There were only 2,000 Maori in the whole of the South Island, and land purchases were not disputed at the time.

New Zealand's first Governors—Hobson and Robert FitzRoy—were hamstrung by their acute lack of resources. The British Colonial Office required its colonies to be self-supporting; they were expected to pay their way through customs revenue and land sales. But the period—discovered that the firing of many weapons at a distance created enough terror to enable the rout of an enemy to be completed by traditional means. From 1820, when their great chief Hongi Hika returned from a missionary-inspired visit to England with 300 muskets, Ngapuhi and their allies rampaged across the North Island on a series of expeditions which took many lives, settled old scores, and raised the mana of the victors to unprecedented heights. As muskets became widely available, other tribes took advantage of temporary leads in local arms races to attack their neighbours. By 1840 the balance of power was such that inter-tribal warfare had virtually ceased. One result of these campaigns was the migration of perhaps 30,000 people and, as a consequence, intractable disagreements about land rights in some areas.

Maori people were eager to adopt European goods and ideas: muskets, agricultural techniques, literacy and Christianity were all enthusiastically embraced, and some (such as firearms) rapidly became necessities. Some Maori even travelled the world as crew members on European ships. But pakeha innovations were used in Maori ways for Maori purposes. The increased rate of conversions to Christianity just before 1840, for example, can be understood in terms of changes in Maori society, as well as seen as a consequence of more effective missionary activity. Social dislocation which resulted from inter-tribal fighting fed a need for spiritual explanation. But the new religion was also fashionable, and the mana which was granted to the literate brought many eager students to mission schools. Missionary teaching was a means to the end of gaining European knowledge. For Maori the most important function of a pakeha was to provide trade goods. Europeans lived in New Zealand on Maori terms, and in 1839 there were still only a few more than 1,000 scattered over the whole country.

The vagueness of their instructions allowed early Governors of New South Wales to view New Zealand as a political as well as an economic ‘dependency’, and also to encourage plans for settlement. In 1814 the Maori people were declared to be ‘under the protection of His Majesty’, and the missionary Thomas Kendall was appointed as a justice of the peace to maintain order in co-operation with local chiefs. He had no effective force at his disposal. Prisoners had to be sent to Sydney for trial. In 1817 Britain declared New Zealand to be outside its legal jurisdiction, although British subjects could be charged for serious crimes committed there. Schemes for colonisation continued, and in 1826 settlers selected by the first New Zealand Company arrived. While many went straight on to Sydney, some established themselves at the Hokianga. As trade and settlement increased, New Zealand moved further into the British sphere of influence. In 1832 James Busby was appointed British Resident at the Bay of Islands. He was a ‘watch-dog without teeth’, having very few legal powers (he was not even a justice of the peace) and no reliable means of coercing British subjects. His authority rested on occasional visits by British warships.

In May 1837 a combination of the remnants of the earlier New Zealand Company and others interested in profiting from Edward Gibbon Wakefield's ideas of transplanting the pre-industrial English class structure to the colonies formed what was soon to be named the New Zealand Company. Wakefield's vision was of the migration of integrated communities comprising all social strata from gentry to respectable working folk. The key to success was to set a ‘sufficient’ price for land. If land was too cheap it would be bought by both speculators and labourers, with undesirable consequences; but the price was to be low enough to enable working-class people to settle on the land after some years of thrift and honest toil, their purchases financing a fresh influx of labourers and ensuring continued economic growth. The eventual form of settlement owed little to this theory, but Wakefield's energy and the strength of his backers ensured that large-scale colonisation would take place. The company sent an expedition in 1839 to find a site for a colony. It acted in haste because the decision to annex New Zealand had already been made, and it wished to buy land before its dealings could be regulated by officials. Even before word reached England that any land had been bought, ships full of emigrants departed, the first (the Tory) arriving at Port Nicholson (Wellington) on 22 January 1840.

British sovereignty over New Zealand was established in international law by New South Wales Governor Gipps’ proclamation on 14 January 1840 that his frontiers included New Zealand, and that Captain William Hobson was appointed his Lieutenant-Governor there. Hobson arrived at the Bay of Islands with a small entourage of officials on 24 January, and at Waitangi on 6 February he obtained from local Maori chiefs the first signatures to the ‘Treaty of Waitangi’. The significance of this document has been debated ever since. In its English-language original all rights and powers of sovereignty were ceded to Queen Victoria, while in return the possession of land, forests and fisheries was secured to the chiefs, with the Crown alone having the right to purchase land. The Queen extended her protection and all the rights and privileges of British subjects to the Maori people. The Maori-language version, hastily translated by the missionary Henry Williams, was couched in considerably vaguer terms, partly because of the difficulty of conveying European legal concepts. Maori signatories assented to the Queen taking over the rights of ‘kawanatanga’ (governorship). As the only local example of the exercise of such authority was the ineffective James Busby, it is unlikely they understood the possible implications of their agreement. Over the next few months signatures to several differing versions of the treaty were collected around the country. Important tribes such as Ngati Maniapoto and Waikato did not regard it as a matter deserving

New Zealand's non-Maori population grew from 625,000 in 1891 to almost 1.5 million in 1936. This increase was uninterrupted, but slowed markedly in the 1930s as hard times led to fewer births and a net outflow of migrants. Until then immigration was continuous—there was a net inflow of some 200,000 between 1901 and 1928—but immigrants were a steadily diminishing proportion of the population. For this reason, and also because there was an even balance of the sexes among immigrants in later decades, the proportion of women to men increased. At the height of the gold rushes in the 1860s there had been only five Pakeha women in the colony for every eight men. The ratio had reached nine to 10 by 1901, and 97 to 100 by 1936. As unmarried men grew relatively fewer, some of the characteristic problems of frontier societies (such as alcoholism, crime, and loneliness) became less prevalent. The transience (enforced by the ephemeral nature of much employment) which had seen a majority of income-earners changing localities several times each decade also gradually diminished. The rural frontier moved forward more slowly, and in the 1930s contracted as many marginal back-country farms were abandoned.

There was a gradual but persistent movement of population from rural to urban areas, although this was arrested in the 1930s by the growth of public works camps. In 1896, 29 percent of the non-Maori population lived in towns of more than 8,000 people; by 1936 the figure was 49 percent. The opening-up of the North Island's farming hinterland before World War I, and industrial development between the wars, saw its share of the population rise from half in 1900 to 65 percent in 1936. Non-Maori people were nearly all of northern European origin. Gold had attracted 5,000 Chinese migrants by 1874, but discrimination and restrictions on immigration saw their numbers fall to little more than 2,000 by 1916. About the same number of people of Yugoslav birth were living in New Zealand in 1911—most in the North Auckland peninsula. By 1936 some 1,200 Indians were resident in the country.

