Captain William Hobson stepped ashore at Kororareka on the afternoon of 30 January 1840. He proceeded to a small church. There he read Queen Victoria’s commissions that annexed New Zealand to the British Crown and appointed him Lieutenant Governor of New Zealand.1 He had brought with him several officials from Sydney who were to form a rudimentary civil service. Their combined authority depended on the outcome of negotiations with Maori for the cession of sovereignty of New Zealand to the British Crown. After discussions with local Maori, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed by Hobson and many Maori chiefs on the afternoon of 6 February 1840. Other chiefs signed the Treaty during the next few months. In theory the country now possessed a fledgling form of European authority by consent of the indigenous people. As Ranginui Walker puts it, ‘the British Crown [had] a tenuous beachhead on New Zealand soil’.2
According to the historian Harrison Wright, ‘almost everybody in New Zealand, both Maori and white, welcomed the British annexation when it came’.3 Within their tribal structures, Maori had usually respected leadership and acknowledged the authority of their chiefs. Since the 1820s Maori society had been devastated by inter-tribal warfare which was made more lethal by European muskets. Maori leaders expressed their unease at the threat settlers posed to their social cohesion in their 1831 petition to King William IV and the Declaration of Independence in 1835.4 In 1840 Maori saw advantages to be gained from the arrival of British sovereignty. A Kaitaia chief is said to have welcomed Hobson’s arrival in New Zealand with the words ‘Now we have a helmsman’.5 Most Pakeha settlers also greeted the arrival of an authority figure in the north. Putting an end to chaos was the first justification for Hobson’s new government. Kororareka had become a ‘vile hole’ in the opinion of one of his officials. It seemed full of’half-drunken, impudent devil-may-care’ European inhabitants. The historian J. C. Beaglehole called it ‘an al fresco thieves’ kitchen’. Previous efforts to bring order to the area had largely failed.6
In the weeks after the signing of the Treaty Hobson also became a repository for people’s ambitions. There were approximately 100,000 Maori in the whole country in 1840. They were more densely concentrated in the north. For five years now they had been seeking ways among themselves to regulate trade and land dealings with the steadily increasing number of European settlers, who totalled approximately 2000 at the time of the Treaty.7 Europeans with access to the Lieutenant Governor and his officials soon sought to use his authority for their own purposes. The residents of Kororareka who signed a memorandum on 3 February 1840 welcoming Hobson’s arrival craved the introduction of enforceable rules and regulations. Some wanted to buy more land, others to sell land or services to the new administration, often at inflated prices. Others were beginning to think about the desirability of assistance with transport and communications. The very first settlers envisaged a role for government that went far beyond law and order.
Hobson’s deputy, Willoughby Shortland, who was confirmed as Colonial Secretary on 7 March, received a similar welcome to Hobson’s when he went south, arriving in Wellington on 2 June 1840. The Lieutenant Governor’s authority was much in demand despite the pitifully small budget at his disposal. Governor Gipps of New South Wales had transferred only £3,000 to New Zealand’s account in the Bank of Australasia before Hobson left Sydney in January 1840,8 and Hobson had barely 100 troops to back his authority throughout the country.
Settlements were springing up in other parts of New Zealand. While Auckland advanced in an ad hoc, unplanned manner, there was little that was laissez faire about those in the middle of the country. To use J. D. Salmond’s expression, they were ‘essentially regulative’ in origin.9 Planning was in their woof and warp. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, whose hand lay behind Wellington and Wanganui (1840), Nelson (1841), New Plymouth (1842), Otago (1848) and Canterbury (1850), wanted the process of colonisation to be ‘scientifically controlled’. Wakefield set out his views in A Letter from Sydney and later in A View of the Art of Colonisation. The words ‘plan’ and ‘systematic colonisation’ were often used as he wrestled with what was needed to produce his ‘best society’ in the South Seas. If land was sold to settlers at a uniform and ‘sufficient’ price then there would be money for public works and some left over to pay for the fares from the British Isles of a labouring class. In this way a vertical slice of English life would be transferred to the new settlements.10 This was New Zealand’s first experiment in social engineering.