Mechanisation brought substantial productivity increases in the primary sector, whose share of the total work-force fell from 42 percent in 1896 to 30 percent in 1926. Some primary industries declined as resources were concentrated on the three major export products. Kauri gum production fell from a 1903 peak, the flax industry declined in the 1930s after fluctuating wildly, and gold and timber had ceased to be significant exports by 1914. Coal mining, which had expanded chiefly to provide fuel for the growing railway system, stagnated as railway construction slowed down. Urbanisation was paralleled by the growth and diversification of secondary industries. By the 1920s manufacturing's share of the gross domestic product was only slightly less than that in Australia and the United States, despite New Zealand's relative lack of protective barriers. Industry was typically small-scale, mixed and unsophisticated, and processed imported components. In the 1920s motor-vehicle assembly and metalworking expanded significantly. By 1926 some 45 percent of the work-force were employed in the tertiary sector (providing services and doing ‘white-collar’ work). New Zealand had become a predominantly urban, yet farming-dependent, nation. It remained Britain's outlying farm as it developed many of the social and demographic characteristics of an industrialised society.

Even after 1890, Maori resistance to Pakeha dominance was occasionally physical. In 1898, 120 men of the regular army confronted followers of the Hokianga tohunga Hone Toia. Serious bloodshed in this ‘Dog Tax War’ was averted only by the timely intervention of a Maori Member of Parliament. In 1916 ‘the last shooting in the Anglo-Maori wars’ occurred when armed police fought a gun battle with followers of the Tuhoe leader Rua Kenana (founder of the Wairua Tapu religion), killing two of them. Increasingly, resistance took new forms. Petitioners sought the aid of the Crown in persuading the New Zealand Government to honour the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi, which now gained a status among Maori that many had not granted it in 1840. The King movement set up its own parliament (Kauhanganui) under a constitution promulgated in 1894. More significant—even though Pakeha legislators refused to acknowledge it—was the rival Kotahitanga parliament, promoted chiefly by kupapa leaders, which met annually from 1892 to 1902.

Expansion of the ‘native schools’ system in the 1870s laid the basis for an influx of gifted students into church boarding-schools such as Te Aute and St Stephen's Colleges in succeeding decades. A group of former Te Aute students took the Irish-Maori Memeber of Parliament James Carroll as their mentor (he held a general electorate from 1893 to 1919, having earlier represented Eastern Maori). They called themselves the Young Maori Party and advocated the wholesale adoption of Pakeha culture. ‘There is no alternative but to become a pakeha’, said Maui Pomare, who had become the first Maori Health Officer in 1900. Pomare and his assistant Te Rangihiroa (Peter Buck), who was Director of Maori Hygiene from 1920, worked for improvements in sanitation and living conditions. The Maori population rose to 57,000 in 1921, due to a decline in the frequency of epidemics, the gradual acquisition of immunity to them, and an increase of numbers in the child-bearing age group. Life expectancy rose from around 25 years in 1890 to 35 in 1905. But Maori health was still comparatively poor. The death rate in the influenza pandemic of 1918 was seven times that for Europeans.

Although Carroll was Minister of Native Affairs, the Liberals transferred 1.2 million hectares of Maori land to Pakeha ownership. Reform alienated a further 1.4 million hectares. ‘Maori landowners, rather than the squattocracy, were vanquished by the state's promotion of closer settlement.’ Improvements in Maori farming came through communal initiatives. In the 1890s the Ngati Porou iwi, who retained much land on the East Coast of the North Island, embarked on large-scale pastoralism. By the mid-1920s they owned a million sheep, as well as a dairy factory, a finance company and a co-operative store. Apirana Ngata (himself a Ngati Porou) as Native Minister sponsored a 1929 Act which channelled state credit to Maori farmers through the Department of Native Affairs. By 1937, the 750,000 acres being developed under this scheme were supporting about 18,000 people, most of whom lived in communities on or near the land they were working. Ngata, although a member of the Young Maori Party, believed in fostering a communal rural lifestyle which continued Maori traditions.

While Maori in Parliament became skilful practitioners of taha pakeha (the European aspects of living), local leaders continued to have the most effective influence over Maori community life. None gained more stature than Te Puea Herangi, a member of the Waikato kahui ariki (paramount family), who came to prominence in the Kingitanga by leading a campaign against the conscription of Waikato Maori during the First World War. In 1921 she established a model pa at Ngaruawahia, and from the 1920s she was a figure of national importance for Maori. With her support, Ngata's land development schemes allowed Waikato communities to preserve their traditional way of life while productively occupying their own lands.

Gordon Coates was the first Pakeha politician to provide leadership on Maori issues. As Minister of Native Affairs between 1921 and 1928 he was determined to ‘remove the old grievances so that economic and social change could proceed’. Among many initiatives, he established the Sim Commission to investigate the Waikato and Taranaki land confiscations (its findings largely upheld Maori grievances), and also the Maori Purposes Fund to make grants for educational, social and cultural activities. With Ngata as Native Minister from 1928 to 1934 the momentum of reform continued. But the leadership of these two politicians began to be challenged by the spiritual leader Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana, who was an advocate for the interests of the ‘morehu’—detribalised, non-chiefly common people—to whom he offered a vision of spiritual and material betterment. His teachings seemed increasingly attractive as the depression worsened. By 1933,40 percent of the male Maori workforce was unemployed, compared with the Pakeha rate of 12 percent.

The Labour Party won power in the 1935 election, when it gained a total of 59 seats (counting a few sympathetic independent MPs) compared to the 19 retained by the Coalition government's candidates. This victory inaugurated a long tenure of office which, like the Liberal era of the 1890s, was to establish new patterns and set the terms of economic and political debate for the next 40 years. Like the Liberals, Labour benefited by being elected as the economy recovered from depression. And, as with the Liberals, the administration of Labour's achievement was eventually to be taken over by its conservative opponents.

Labour won office because it was seen to represent a genuine alternative to the orthodox economic policies which had entailed hardship for too many. In addition, although export prices and the general economy were recovering in 1935, dairy produce receipts were still low. Discontented dairy farmers, who approved Labour's promises of guaranteed prices and cheap credit, were decisive in turning the Coalition's defeat into a rout. Led by the former ‘Red Fed’ and Socialist Party militant Michael Joseph Savage, the Labour government moved to restore and direct the economy and introduce a comprehensive social welfare system.

Previous cuts in wages and conditions of employment were reversed, and the normal manufacturing working week was reduced to 40 hours. Pay rates for relief work were substantially increased. Unemployment fell to 38,000 in 1936, and continued economic growth combined with a large public works programme to leave only about 8,000 on ‘sustenance and relief by December 1937. In 1936 full jurisdiction was restored to the Arbitration Court, and union membership was made compulsory for all workers subject to awards. The number of unionists rose in consequence from 103,000 in 1935 to 249,000 in 1938. The Agricultural Workers Act 1936 set a minimum pay rate for previously unprotected rural labourers, and required the provision of decent living conditions for them. By buying out private shareholding in the Reserve Bank (created by Coates in 1933 to give the state some control over monetary policy), the government assumed conclusively the power to use the ‘people's credit’. Finance issued by the Reserve Bank underwrote housing construction, public works and guaranteed prices for dairy products. Cheap mortgages from the revitalised, government-controlled State Advances Corporation helped efficient but indebted farmers remain on the land.