The fact that many of the early settlers received assistance with their fares led them to claim something akin to a contractual relationship with authorities in the new land. They expected much after being enticed half way round the world. Once in New Zealand they became conscious of being in the most remote place on earth. New Zealand’s rugged terrain made many parts of it difficult to penetrate. ‘The hills and dense forest by which we are enclosed … will cause it to be some time before we shall know much about our whereabouts’, wrote one of the first Wellington immigrants.11 Felling trees and planting grass was arduous work. Labour was in short supply. In the various encampments there was little fencing; animals roamed about, sometimes destroying newly planted gardens. All settlements initially consisted of tents, makeshift housing and a grog shop or two. Roads were no more than bridle paths. It was not until the middle of the 1850s that any of New Zealand’s settlements could be said to resemble a small British market town.
Edward Gibbon Wakefield: promised steady employment and opportunities in the new land. ATLF-131790 1/2
Assistance with communications and with opening up the land became early settler priorities. However, some expectations went beyond this. As John Martin shows, the New Zealand Company led the first workers in Nelson and Wellington to expect assistance in finding employment. Systematic colonisation hinted at a new social order, where labourers could reasonably expect to improve their lot by jobs, fair wages and access to land. What Martin calls ‘a long term relationship between politics, public works and the pattern of protest’ soon developed, and it carried on into the twentieth century.12
The first area where Hobson sought to establish his authority was the pivotal issue of land sales. For reasons paternal, as well as the Government’s financial needs, Hobson took for the Crown the sole right to purchase land from Maori. He soon promised to investigate deals struck between individuals and Maori before the signing of the Treaty. This worried many in the Wakefield settlements. A lot of migrants had signed up for land before leaving England. It transpired that in some cases the land had not been purchased at the point it was onsold to them. While the Wakefield settlers enjoyed a special relationship with the New Zealand Company, they always felt that the Governor was the ultimate guarantor that their expectations would be fulfilled. Like the northern settlers, they wanted his authority to back the land they had bought in good faith. They were kept in suspense. It was not until 1845, during Governor FitzRoy’s term of office, that the Land Claims Commissioner, William Spain, recommended confirmation of several land purchases made by the New Zealand Company. In the end the New Zealand Company was required to pay more money to local Maori. This only reduced the company’s available resources for infrastructural projects demanded by the settlers. Once more settlers turned to the Governor. The reality was that while the bulk of Wakefield immigrants had received some assistance with their passages, organised settlement fell short of Wakefield’s ideal.13 Ultimately government intervention became necessary, as it would on many future occasions, to ensure that the blandishments waved before emigrants before they left the ‘Old Country’ turned into something approaching reality in the new.
In all settlements the newcomers were impatient for the Crown to purchase further land, and for it then to be onsold. In Taranaki where New Zealand Company claims were largely disallowed after Spain’s investigations, settlers became obsessed with the desire for more space. Everywhere the settlers also wanted an active immigration policy. A rapid inflow of people was likely to provide more labour in the new country and it would push up the value of land already in settler hands. Nowhere is there evidence that any settlers wanted an inactive government, or believed that they were in the best position to control their environments. Constructive use of authority was essential to success in early colonial life.
Maori, on the other hand, were ambivalent about land sales. While the concept of selling land was alien to their customs, many liked the trade that settlers brought with them. Before 1840 many Maori had readily provided access to land. Others, however, were more cautious, soon realising that settlers regarded access to Maori land as something permanent. In the years immediately after the Treaty, Maori hoped that Hobson’s Government would ensure that articles two and three of the Treaty spelling out their rights would be enforced. Since Maori were numerically so much stronger than the settlers, a fact that made all the settlements ‘mere encampments on the fringe of Polynesia’,14 the governors had of necessity to be mindful of Maori rights. Governor FitzRoy, who became governor at the end of 1843, was regarded by settlers as too pro-Maori. In fact he lacked the force to be otherwise. However, as Alan Ward points out, the first governors made little effort to ‘engage the Maori leadership in the formal machinery of state’. Maori did not become part of the Governors’ travelling police detachments, nor was there much effort made to incorporate their customs into British law as it was gradually enforced throughout the country. These failures contributed to a sense of subordination that led to resentment among Maori.15
Governor Sir George Grey (1845-53) made a better attempt both to understand and consult Maori. And he contrived to give the impression that his government was fair. But it was mutual economic advantage that maintained a degree of racial harmony in the early years of Pakeha settlement. According to Ranginui Walker, ‘the first fifteen years after the Treaty saw a period of economic expansion and prosperity for many tribes, especially those close to Pakeha markets’.16 De facto authority at the local level lay with Maori. So long as governments did nothing to disturb the status quo both races were, by and large, prepared to accept the Governor’s authority.