During Labour's 14 years in power some 30,000 ‘state houses’ (government-owned, privately-built rental dwellings) were constructed. State Advances mortgages financed a further 19,000 houses built for private ownership in the same period. The two schemes together gave government assistance to two in every five houses built. Spreading state house suburbs whose inhabitants shared similar lifestyles came to symbolise an egalitarian ‘level-ling upwards’ in the quality of New Zealand life. Educational reforms included the lowering of the school-entry age from six to five. The primary-level proficiency examination was abolished and, after the leaving age was raised to 15, was effectively replaced by the new school certificate. These changes required much greater spending on school construction and teachers’ salaries. The landmark Social Security Act of 1938 was intended not merely to provide a subsistence income but to meet the ‘normal needs’ of beneficiaries. Essentially free general medical care was introduced despite the bitter opposition of doctors, who, ironically, were to be the group who benefited most from the new ‘welfare state’. Social security and public admiration for Savage were major factors in Labour's 1938 electoral triumph, which was blighted only by the recapture of some rural seats by a more united parliamentary opposition.

The government now looked forward to years of development, but was immediately reminded that New Zealand remained a small, dependent trading economy. Withdrawal of private capital combined with the expense of overseas-purchased machinery and supplies to reduce the country's sterling reserves from £29 million to £8 million in the six months before foreign exchange controls were introduced in December 1938. Minister of Finance Walter Nash won few concessions in months of negotiation with the British government and financiers. But bleak prospects were transformed by the outbreak of World War II. Britain rapidly agreed to bulk purchase arrangements at prices favourable to New Zealand for meat and dairy products, and later wool. Imports declined as European production was diverted to war purposes or made unobtainable by shipping difficulties. The exchange crisis was quickly succeeded by a healthy balance of payments surplus.

As in World War I, the country's major contribution to the Allied effort was the provision of food, which went mostly to Britain and later to the Pacific theatre. While the war claimed some 12,000 New Zealand lives and saw 17,000 wounded, these were significantly lower casualties than World War I inflicted on a society of half a million fewer people. Nevertheless, some 150,000 were serving in the armed forces when they were at their peak, and civilians were mobilised in support of the war effort. Prices and wages were tightly controlled, and the labour force was subject to direction into essential occupations. Secondary industry, already stimulated by economic expansion, public works and import licensing, was now boosted by the need for greater self-sufficiency. A ‘hot-house growth of manufacturing’ resulted as many small, previously marginal ventures secured a disciplined labour force and guaranteed markets. The strongest growth occurred in Auckland, which was the largest focus for the urbanisation which had resumed with the end of the Depression. With so many men in the armed forces, women entered the workforce in large numbers. The proportion of public service clerical workers who were female rose from 5 percent in 1939 to 25 percent in 1947. By 1945 nearly 15 percent of married women under 30 were in full-time employment, a percentage which was not to decline after the war ended. From national necessity, many women entered rural and industrial occupations previously assumed to be ‘men's work’.

As with perceptions of women's role in society, assumptions about New Zealand's place in the world were irrevocably altered by World War II. The Balfour Report of 1926 recognised that Britain's dominions were de facto independent states. The Statute of Westminster of 1931 effectively relinquished the British Parliament's power to make laws for the dominions. New Zealand was not to accept this formally until 1947. The Labour government, like its conservative predecessors, sought consultation with Britain rather than an independent foreign policy. In the late 1930s New Zealand's support for the League of Nations and collective security brought disagreement with the appeasement-minded British. In 1945 Prime Minister Peter Fraser was to be a leading advocate for the rights of the small nations represented in the new United Nations Organization. In the intervening years the limits of British power had been particularly brought home by the rapid capitulation to the Japanese in 1942 of the vaunted Singapore military base. The necessity of reliance on United States protection was underlined by the wartime presence of 100,000 American ‘GIs’ at New Zealand staging bases. Unlike Australia, New Zealand kept its best fighting troops in the Mediterranean theatre throughout the war. After participating in the unsuccessful defence of Greece and Crete in 1941, they endured the hardships of the North African desert and the slow, difficult advance through Italy. Although operating within the British command structure, New Zealand troops remained under New Zealand Government control. The war also stimulated a redirection of New Zealand trade. New Zealand's exports to non-British markets doubled to about 40 percent of all its exports in the decade after 1941, and were never to return to the levels of the previous half-century.

While a multi-party War Cabinet made the major decisions, Labour's regular Cabinet continued its largely domestic business. Pragmatic politics counterpointed national sacrifice. The 1943 Servicemen's Settlement and Land Sales Act empowered the government to control prices in all land transactions, and to buy land suitable for subdivision. Farmers hoping to profit as before from a wartime rise in land values, and dissatisfied with the level of guaranteed prices, turned against the government. Despite its abolition of the country quota, Labour won a majority of only four seats in the 1946 election. In contrast with 1919, the reintegration of returning service personnel into the economy was impressively successful, backed as it was by full employment, enforced wartime savings and guaranteed markets abroad. But the continuation of many wartime restrictions—symbolised by the 1948 Economic Stabilisation Act—was irksome. Maintaining supplies to impoverished Britain required continued rationing, electricity use was limited, and soaring marriage and birth rates outstripped house building.

The post-war National Party promised both more efficient management of Labour's legacy and greater personal freedom (such as the right of purchase for state house tenants). Led by Sidney Holland, National won the 1949 election. In 1951 it increased its majority in a snap election called to take advantage of the government's crushing termination of a major five-month-long industrial dispute which had been precipitated by a breakdown in relations between waterfront workers and their employers. The Labour Party, though clearly not laggards in their enthusiasm for the ‘Cold War’—they had introduced peacetime compulsory military training in 1949—were outmanoeuvred by a government which consolidated its support around the popular themes of ‘law and order’, anti-communism and curbing the unions. Labour's ambivalence towards the strikers reflected divisions within the union movement, inside which a militant Trade Union Congress had emerged in opposition to the cautious Federation of Labour.

Under national, economic restrictions were slowly relaxed. Rationing was at last abolished, and import licensing was liberalised. However, economic growth was erratic and inflation proved difficult to suppress. National barely won the 1954 election, and was defeated in 1957 by a Labour Party led by the now-elderly Walter Nash.