Among the settlers, expectations of the new Government were high. When officials first arrived at Kororareka, commercial activity was rudimentary. Hobson found it necessary to appoint a Colonial Storekeeper before he left Sydney. His job was to purchase goods on the Government’s behalf. The handful of Kororareka retailers soon sought government assistance with the importing of supplies. The irregularity of shipping meant retailing was a chancy business. Dr William Davies, who took office later in 1840 as Colonial Surgeon, expected the Colonial Secretary to purchase, among other things, supplies of aqua rosa, nitric acid, potassium sulphate and sarsaparilla on his behalf. The local harbourmaster wanted the Colonial Secretary to procure him a boat. A postal official sought a canoe to reach outlying places. It was soon clear that no service worked unless Hobson’s officials gave it a helping hand.17
Settlers’ demands grew exponentially. Besides order, they soon wanted employment opportunities and an array of services. On 11 April 1840 a group of 37 inhabitants of Kororareka sought to have Hobson introduce a form of town planning to ensure that the narrow streets with their sea of tents did not ‘prevent altogether the rise of the township’. There was a steady stream of place-seekers, too, who looked to the new administration to provide paid employment. And those accustomed to access to hospitals in the ‘Old Country’ expected such amenities in the new, and were not too fussy about who took the initiative. On 28 May 1840 Hobson chaired a meeting of between 30 and 40 residents of Kororareka to discuss the setting up of a local hospital. There was talk of private subscription, but there seems to have been an underlying assumption that the Crown would take a role in financing the hospital’s construction. The State was being drawn into activities by force of circumstance.
Education quickly became an issue in Kororareka, since several of Hobson’s officials had children. The Colonial Secretary was soon involved in efforts to establish a school. In August 1840 he was asked to purchase 8 Bibles, 24 spelling books, 24 slates and 100 pencils to help with the children’s instruction. The provision of education elsewhere in the colony was not yet regarded as a government responsibility, although the Colonial Secretary’s files in the 1840s reveal many requests for government help from missions providing education.18 Settlers were possessed of what might be called pragmatic pioneer experimentalism. From earliest days the line between what was their own responsibility and what could reasonably be expected of the Government was blurred. If authority was close at hand, settlers did their best to take advantage of it.
While the settlers were for the most part able-bodied and young, a few fell by the wayside. In 1841 the Governor refused to entertain making money available for an indigent brought to his notice, arguing that it was ‘a case for private charity’. Such arguments soon became hollow; whatever virtues the settlers possessed, private charity, which was premised on some people having surplus resources, was not their strong suit. A few well-positioned women donated their time to charitable concerns. However, most of those with spare money preferred to speculate; the pickings could be lucrative. Even as late as 1900 relatively few people who had succeeded in accumulating wealth left charitable bequests.19
Governors were slow to find a way of dealing with those who seemed unable to look after themselves. In the Destitute Persons Ordinance 1846 responsibility for the poor and elderly, of whom there were as yet very few, was placed firmly on ‘near relatives’. If there were none, then the Government would help so long as a Justice of the Peace or a Magistrate first reviewed the case. By 1850 there were 28 such indigents in Auckland receiving daily rations from the Government. The Colonial Surgeon recommended charity admission to the Colonial Hospital for those in need of attention but unable to pay. The number of people receiving what was known as ‘indoor relief rose. Maori, too, soon availed themselves of hospital services in Auckland. In January 1852 Dr Davies reported to the Governor that ‘their frequent applications for admission, and the difficulty I experience in inducing them to leave the hospital when perfectly reestablished in health affords conclusive proof of [Maori’s] estimation of the value of such an establishment’. In the same year Auckland’s first psychiatric hospital was built – also with government funds.20
Auckland Colonial Hospital about 1859. AIM
Given the importance in New Zealand that eventually attached to state-provided pensions, it is worth noting that by 1850 money was being paid from the account labelled the ‘Commissariat Chest’ to soldiers injured on military duties. Many hundreds of pounds had already been paid out. However, there was a means test. In 1852 the Governor decided that if a military pensioner needed to go to hospital, the pension would cease unless his family was destitute.21 During and after the wars of the early 1860s pensions became a more significant public issue.
In the Wakefield settlements the New Zealand Company’s resources were slim and government authority seemed distant. Margaret Tennant notes that there were reports of near starvation in Nelson in 1843. More people were affected the following year when an economic downturn forced the company to cut its budget. It resented being expected to provide the sort of relief which in England would have come from the parish. However, religious affiliations did not always survive the journey to New Zealand, and the early churches had little cash.22 They were struggling to buy land, erect buildings and promote missionary activity. Besides, religiosity was often shaken off by colonists, many of whom were young and socially independent individuals. It slowly became clear to settlers in the Wakefield settlements that security and advancement were more likely to come from the hands of the Government than their own impoverished company officials. No other institution seemed to have the capacity to provide services.
As the New Zealand Company’s financial fortunes waned, and confidence in it subsided, the Wakefield settlers came to resent the Governor’s distant authority, and his inability to perform the miracles so many felt they needed. Nelsonians were irritated to discover how few resources FitzRoy possessed. Some tried to play off the beleaguered company against the Government, but by 1850 the company was heavily indebted. It teetered on until 1854, at which point central government had no option but to take over its debts. By this act, central government assumed some responsibility for the failed Wakefield exercise in social engineering. Assistance with access to land, help with hospitals, education and jobs could come from nowhere else. Charity, too, stopped at the Government’s door. By 1860 most provinces had some provision for charitable aid on their books.23
Otago and Canterbury varied only slightly from the earlier Wakefield settlements. Otago was established in 1848 with limited help from the New Zealand Company. Captain William Cargill and the Rev. Thomas Burns arrived with two boatloads of young Scottish families intent on establishing what historian Erik Olssen calls a ‘godly experiment’. They were the advance guard for 12,000 largely Presbyterian immigrants who followed over the next twelve years. But even before Cargill arrived the company’s finances were sorely stretched. The new Otago settlers were so distant from central government, or indeed from the other settlements, that they were effectively on their own. What has sometimes been called a canny Scottish self-reliance in the far south of New Zealand probably had as much to do with the isolation settlers faced for many years after their arrival as any inherent character traits. The Otago Association reported to the Governor in April 1851 that the locals had nearly completed their own hospital. Cargill was trying to devise ways around appointing a Colonial Surgeon by requesting that the handful of medical practitioners in his community provide free services on a roster basis. Public works seemed to have a higher call on his funds than social services. Cargill sought money to improve a bridle path to Port Chalmers and to improve a bridge in the centre of the town. His appeal to the Government for funds was necessary, he said, on account of the ‘retirement of the Company’ from funding. It had ‘thrown upon our little community a burden which is really beyond their means’.24 During the first few years settlers were finding they had to prioritise their expenditure. It is difficult to generalise, but in Otago an expectation developed that settlers would attend to their own social needs. Public authorities would assist where possible with infrastructural developments. The boundaries, however, were never rigidly fixed.
Formed in 1850, Canterbury experienced the same financial difficulties as Otago. Wakefield made special efforts to ensure that his ‘slice of English life’ reached Christchurch. For some months the settlement even had a bishop. W. J. Gardner asserts that the 3500 initial settlers were ‘the nearest approximation to a “Wakefield” colonial nucleus in both homogeneity and numbers’. But by 1852 the Canterbury Association was in financial straits and unable to pay its debts, let alone find money for public works. The association’s members were most willing to hand over their responsibilities to the new provincial government established as part of the new constitution granted to the then governor, Sir George Grey in 1852. But the provincial assembly, too, had little ready money.25
The search for order in the new colony was a fumbling affair. In the north the Governor’s agents occasionally overstepped the mark. On 19 June 1840 Henry Williams complained from Paihia that several policemen were helping themselves to firewood by ‘cutting anything, anywhere’. He didn’t want them cutting down peach trees or ‘disturbing the pigs’.26 For a time no one seemed clear about who owned what, nor where, precisely, authority ended, and individual responsibility began.