Labour delivered on promised tax refunds, increases in social security benefits, the capitalisation of family benefit payments for house purchase, and cheap state loans for house building. But it had inherited a balance of payments crisis, and reacted by reimposing import controls and increasing both direct and indirect taxation in the ‘Black Budget’ of 1958. Derided by its opponents and unable to satisfy its supporters, Labour was well beaten by National in 1960, and was not to win office again until 1972.

Led by the avuncular and pragmatic Keith Holyoake, National presented itself as the ‘natural party of government’, the party which would best defend the ‘national interest’ against divisive sectional concerns. Holyoake's ‘steady-does-it’ approach was well suited to a period of prosperity—real GDP per capita increased by 44 percent between 1960 and 1975.

The unprecedented prosperity of the early 1960s faltered after wool prices collapsed in 1966. In 1967 some unemployment emerged for the first time since 1940, and the currency was devalued by nearly 20 percent. Efforts to diversify the productive base were given added impetus by Britain's application to join the protectionist European Economic Community. In 1951 wool, meat and dairy products earned 90 percent of all export receipts. By 1975 the figure was little more than 50 percent, and there was also a significant contribution from wood-pulp and paper products from the exotic forests planted in the central North Island during the Depression and after World War II.

An increasing variety of agricultural and manufactured products were sold in a growing range of markets. In 1950 Britain took two-thirds of New Zealand's exports; by 1970 the proportion was less than two-fifths. Primary produce sales were increasingly handled by centralised producer boards. The main focus of secondary industry remained the further processing of imported goods for local markets, but the 1957–60 Labour Government in particular encouraged import-substitution industries. There was also growth in the local processing of primary products.

The proportion of the labour force employed in agriculture fell from a quarter in the mid-1930s to an eighth in the early 1970s, due to technological advances which permitted a steady increase in the average size of farms. Tractor numbers rose ten-fold between 1938 and the 1970s; the number of farm units fell by a third between 1955 and 1972. In the latter year, there were twice as many manufacturing workers as were found in farming. White-collar employment also increased its share of the male workforce, from a quarter in 1951 to a third in 1971. The growth of manufacturing, which was particularly marked in the Auckland region, enabled the continuation of nearly full employment until the mid-1970s.

The increasing number of women in paid work constituted one of the major changes of the post-war period. In 1951 a quarter of adult women were in paid employment; by 1971 the figure was nearly two-fifths, and more than a quarter of all married women had paid work, compared with only 8 percent in 1945. The majority of these women found white collar, particularly clerical, work. While this was less onerous than domestic service or the textile industry (where many women had previously been employed) they remained economically disadvantaged by being concentrated in a few occupations. The first minimum wage legislation, in 1936, had set the female minimum rate at 47 percent of the male. Under the Government Service Equal Pay Act 1960, public servants of both sexes now received equal remuneration for the same work. Not until 1972 did the Equal Pay Act remove overt discrimination on the basis of sex in the private sector.

The growth of both public and private bureaucracies was closely linked to the expansion of post-primary education. As a result of the post-war ‘baby boom’ and universal secondary education, spending on education rose from 6 to 14 percent of government expenditure between 1945 and 1970, and the number of secondary students more than trebled. By 1971, one New Zealander in three participated directly in the education system. The number of university students had doubled in the previous decade. Tertiary education had become a ready means of upward social mobility, thanks to an emphasis on equality of access.

Continuously rising living standards at last made New Zealand ‘God's own country’ for many in the quarter-century after 1950. The proportion of houses which were owner-occupied reached nearly 70 percent. Low-cost suburban bungalows of uniform style were furnished with a widening range of consumer durables. Electric ovens, refrigerators and washing machines, found in only about half of all homes in the 1940s, were nearly universal by the mid-1960s. Within a decade after a television service began in 1960, five out of six house-holds had acquired a set. The resulting decline of cinemas and dance-halls accentuated the trend towards home-centered leisure which had accompanied suburbanisation. Simultaneously, however, high levels of car ownership and substantial expenditure on roading brought unparalleled mobility to many families.

A tentative widening of cultural horizons owed much to a relatively small influx of European refugees in the 1930s and 1940s. They also contributed disproportionately to institutions such as the National Orchestra (founded in 1946), the New Zealand Ballet (1953) and the New Zealand Opera Company (1954), as well as to the professional theatre companies which began to emerge. But European immigrants continue to come mostly from Britain and Ireland, with the exception of some 30,000 Dutch who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s. By 1971 there were also 45,000 people from the Pacific Islands in the country. Both Western Samoa and the Cook Islands effectively became independent in the 1960s, but their citizens retained the right of entry to New Zealand.

These migrants settled mainly in the cities of Auckland and Wellington, accentuating the population shift from country to town and from south to north. By 1971, 81 percent of New Zealanders lived in urban areas, and 72 percent in the North Island. The Auckland conurbation alone contained almost a quarter of the country's people, some 700,000 of a population which had increased by nearly a million in the last two decades. Two-thirds of this growth had come from natural increase—the ‘baby boom’ lasted until use of the contraceptive pill became widespread during the 1960s. By 1961 a third of New Zealanders were aged under 15.

Many of these ‘baby boomers’ were emboldened by the nightly television images of youthful protest in the United States to rebel against what they saw as the staidness and complacency of their parents. As elsewhere in the western world, a youth ‘counter-culture’ based on individual freedoms—particularly with respect to sex and drugs—set itself up against the dominant conformity. On some issues, young radicals formed powerful alliances with some of their elders. The heroic age of hydro-electric construction, which had transformed the landscape of a significant part of both islands during the 1950s and 1960s, and provided power for the growth of secondary industry, came to an end in 1972 with the election of a Labour Government resolved not to raise the level of scenic Lake Manapouri. National's equivocation when faced with the largest petition in New Zealand's history was one of the main reasons for its defeat.

National was also attacked for its failure to withdraw New Zealand troops from Vietnam. Whereas the despatch of troops to fight in Korea and Malaya in the 1950s had been widely supported, the sending (under American pressure) of an artillery battery to South Vietnam in 1965 was controversial. Although the military commitment remained small, it was opposed by increasingly large demonstrations. Many people felt that New Zealand had at last cast off the legacy of British rule, only to succumb to American hegemony. New Zealand was formally allied to the United States (and Australia) by the 1951 ANZUS treaty. The focus of the labour party's charismatic leader, Norman Kirk, on New Zealand taking charge of its own destiny as an independent nation in the South Pacific, had wide appeal.

The first Labour Government came to office promising ‘economic equality with racial individuality’, and took significant steps to improve the health and economic status of Maori people, which were still markedly inferior to those of the general population. Funding of the Native Housing Act 1935 enabled the construction of some 3,000 houses by 1951, and some state houses were allocated to Maori. Experts such as HB Turbott combined with community leaders like Te Puea to introduce health programmes. Effective control of diseases like tuberculosis, and falling infant mortality, led to a rise in Maori life expectancy from 46 years in 1925 to 58 in 1956. These factors, and a continuing high birthrate, saw the Maori population double within 30 years, to reach 116,000 in 1951, and double again to 227,000 by 1971. In that year almost half of all Maori were aged under 15.