The concept of personal responsibility was still strong in Victorian England at the time when New Zealand was established.27 It did not have an easy passage to New Zealand, nor for that matter, to any other British colony. Since most settlers were young and able-bodied, the need for charitable aid was initially small. But in every other respect the settlers’ needs were large. Wakefield and non-Wakefield settlers tried to extract as much help as they could from established authority wherever it existed. New arrivals hoped for quick results from their endeavours but found the necessary infrastructure such as roads, bridges and transport nonexistent. But provincial and central government seldom lived up to expectations. Gardner notes that between 1840 and 1845 New Zealand was ‘usually in debt and at times insolvent’.28 Government revenue was short, and labour was hard to come by. Government officials initially hoped that land sales would provide a reasonable source of revenue. Encouraged by Ngati Whatua and Ngati Paoa Maori who wanted a closer association with the Government to ensure better trading opportunities on the Auckland isthmus, Hobson shifted his capital to Auckland in February 1841. A brief building boom followed as the Governor and his staff constructed new houses. In April 1841 a public auction of land recently purchased from Maori was held. It produced £21,499 9s for the Government’s coffers. But prices subsided thereafter, and throughout the 1840s revenue from land sales failed to cover the cost of government services. Moreover, in order to encourage enough settlers to come to New Zealand it soon became necessary to sell land on a system of deferred payment. This did little to revive the Governor’s cash flow.29
If governors were to provide rudimentary services and satisfy settler expectations, they had to raise revenue by other means if they were to use their authority creatively. By the end of 1840 Hobson had decided to introduce a general tariff. The Customs Department quickly became the biggest agency of State. There were officers in almost every port. For the rest of the century governments relied largely on customs levies for their revenues. While Governor FitzRoy briefly experimented in 1844 with a form of income tax, there was no legislative provision for income tax until 1891. Under the system of provincial government after 1852, money from land sales went to the provinces while customs dues were the principal form of central income. One commentator, Marion McEwing, has argued that while the first tariffs were introduced solely for revenue purposes, they did have a mildly protectionist economic impact and helped industries to develop by affording a small degree of preference against competing imports. However, it was not until the late 1880s that there was a conscious shift towards using tariffs for the social end of protecting New Zealand industries and producing jobs.30
Money was also raised from a rudimentary licensing regime which emerged during the first days of settlement. In effect the Governor charged for granting permission to pursue various activities. The sale of liquor was one of the first areas affected. In December 1840 several licences to sell ‘wholesale fermented and spirituous liquors’ were granted for a fee. In 1852 a publican’s licence cost £40 pa. By this time so many licences were being issued that the power was delegated to magistrates.31 The Government also charged for a timber cutting licence.
This licensing regime was extended and fees increased whenever the Government was particularly short of revenue.32 During the 1840s permission was required to take sand from beaches and to set up brickworks or erect saw mills. By 1852 gold prospecting fees were also being charged. In November 1852, when a trader sought permission to operate a schooner between Coromandel and Auckland bringing wood and fresh water to the capital, he was given permission by the Colonial Secretary on condition that he pay 2 guineas per day. Auctioneers paid licence fees, as did those operating slaughterhouses, or running cattle markets or pounds. By the middle of the 1850s central government was charging a fee for permission to sell ammunition.33 Revenue needs drove all these early licensing regimes, many of which, over time, were deemed to serve social goals as well. From earliest times licensing played an important role in the commercial life of New Zealand.
Both settlers and Maori expected that the Government would assist commerce. There was much trade between Maori and Pakeha. In the Colonial Secretary’s papers there are occasional inventories from the early 1840s listing the produce sold by Maori from their canoes drawn up on the Auckland waterfront. Settlers often sought favours from Government for whatever was their chosen field of endeavour. Government, too, extracted quid pro quos from entrepreneurs so as to achieve social goals. In January 1853 a Waiuku applicant to the Colonial Secretary for a hotel licence was promised it at a reduced price so long as he kept ‘a commodious canoe’ that could be used to assist the comings and goings of traders from the south.34 This decision reveals an early propensity for administrations to make ad hoc decisions, and to mix together social, revenue, and general economic goals at the same time. In the interests of serving ‘the public good’ a complex web of relationships was being woven between private enterprise and public authority.
Settlers’ wish lists flashed with pound signs. Yet, few settlers, and even fewer Maori, possessed much money. Russell Stone notes that Aucklanders came ‘with more hope than capital’.35 Few had any lines of credit to ‘the Old Country’. Immigrants were for the most part young English, Scots, or Irish in search of a better life. Edward Gibbon Wakefield might have hoped that he could transfer propertied people as well as labourers, but his goal proved illusory. Adequate land was never available in sufficient quantities to attract the wealthy from Britain; emigration to a country which, for many years, enjoyed little more than a subsistence economy and few social amenities, held little attraction for British men and women of substance. Nor was there much spare labour. Among the middle and lower middle classes who made the journey, there were many more men than women; what was regarded in England as normal social life was hard to find.36 Nearly all of those who made the journey to New Zealand possessed barely enough money for their share of the fare and, at best, a few pounds extra with which to purchase some land. Legal tender was scarce; many early transactions in the new colony were conducted on the basis of barter.
Banking enjoyed a head start in Auckland over other parts, since it was the seat of government until 1865. Yet even there, bank deposits came in slowly.37 In Wellington the Union Bank of Australia found the services that it provided in the early 1840s unprofitable.38 In Dunedin it took the gold rushes of the early 1860s to stimulate a group of businessmen to establish the Bank of Otago.39 In general, a shortage of money in early New Zealand meant that loans were hard to come by. If money was available for lending, the law of supply and demand meant that interest rates were much higher than settlers had been accustomed to in Britain. As Jim McAloon comments, ‘prosperity in nineteenth century New Zealand was particularly dependent upon the inflow of money, that is, upon exports, external public borrowings, private capital imports, and bank credit’.40.
Settler expectations of government kept coming back to infrastructural needs. As Sir Keith Hancock has noted of Australia, ‘collective action is indispensible if an obstinate environment is to be mastered’.41 By the middle of the nineteenth century migrants to both countries were leaving a country that was engrossed in the industrial revolution. Britain’s share of the world’s manufacturing production was increasing at a rate that far outstripped any other country’s. George Stephenson had long since invented a steam locomotive, and demands for rail transport were sweeping the British Isles in the 1840s. 42 It was axiomatic to impatient settlers that before they could utilise their skills or the meagre resources available to them, they needed a capacity to move freely. A Government that was regulating so many areas of commercial activity was expected to be a key player in any major construction project.
Roads and bridges were the first infrastructural requirements. Even before Hobson’s administration had shifted to Auckland, public servants were drawn into roading decisions in Kororareka.43 The administration struggled to keep control of initiatives that some officials purported to take in the Governor’s name. In October 1842 Willoughby Shortland, who became Administrator after Hobson’s untimely death, was obliged to advise Colonel William Wakefield in Wellington that his plans to build roads at central government’s expense did not have his approval.44 The absence of roads constantly frustrated residents in Auckland. However, when race relations in the northern areas deteriorated in the middle of the 1840s, the administration was obliged for military reasons to pay for the draining of swamps along Manukau Rd and to let contracts for roads and bridges further south at Otahuhu. By 1846 the Colonial Secretary was also taking an interest in the possible construction of a road between Auckland and Wellington that could be ridden within ten days.45 No matter how urgent the need, any money spent in Auckland caused envy in other parts of the colony.
While all settlements wanted a better transport infrastructure, progress was invariably slow. Construction of the road over the Rimutaka Ranges to the Wairarapa took longer than expected, and was over budget.46 By the early 1850s the economy had produced few riches. Raising crops and animals was mostly for local consumption. It was not until the discovery of gold in Australia in 1851 that significant trade developed with the colony of Victoria. An air of impatience suffused settler dialogue, and dominated political gatherings. Edward Stafford early developed a skill at arguing aggressively for more development money for Nelson, a skill that provincialists used in later years against the central governments that he headed. 47
Overseas communication was vital to settlers who experienced a profound sense of isolation from the rest of the world. One of the first actions of the House of Representatives in 1855 was to authorise the Government to subsidise a shipping line that would agree to deliver the mails from Europe in an expeditious manner. The following year Stafford’s Government despatched two ministers, Henry Sewell and John Logan Campbell, to Australia to negotiate a shipping deal. They were unable to do so. It was not until 1866 that an agreement for a service between Panama and the various provinces of New Zealand came into operation. After the completion of the trans-American rail line in 1869 a subsidised service operated to and from San Francisco.48 Contract arrangements failed from time to time in the 1870s and 1880s, but by the 1890s a reasonably reliable service operated between San Francisco, Vancouver and New Zealand. By then the steamers carried passengers as well as mail.49
Given the level of settler impatience about progress it was inevitable that government borrowing would become a vital political issue. A factor, as Gary Hawke notes, was that governments could usually borrow more cheaply than individuals; banks allow a premium for the surety that governments can offer because of their unique ability to levy taxes.50 Hobson and Shortland borrowed from the British Treasury to the point where the administration’s total debt in 1843 exceeded its estimated annual revenue. FitzRoy endeavoured to survive with a variety of new taxes and by resorting to the issue of debentures, a back-door form of borrowing. It took a trebling of the British Treasury grant and other initiatives after 1845 to improve the Government’s financial position.51 But overseas borrowing on a large scale was not undertaken until the late 1850s. It became a regular feature of infrastructural financing after 1861.