Maori benefited from the expansion of the economy and shared in social security provisions, albeit for some time at lower rates that Pakeha. But it was World War II which caused the most important changes in Maori society. From 1940 both men and women joined the armed forces and were drafted into essential industries. This process was co-ordinated by the Maori War Effort Organisation, whose several hundred tribal and executive committees also took on welfare functions. The Maori members of Parliament who headed it sought to make it a semi-independent administration, but the committees were incorporated into the Maori Affairs Department under the Maori Social and Economic Advancement Act 1945 (the word ‘Maori’ had at last replaced ‘Native’ in official usage). Maori autonomy (mana Motuhake) was not to be achieved so easily.

A Maori Battalion organised on an iwi basis served throughout the war, with 640 deaths. Returning soldiers received rehabilitation assistance on the same basis as their Pakeha counterparts, whereas members of the World War I Pioneer Battalion had obtained none. Many of the officers returned to positions in the public service, the professions and iwi organisations. Maori politics at the national level was controlled by the Ratana/Labour alliance, which held all four Maori parliamentary seats from 1943 to 1963. But its members of Parliament failed to exact any meaningful price for their support of Labour when they held the balance of power in the late 1940s and between 1957 and 1960. Led by the redoubtable Whina Cooper, delegates from local welfare committees in 1951 formed the Maori Women's Welfare League, which remained the only national forum for Maori concerns for the next decade.

The paucity of leadership was made more serious by the growing problems of Maori living in urban areas, whose share of the total Maori population soared from 11 percent in 1936 to 70 percent by 1971. This migration was both an effect and a reinforcement of the integration of Maori into the national economy which had begun with their wartime direction into essential urban industries. Maori continued to find work in the cities, but mostly as unskilled labour, and the incomes of Maori families remained well below those of Pakeha families. While Maori children benefited from labour's introduction of free secondary education and a raised school-leaving age of 15, the state school system remained resolutely monocultural. By 1960 only 5 percent of Maori children were gaining school certificate, compared with 30 percent of non-Maori. Even more ominously, the Maori crime rate was three and a half times that of Pakeha. Maori migrants, concentrated in areas of poor-quality housing, were no longer under the effective control of their tribal elders, unlike the fast-diminishing Maori rural proletariat.

The official response to these problems, expressed in the 1960 Report on the Department of Maori Affairs by JK Hunn, the deputy chairman of the Public Service Commission, was that the ‘integration’ of Maori and Pakeha (in reality, the virtual assimilation of the former by the latter) was both inevitable and desirable. Already, more than half the marriages of Auckland Maori were to Pakeha. National carried out Hunn's major proposals by accelerating land and housing development, slowing the splitting up of Maori land titles, removing racially discriminatory legislation (under the Race Relations Act 1971, a race relations conciliator with formal powers was created), and setting up a Maori Education Foundation to help Maori students. National also created the New Zealand Maori Council in 1962, with the intention of both undermining Labour's political domination and facilitating the co-ordinated expression of Maori views. Maori had long wanted such a body, but to achieve Maori goals. Its district councils, based on Maori Land Court boundaries, tended to be overshadowed by tribal trust boards and incorporations, some of which controlled significant economic resources. The national body was dominated by relatively elderly, conservative men without wide support among Maori.

New forms of Maori organisation arose in response to new circumstances. Tribal, and later pan-tribal, church-based cultural groups and marae began to be established in the new suburban housing estates to which Maori were increasingly relocated in the 1960s. Maori educators met regularly to discuss Maori concerns and advocate the teaching of Maori language and culture. Eventually young urban leaders formed the activist Nga Tamatoa (‘the young warriors’), which sought not only the compulsory teaching of Maori in secondary schools, but also ratification of the Treaty of Waitangi and compensation for historic Maori grievances. The Maori Organisation on Human Rights made similar demands. These groups won support from Pakeha-led organisations such as the Citizens Association for Racial Equality and Halt All Racist Tours, both established to oppose sporting contacts with apartheid-ruled South Africa but later encouraged to also concern themselves with indigenous racism. From the 1960s, young urban Maori increasingly joined gangs such as the Mongrel Mob and Black Power. Alienated from their rural bases, from the urban structures that were replacing them and from each other, many eventually swelled the growing Maori prison population. The price of ‘integration’ was high.

Labour won a huge victory in 1972 with the message that it was ‘time for a change’. The change envisaged involved image and lifestyle rather than economic fundamentals. Buoyed by a temporary boom in world agricultural prices, the country still had virtually no unemployed and ranked about 10th in the world in GDP per capita—and much higher in terms of quality of life. The successful diversification of both primary production and export markets meant that Britain's imminent entry into the European Economic Community would do little harm. Manufacturing thrived behind import licensing and tariff barriers. The new government concentrated on foreign policy issues, withdrawing the remaining troops from Vietnam, belatedly recognising the communist government of China, sending frigates to oppose French nuclear testing in the South Pacific and stopping the visit of a whites-only South African rugby team.

In 1973–4 the reaction of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to the Arab-Israeli war caused world oil prices to rise four-fold within a few months. New Zealand's terms of trade fell by 43 percent in a year, and have never recovered even to their average level in the 1960s. A large trade surplus became a billion-dollar deficit within two years. Price inflation surged well into double figures. The response of the government, headed by former Finance Minister Bill Rowling after Kirk's sudden death in late 1974 was to borrow overseas and attempt to hold down consumer prices, particularly by widening the range of industry subsidies. It also introduced a compulsory contributory superannuation scheme. National, now led by the pugnacious Robert Muldoon, promised to make ‘New Zealand the way you want it’—and to re-introduce a taxation-funded universal superannuation scheme even more generous than the previous one. National also pledged to allow South African sporting tours and crack down on Pacific Island ‘overstayers’ whose willingness to do menial work had until recently been welcomed. In 1975 National regained office in a landslide which reversed the 1972 result.

National kept the promises which had won the election. Dawn raids and random checks on Pacific Island people led to the deportation of some overstayers, at considerable cost to the country's race relations. The All Black rugby team toured South Africa in 1976, provoking a widespread boycott of the Montreal Olympics which tarnished New Zealand's international reputation and cheapened the successes achieved by its athletes. In 1981 despite having pledged to take ‘every practical step to discourage...competition...with sporting organisations...from South Africa’, Muldoon allowed a Springbok rugby team to tour the country. Large demonstrations attempted to disrupt every match, and a high proportion of the country's police were deployed. The sport which had once stirred national pride now bitterly divided the country, bringing violence in the streets on a scale scarcely witnessed before.

Muldoon also introduced his superannuation scheme, which became the largest single item of government expenditure. In 1976 the terms of trade fell still lower, and inflation reached 18 percent, well above the level of New Zealand's trading partners. Real GDP per capita growth ceased, and by 1979 there were some 25,000 unemployed and 30,000 on ‘job creation’ schemes. New Zealand's standard of living slumped to about 20th among the 24 members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Muldoon's reputation as an economic manager was severely dented, and in the 1978 election Labour won more votes than National, which nevertheless retained a comfortable majority due to the spread of votes across electorates.

Following a second ‘oil shock’ after the Iranian revolution in early 1979, the government embarked upon a ‘Think Big’ growth strategy which would make New Zealand at least 60 percent self-sufficient in energy. Natural gas was to be made into synthetic petrol, methanol and urea. The conversion of motor vehicles to run on liquefied petroleum gas and compressed natural gas was encouraged. A high dam would be built at Clyde on the Clutha River to generate hydro-electricity. Secure energy resources and the 1980 Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement with Australia under which restrictions on trans-Tasman trade were to be steadily removed, would be the basis for the development of industry and manufacturing. This would provide 410,000 new jobs in a decade, according to National's 1981 election manifesto. The New Zealand Steel mill at Glenbrook, south of Auckland, was expanded, and a second aluminium smelter was planned to complement the existing Comalco smelter at Bluff which utilised cheap power from the modified Manapouri scheme. This ambitious planning was accompanied by further controls on the economy: the Remuneration Act 1979 increased the government's ability to intervene in industrial relations and wage-fixing.

In 1981 inflation remained high and more than 50,000 were unemployed. The projected budget deficit exceeded $2 billion, and there was still no economic growth. Yet, as a result ‘Think Big’ and the polarisation of opinion over the Springbok tour (which enabled National to retain several marginal provincial electorates) the government clung to power despite once more winning fewer votes than Labour. In June 1982, with inflation soaring towards 18 percent, Muldoon imposed a wage and price freeze which was to last for nearly two years. As overseas meat prices fell, the government introduced the Supplementary Minimum Price Scheme, under which taxpayers subsidised agricultural production. The two Social Credit members of Parliament were persuaded to ensure the passage of legislation permitting the construction of the Clyde dam, but the aluminium smelter for which it was to provide power was abandoned. By 1984 the budget deficit was over $3 billion and the public overseas debt was more than $8 billion. The ‘economic magician’ had no more tricks. When he called a snap election rather than risk being defeated in the House on the issue of whether nuclear-capable American ships should be allowed into New Zealand ports, Labour (now led by young lawyer David Lange) won with a large majority.

The new Labour Government was very different from its predecessors. Its ministers were mostly youngish professionals whose views had been formed during the free-thinking and prosperous 1960s. It faced two immediate threats.

The United States made it clear that New Zealand could not continue to be an effective member of the ANZUS alliance unless it allowed visits from American warships which might be carrying nuclear weapons. Labour, with popular support, stuck to its ban on nuclear propulsion and weaponry. National later embraced Labour's policy, and ANZUS has been inoperative since 1985. (The same year, French secret service agents sank a Greenpeace vessel in Auckland harbour, killing a crew member. The ship was about to leave to protest against French nuclear tests at Mururoa. Two of the agents were jailed and substantial financial compensation was eventually paid after mediation by the United Nations’ Secretary-General.)

The second crisis was economic. A massive run on the New Zealand dollar before the 1984 election had been stemmed only by closing the foreign exchange market. Even after being defeated Muldoon had resisted the inevitable, but was forced to accept a 20 percent devaluation. This swift action set the tone for the next six years. Labour had won the election offering its traditional approach to social and economic issues, but without having to specify detailed policies. Its Finance Minister, Roger Douglas, now set about restructuring the state and the economy at least as radically as the early Liberal and Labour governments had done—and in a very different direction. Rejecting the Keynesian approach to economic management which had been followed by both major parties for decades, ‘Rogernomics’ embraced the monetarist philosophy which held that tight control of the money supply, and therefore of the rate of inflation, would lead to the efficient allocation of resources by the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. The economic role of the state was to be minimised; the more the state withered away, the more wealth would be created. Between 1984 and 1987. Douglas and his assistants demolished the structures established by the first Labour Government.

In early 1985 the dollar was floated and controls over foreign exchange dealings were abolished. The top income tax rate of 66 cents in the dollar was halved, and the loss of revenue recouped by a 10 (later 12.5) percent Goods and Services Tax. Agricultural and consumer subsidies, import licenses and export incentives were all removed. The government departments which ran railways, forests, farms, coal mines and power stations were turned into state-owned commercial enterprises and instructed to make profits. They did so by making huge numbers of their employees redundant. The social welfare benefit system was refocused to ‘target’ those in real need. The most dramatic move away from universality was the imposition of a surcharge on well-off superannuitants which effectively returned their pensions to the state. Despite all this disruption, the government actually increased its majority in the September 1987 election, thanks in no small measure to the optimism engendered by a prolonged stock-market boom. The crash which came the following month proved to be a portent for its second term.

Labour now turned its attention to the reconstruction of the welfare state. In 1987 health, education and welfare programmes absorbed more than half of all government expenditure. Now, business-style management in the health sector replaced joint control by doctors, nurses and administrators, and helped to stabilise health spending at about 7 percent of GDP. Lange assumed the education portfolio, and oversaw the abolition of the century-old system of education boards. Schools were now managed by elected boards of trustees, with financial, management and maintenance responsibilities vastly greater than those of the school committees they replaced. Fees for tertiary education were increased greatly as a ‘user-pays’ philosophy was applied. In 1989 national superannuation was renamed the guaranteed retirement income. The qualifying age was to rise gradually from 60 to 65 years, with the entitlement for a married couple to be between 65 and 72 percent of the average wage after tax. The surcharge remained.

The juggernaut of change continued to roll through the public sector. Faced with a public debt that was nearly 80 percent of GDP and absorbed one-fifth of government spending in interest payments, Labour stated that it would break its promise at the 1987 election and sell many of the newly streamlined state agencies in order to retire debt. By late 1990 some $11 billion had been raised by this means. The largest single items were Telecom Corporation ($4.25 billion), forestry cutting rights ($1.8 billion), the State Insurance Office, Rural Bank, Post Office Bank and Air New Zealand (around $700 million each) and Petrocorp ($800 million). It was symbolic that other ‘Think Big’ assets were also sold off, including New Zealand Steel, Maui Gas, New Zealand Liquid Fuels and Synfuels; and so was the Development Finance Corporation. The public debt remained at record levels. The State Sector Act 1988 sought to ensure the application of business management principles in the ‘core’ state sector, which was restructured to separate the delivery of policy advice from the provision of services. The Public Finance Act 1989 brought public sector financial management into line with that in the private sector. The structure of local government was also changed radically, with ad hoc authorities being absorbed into geographically-based councils which were themselves much reduced in number.