From 1841 till 1865 government authority emanated from Auckland. Until 1853 governors ruled with the assistance of an Executive Council that consisted of three senior officials. There was also a Legislative Council. It was made up of the Executive Council augmented by three nominated representatives. Theoretically they represented the settlements. Circumstances conspired to give the Governor wide powers. When Sir George Grey became Governor in 1845 the more generous grant of money he received from the Colonial Office enabled him to employ a more effective security force. When he purchased bigger blocks of land from the Maori, stepped up the influx of immigrants, thus stimulating land prices, and was able to calm tensions that had developed in the north, many settlers forgave his autocratic style. Inhabitants in the centre of the country endorsed Grey’s imprisonment of Te Rauparaha, who had been at the centre of a violent land dispute at Wairau in 1843. There were few complaints in 1848 when he failed to meet his Executive Council for seven months. Early New Zealand settlers, no less than later generations, tolerated arbitrary government if it could deliver the order and progress they sought. Demands for consultation then, as now, were cries from the excluded.
At first Grey experimented with limited devolution of power, although he was careful always to retain overall authority in his own hands. Between 1848 and 1852 there were two provinces for administrative purposes, New Ulster in the north, and New Munster from Wellington southwards. Grey also allowed limited local government in Auckland and Wellington. His constitution in 1852 abolished New Ulster and New Munster. Reflecting the fact that New Zealand was still a collection of settlements, often with few links between them, he set up six provincial governments (eventually nine). They had mini-legislatures. At the centre the ‘general’ government consisted of the Governor, a Legislative Council and a House of Representatives.52
When the House of Representatives first met in 1854 ministers immediately requested responsible government. After several tense scenes with Lt. Col. Wynyard, Acting-Governor after Grey’s departure, the British Government acceded to the request on 8 December 1854. On 18 April 1856 the first Cabinet took office under the brief premiership of Henry Sewell. Members of the old Executive Council were pensioned off. A few constitutional limitations still applied to the powers of the new General Assembly. The Governor, now Colonel Thomas Gore-Browne, remained an important constitutional figure. In practice, however, limitations on the power of the Government were few. A capacity for decisive administration was circumscribed only by the mental abilities of legislators and governors, a shortage of funds at their disposal, and the fact that for the next twenty years considerable power still resided with the superintendents of the provincial councils in the far-flung settlements.
By 1856 a fairly sizeable bureaucracy was in place throughout the country – 191 central government officials, and several hundred more in the employ of the provinces.53 In their search for order and progress in the South Seas, settlers were giving birth to big government. By now many of the institutions and attitudes to government of a century later were falling into place. They were carried over into the era of Cabinet Government and further developed over time. Powerful executives existed both provincially and centrally. They were expected to regulate, assist, police and finance many aspects of the colonial economy. Taxation precedents had been established, and governments – provincial as well as central -soon embarked on substantial borrowing programmes.
The introduction of responsible government was a milestone in New Zealand’s development. But it did not by itself improve New Zealand’s economy or its creditworthiness. Ministers rather than governors were now in charge of promoting New Zealand abroad, while the new provincial governments had the right to dispose of waste lands purchased by Grey. He and his chief purchasing officer, Donald McLean, bought 32 million acres, including much of the South Island, for £50,000. This bountiful supply of land made it easier for Grey to promote his dearly held aim of a country composed of’small landed proprietors’. His decision to reduce the price of land to settlers in 1853 was intended to assist those with few resources to get on to the land. But it had the effect in practice of helping a number of Australian runholders with capital to buy up large tracts for pasturing sheep, especially in Canterbury and the Wairarapa.54 This was an early example of social engineering intended for one purpose which had a different outcome in practice – a phenomenon that many later governments were to experience.