Rapid change had continued despite a disagreement over its pace which led to the resignation of first Douglas and then Lange. One of Douglas's legacies was the Reserve Bank Act 1989, which gave statutory recognition to the centrality of price stability in monetary policy. This was being achieved: inflation had fallen below 5 percent. New Zealand's terms of trade had improved, and with them the balance of payments. The budget was close to being balanced. But this progress had come at the cost of 150,000 unemployed—10 percent of the workforce, not far off the rate during the 1930s. Labour's anti-nuclear stance and other foreign policy initiatives were popular, and it remained in tune with public feeling on other social issues. For example, its members had been mainly responsible for the passage of a Homosexual Law Reform Bill which legalised gay sex between consenting adults in 1986. But Labour's economic revolution had caused too many too much pain for it to win a third term, despite the substitution of the populist Mike Moore for the academic Geoffrey Palmer as Prime Minister. In October 1990 the National Party, promising a return to a ‘decent society’, won a thumping victory under the apparently moderate leadership of Jim Bolger.

National had been accused of ‘sleepwalking’ to an inevitable victory. That it considered it had a mandate to complete Labour's programme was confirmed by the appointment of Ruth Richardson and Jenny Shipley to the respective portfolios of finance and social welfare. Faced with a larger budget deficit than it had expected, the new government within two months made major cuts in social welfare benefits and increases in medical fees and prescription charges, and abolished compulsory unionism. In May 1991 the Employment Contracts Act restricted the right of workers to bargain collectively and to strike. Richardson's ‘Mother of all Budgets’ in July 1991 continued the dismantling of what was left of the universal benefit structure. The minister put it clearly: ‘the top third of all income earners can be expected to meet most of the cost of their social services’.

Charges were introduced for hospital services, with beneficiaries and the chronically ill entitled to subsidies. Shipley was forced to reverse plans to make the guaranteed retirement income a residual ‘safety net’ only, but the surcharge was kept despite an election promise to abolish it. Tertiary education fees were raised again, and student allowances cut. In July 1992 the management of state housing was transferred to a new state-owned enterprise. Housing New Zealand, which was to gradually move to charging market rentals for its properties, albeit with protection for elderly tenants. Rents were to be subsidised through an accommodation supplement delivered by the Department of Social Welfare. The Housing Corporation's mortgages were put on the market, and $900 million worth were sold by early 1993. Other significant asset sales in National's first term were of the Bank of New Zealand ($850 million) and New Zealand Timberlands ($366 million) in 1992 and New Zealand Rail ($330 million) in 1993.

The reshaping of the state continued apace. In mid-1993 the separation of funding from the provision of services was extended to the health sector. Responsibility for the purchasing of health services was devolved from the Department of Health to four regional health authorities, which were empowered to make contracts with public, private or voluntary bodies. Area health boards were disestablished, and most hospitals became Crown health enterprises, with appointed boards of directors who were expected to run their operations as businesses. The accident compensation system, which had for two decades provided income maintenance on a no-fault basis to all who suffered injury, was significantly altered. Levies on businesses, based on the riskiness of their occupations, were reduced, and direct levies on the wages and salaries of individuals were introduced. Accident Compensation Corporation entitlements were cut, notably by abolishing the lump-sum payments which had been made for permanent disability or loss of enjoyment of life.

When National faced the electorate in November 1993, the success of the decade-long economic experiment was still uncertain. The slump of 1990–92 was over, but real GDP per capita was still below the 1986–91 level. Despite improved terms of trade, the balance of payments remained stubbornly negative, and despite the sales of state assets New Zealand's overseas debt had fallen little from the record levels of the 1980s. Net taxation levels were not far below the peak they had reached in 1990, despite the widespread implementation of user-pays policies. Inflation had virtually disappeared and interest rates had fallen, but the unemployment rate was still above 10 percent. Voters were just sufficiently impressed to re-elect the government by the barest of margins. As well as a Labour Party unsure of how strongly to disown its Rogernomic past, the opposition now included the New Zealand First party, with a support base of the indignant elderly and northern Maori, and Alliance comprising five small predominantly left-wing parties.

Although it was unusual for four parties to be represented in Parliament, New Zealanders had become used to minor parties since the advent of Social Credit in the 1950s. Motivated partly by a sense of fairness—the idea that everyone's vote should ‘count’—but mainly by dissatisfaction with the upheavals of the last decade, the country decided in a referendum in 1993 to replace the ‘first past the post’ electoral system with a mixed member proportional system: The supporters of MMP argued that its introduction would bring more open and consensual decision-making in politics, while its opponents asserted that real power would pass from the voters to party powerbrokers operating in secret. The new system was planned for the 1996 election. Meanwhile, the 99 current MPs prepared themselves for the new era. Most preferred to seek one of the 65 constituency seats rather than take their chances on the party lists which would provide the other 55 MPs. The political system was being restructured as fundamentally as the rest of society had been.

Maori have in many ways suffered disproportionately from the economic problems of the last two decades. The level of Maori urbanisation is now close to that of the general population, but Maori have not shared fully in the benefits this was expected to bring. They remain greatly under-represented in professional, technical and managerial positions. In 1981, 14 percent of Maori were unemployed compared with less than 4 percent of Pakeha. By 1993 the figures were 24 percent and 8 percent. Maori incomes have accordingly fallen further behind those of non-Maori. So has the proportion of Maori owning their own houses, which was 55 percent in 1991, compared with 74 percent for the whole population. By that year the proportion of Maori school-leavers with school certificate passes was 63 percent, while for all school-leavers it was 84 percent. Unemployment among young Maori has reached alarming levels, and Maori comprise around half of the prison population.

It would be misleading to paint too bleak a picture. A century after their extinction was confidently predicted, there are over half a million people with Maori blood in a total population of 3.5 million. While Maori life expectancy remains four or five years below that of non-Maori, the Maori birth rate is higher. And more than physical survival is assured. The cultural revival which began hesitantly in the cities has become a resurgence. More urban marae have been established, many associated with educational institutions. Since the late 1960s there has been a great expansion in the teaching of Maori language. By 1976, 123 secondary schools taught Maori to 11,000 pupils, and 100 primary schools offered Maori studies programmes. Since 1982 pre-schoolers have been taught in Maori through the kohanga reo movement. By the early 1990s more than 12,000 children were being taught in more than 500 kohanga reo. Increasingly, they are able to go on to kura kaupapa Maori primary schools, which provide a Maori-speaking environment in the playground as well as the classroom. Maori literature and art have thrived, and is now more appreciated by wider society. And by the wider world: between 1984 and 1986 the Te Maori exhibition of carvings and artifacts was acclaimed in the United States. At home Maori writers such as Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Alan Duff and 1985 Booker Prize winner Keri Hulme received more widespread attention, as did artists such as Robyn Kahukiura, Ralph Hotere and Cliff Whiting.