Not surprisingly, irritation grew among many small settlers. They resented the number of large runholders and absentee owners who were benefiting from policies intended to help them. The notion that governments had a responsibility to help the small man while restricting opportunities for the large was developing. As yet, however, few settlers saw any conflict between the growing interventionism of governments on the one hand, and the expectation that a considerable degree of self-help and self-reliance would be required on the other. The two moved uneasily side by side, with settlers trying to work out where the boundaries between each should be, or indeed whether there should be any boundaries at all. Many people have tried to construct theories about the enthusiasm for government shown by settlers in what Alexander Brady called ‘the sociopolitical laboratory of Australasia’.55 Geoffrey Blainey argues that in Australia, at least, the migrants before 1850 came more from cities, and were slightly less willing to stand on their own feet than many settlers from rural backgrounds who went to the United States. Australian settlers were therefore more inclined to welcome the paternalistic State.56 Leaving aside Blainey’s arguable assumption about the preferences of urban workers, there is not enough evidence about New Zealand’s settler mix to enable us to arrive at a similar judgement.57 New Zealand historians have acknowledged that theories shaped some ideas about settlement. Believing as he did in the need for ‘ample government’, Wakefield’s ‘experimental mind’, according to Erik Olssen, tried valiantly to make New Zealand a ‘new and civilised society’. In the long run his ‘scientific experiment’ enjoyed little immediate success, although Wakefield’s belief that societies could be scientifically planned outlived him.58 At the time, however, Wakefield may have been ‘zealous for a theory, [but] many of his backers were keener on cash’. No one, says Oliver, could be credited with having planned the kind of country that ultimately emerged.59
Others also downplay the role of theory. Practical necessity, not ideology, drove settler behaviour. In an extreme view, Miles Fairburn doubts that New Zealand’s immigrants idealised the State, or even gave it much thought. He notes that settlers perceived New Zealand to be a country of ‘natural abundance’, with ‘ample opportunities for labouring people to win an “independency”’. However, in Fairburn’s view, few gave any credit to the Government for any special characteristics of New Zealand society. The inference seems to be that New Zealand just grew.60 If this were the case, there is a great deal of special pleading by settlers to explain away. Hancock observed that Australian settlers soon came to see the State as ‘a vast public utility, whose duty it [was] to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number’.61 The same can be argued for New Zealand.
New Zealand’s active government matured the way it did because of the unique mix of circumstances in the new country. The sizeable number of indigenous people in the north, and the nature of the treaty arrangements made with them, required a sense of security if settlement was to proceed. Some form of authority was vital. The physical conditions of the new country meant that infrastructural developments were bound to be expensive if settlers were to turn their land to good use, to ‘get ahead’, as many of them described it. Having found in Hobson a governor who was willing to accept some responsibility to assist in their enterprises, settlers sought similar help from his successors. Interventionism was incremental; tariffs, licences, controls, ordinances and spending on public works, all introduced for a melange of reasons, contributed towards a political culture that was distinctly interventionist by the time responsible government was introduced.
The novelist Anthony Trollope visited New Zealand in 1872. He had been one of Gladstone’s Liberal candidates in 1868 and was disposed towards mildly interventionist government. But in his view New Zealand had already gone too far. It was ‘over-governed, over-legislated for, over-provided with officials, and over-burdened with national debt’.62 A settler in the Kaipara area in the middle of the 1880s observed that New Zealand had become ‘altogether over-governed, and that is one of the reasons why so many of our enterprises turn out commercially unsuccessful ….’ The number of ministers and the size of New Zealand’s bureaucracy forced up costs, which militated against successful commerce. ‘The colony’, wrote P. W. Barlow, ‘may at present … be likened to a goodly fruit tree full of bud and promise, but suffering from the ravages of a host of caterpillars, which are destroying its blossoms, and with them the chance of fruit.’63 Yet the Government’s share of economic activity at the time was still barely 10 per cent of national income.
The French academic, Andre Siegfried, visited New Zealand in 1904 to study its social and political attitudes. He remarked on the large size of the state apparatus that had been constructed and suggested that it was typical of colonial societies. Immigrants to a new country usually cooperated little, and found that government was the only bond that united them. ‘The Government is thus brought by the force of circumstances to perform functions, which in the old countries would lie within the province of private initiative.’ New Zealanders, Siegfried suggested, were not ‘State Socialists’, just ‘cynical and practical opportunists’.64
This is a view which the economic historian, Gary Hawke, expresses more simply. ‘European observers’, he says, ‘thought that New Zealanders practised socialism without doctrines, but they thought in European terms. New Zealanders simply found new roles for government in a pioneering society.’65 In their search for order in the new land, settlers had come upon a helpmate. In time, it developed into a control agent as well.