In the 1970s new organisations were formed to pursue the long-standing grievances over the loss of land and other resources, especially in the confiscations (raupatu) of the 1860s. In 1975 Dame Whina Cooper led a land march (hikoi) from the Far North to Wellington under the auspices of Te Ropu o Matakite. This body then broke up into several factions, one of which campaigned successfully for the return of a burial ground at Raglan which had formed part of a golf course. The most dramatic of these actions was the 506-day occupation by Ngati Whatua of Crown land on Bastion Point in Auckland which had originally been set aside for the tribe as a reserve. Ngati Whatua had been evicted from their homes at Okahu Bay in 1951, and were determined not to allow further subdivision of their land for expensive housing. In May 1978, however, they were removed by a large force of police, and their buildings were demolished.

Within a decade, the government had agreed to return the disputed land to Ngati Whatua, and provide a cash settlement to finance a rehabilitation programme for the tribe. The relationship between the Crown and Maori had been transformed in the intervening years. The process had begun during the 1972–75 term of Matiu Rata as Minister of Maori Affairs, the first Maori since Ngata to hold the portfolio. He had in 1975 set up a Waitangi Tribunal as a forum in which Maori complaints of future breaches of the treaty could be heard. Rata resigned from the Labour breaches of the treaty could be heard. Rata resigned from the Labour Party in 1980, and unsuccessfully contested his Northern Maori seat for the new Mana Motuhake party. Although Mana Motuhake has not won any Maori seats, it loosened Labour's grip on them, allowing a New Zealand First candidate to win Northern Maori in 1993. Aware of its vulnerability, and pressured by organisations such as the Waitangi Action Committee (which organised Waitangi Day demonstrations in the early 1980s) and by Labour Party activists, the new Labour Government of 1984 accepted that the tribunal be empowered to hear claims against Crown actions since 1840.

This decision opened the floodgates to a pent-up tide of grievances. Major claims which were submitted included that of Ngai Tahu in the South Island, and several raupatu claims in the North Island. Only a small proportion have yet been heard. Some of the findings and recommendations, such as those of the Ngati Whatua and Ngai Tahu, have been generally accepted. Others, like the finding on the Muriwhenua claim that the treaty guaranteed Maori fishing rights, have been controversial. Under the Maori Fisheries Act 1989, a Maori Fisheries Commission entitled to 10 percent of all fisheries quota was established. In 1993 the National Government purchased half of the Sealord Products Company for Maori, in exchange for the extinguishing of all claims to commercial fishing rights under the treaty.

From 1989 the government worked on ways of resolving the great majority of historical claims. Direct negotiations with the Crown, regardless of whether the Waitangi Tribunal had heard claims and made recommendations, were offered to claimants. A set of wide-ranging policy proposals on resolving historical grievances was launched for public discussion in December 1994. These encompassed proposals on matters such as claims for natural resources, claims over land that was later incorporated into the conservation estate, claims regarding land gifted by Maori for educational and other purposes and later declared surplus, matters of iwi and hapu representation, and more.

Once finalised, the new policies were to be applied to negotiations by a new Office of Treaty Settlement. The only non-negotiable aspect of the proposals was that all claims were to be met (over 10 years) within a ‘settlement envelope’ of a billion dollars (including the Sealord settlement). It was proposed that claims be settled ‘fully and finally’, a concept which had been tried unsuccessfully before, such as in the ‘settlements’ of the 1940s with Ngai Tahu, Taranaki and Tainui. Who the recipient organisations would be, what proportion of the settlement envelope they would get, and how they would administer these resources, were fundamental issues still to be resolved. If treaty rights were converted into economic assets, those charged with their stewardships would have a huge responsibility.

By late 1994 New Zealand society was much changed from the wartime austerity of half a century earlier. The country was much wealthier, and the economic growth which had begun in 1993 was expected to continue for several years, bringing budget surpluses and allowing the repayment of overseas debt. But there was no likelihood of a return to full employment, although the unemployment rate had fallen below 8 percent. Many of the new jobs being created were in the tourist industry. Over 1992–93 New Zealand had more than a million visitors from overseas, four times the number 20 years earlier. They contributed some $4 billion to the economy. More than a third came from Australia, a quarter of a million from Asia and 135,000 from Japan. New Zealand was placing increasing emphasis on the financial resources of prospective immigrants, and granting more Asians permanent residence. In the early 1990s ethnic Chinese and white South Africans were the fastest-growing groups of new migrants.

1993 marked the centenary of women's suffrage in New Zealand, rather more cheaply and with less soul-searching than had been indulged in three years earlier on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Women's lives were continuing to change. By the early 1990s, a quarter of families were dependent children were single-parent families, nearly half of married women had full-time paid jobs, and more than a quarter of women in two-parent families with children less than a year old were in the workforce. Other social changes complemented this trend: the gradual introduction in the early 1980s of weekend retail trading and the increasing availability of childcare. In 1992, 136,000 preschoolers were receiving early childhood education. Women were having fewer children, 2.1 each on average in 1992, compared with 3.2 in 1971. Rural women were seizing new opportunities. Many had been handling farm correspondence and accounts as well as doing other farm work. As mechanisation of agricultural tasks continued, they were increasingly able to take up or continue careers beyond the farmgate.

Women's integration into the paid economy was aided by their educational attainments; they comprised more than half of all university students in the early 1990s, compared with less than a quarter 40 years earlier. Women also played a greater role in public life. In 1993, 21 percent of both members of parliament and senior public servants were female, as were 26 percent of local government office-holders. But the ‘glass ceiling’ continued to hold women back from the very highest positions, and their average hourly earnings remained about 80 percent of those of men. But in late 1994, the Governor-General (Dame Catherine Tizard) and the leaders of two of the three major political forces (the Labour party, under Helen Clark, and the Alliance, led by Sandra Lee) were women. All three might play crucial roles in the new MMP environment. It is also possible that by early in the new century New Zealand may have severed its remaining constitutional ties with the United Kingdom, and installed an elected president as head of state in place of the British Monarch. That the Prime Minister and leader of the main conservative party was leading the debate on this change was some indication of how fundamentally New Zealanders’ view of themselves had altered since World War II.

Contributors

The Governor-General is the representative of the Sovereign in New Zealand and exercises the royal powers derived from statute and the general law (prerogative powers). The powers of the Governor-General are set out in the Letters Patent 1983, and it is for the courts to decide on the limits of these powers. The Governor-General's main constitutional function is to arrange for the leader of the majority party in Parliament to form a government.

The Crown is part of Parliament and the Governor-General's assent is required before Bills can become law. The Governor-General is required, however, by constitutional convention and the Letters Patent, to follow the advice of ministers. In extraordinary circumstances the Governor-General can reject advice if he or she believes that a government is intending to act unconstitutionally. This is known as the reserve power.

The Sovereign appoints the Governor-General on the Prime Minister's recommendation, normally for a term of five years.