John E. Martin, The House: New Zealand’s House of Representatives 1854–2004, Dunmore Press, Palmerston North, 2004. 390 pages. $59.95. ISBN 0-86469-463-6.
Reviewed by Barry Gustafson.
Very occasionally one reads an encyclopedic scholarly book that will not only clearly become the standard reference work for the foreseeable future but is also simply a pleasure to read, though some general readers may find its size and density daunting. Such a book is John E. Martin’s The House, written and published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the first meeting of the House of Representatives in Auckland on 24 May 1854. This was only fourteen years after New Zealand became a British colony following the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.
Such rapid constitutional development was possible because of principles of colonial government that had recently been accepted by Britain. Older colonies such as Canada and New South Wales had representative assemblies and were moving towards being granted responsible internal self-government. The 1852 New Zealand Constitution Act, which set up a General Assembly consisting of two houses, a lower House of Representatives and an upper Legislative Council, did not explicitly extend either responsible government or control over the ministerial executive to the Assembly. The situation was clarified after the House, meeting for the first time in 1854, passed by 29 votes to one a motion that ministers should be responsible to the majority in the elected assembly.
Martin works chronologically through nine periods in the evolution of Parliament, during most of which the government of New Zealand became more and more centralised: the provinces were abolished; disciplined parties dominated by the Prime Minister and two or three other key figures in the executive developed; and the Upper House was abolished, leaving New Zealand with a unicameral system.
Over time Parliament also became more representative of the New Zealand population, with the country at the forefront of those enfranchising indigenous people, all males and then all women. During the latter part of the twentieth century the proportion of farmers in the House fell dramatically, as did the average age of MPs. An increasing number were born in New Zealand, and the proportion of women MPs grew steadily after 1975.
In many ways The House is a broad history of New Zealand politics as well as a record of the House of Representatives. It is nicely balanced between the place, the people who have inhabited it, and what has gone on there. Martin covers the reasons for Parliament’s early shift from Auckland to Wellington; the construction of various Parliament buildings; the way political and legislative processes, including standing orders, developed; the establishment of parliamentary services, Bellamy’s, the library and the research units; MPs’ salaries, travel and other expenses, and superannuation; the broadcasting of Parliament; and the evolution of independent politicians into factions based on region and personality, and then into disciplined parties.
The way in which parliamentarians over time coalesced into ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ parties, and how they perceived each other, is very revealing. Conservatives saw the liberals as inciting the ‘mob’ with populist rhetoric and policies; liberals saw the conservatives as the corrupt supporters of privilege, business and large landowners. That was, and has continued to be, an oversimplification, but nevertheless contains some truth. Parliament itself changed during the twentieth century from having one dominant party to three competing parties, to a basically two-party system, and finally to a multi-party system with the advent of a new Mixed Member Proportional electoral system in 1996.
Many of the great orators in Parliament were populists inclined to appeal to their constituents by describing conspiracies of the rich and powerful against the ‘common man’. Sir George Grey, Richard John (‘King Dick’) Seddon, Sir Robert Muldoon and Winston Peters all fit that mould.
Seddon looms particularly large in Chapter 4, which deals with the first modern, disciplined political party in the House: the Liberal Party, dominant for twenty years. Seddon’s confirmation as leader in 1893, according to Martin, ‘put the seal on a new breed of New Zealand politician’ and began a gathering of power into the hands of the Premier’, who also ‘dominated Parliament by strengthening executive power’. The long-time Reform Party leader, William (‘Kaiser Bill’) Massey, was also an implacable party man, and in time an authoritarian Prime Minister who used the House to rubber-stamp executive decisions. Later Prime Ministers such as Michael Joseph Savage, Peter Fraser, Sidney Holland, Keith Holyoake and Robert Muldoon displayed similar personal authority and political acumen at the head of disciplined party caucuses supported – particularly at election times – by large party organisations outside the House.
History has a habit of repeating itself, and one cannot fail to see the similarity between Grey’s unconstitutional action in refusing in 1877 to forward a bill he disliked which had been passed by the House to Governor Normanby for his signature, and the suggestion in 1984 that Muldoon’s government was prepared to do the same if Parliament passed anti-nuclear legislation.
The necessary structural-functional description and analysis are complemented by judicious summaries of major legislation and debates in the House and enlivened with short biographies, often in side-boxes and drawing on the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. The politicians’ personal idiosyncrasies, occasionally bizarre behaviour, and dramatic clashes in the House make fascinating reading, especially during Parliament’s first 50 years.
Many well-known MPs have clearly drunk too much alcohol, including one of Parliament’s longest-serving and best-known Speakers, Maurice O’Rorke. Julius Vogel missed a crucial vote on a motion to separate the North and South Islands into two separate colonies while ‘drunk and asleep’. The alcoholic Jerningham Wakefield was locked in a committee room without liquor to keep him sober enough to vote – but the opposing whip climbed onto the roof and lowered a bottle of whisky down the chimney. By the time the division was called, Wakefield was ‘paralytic’ under the table. Some years later another MP, John Joyce, was also locked in a room by a government whip and plied with alcohol to make him incapable of voting.
Among more recent incidents involving excessive alcohol consumption, one in January 1958 is both entertaining and might well have had political significance. After Robert Macfarlane, about whom Martin is quite uncomplimentary, had been made Speaker, Opposition leader Holyoake took charge of the Speaker’s liquor cabinet and ‘began pouring generous drinks’. One Labour MP passed out, removing the new government’s one-seat majority during the debate on its £100 tax rebate. Fortunately several National MPs were similarly incapacitated, although Labour still nearly lost the first vote when Warren Freer, who was in the shower, failed to hear the division bells.
An early Speaker, David Monro, on one occasion had the clock put back to delay the rising of the House, which would have prevented the third reading of a government bill designed to facilitate the alienation of Maori land.
Henry Sewell, whose journals proved ‘an indispensable source for the formative years of the House’, once tried to manhandle an opponent, James Mackay, out of the chamber. Mackay defended himself with ‘his trusty umbrella’ and finally escaped by climbing over the rail into the strangers’ gallery. Some years later, Vincent Pyke threatened Seddon with his walking stick but struck another MP by accident before being hauled – still shouting – out into the lobby.
Early newspaper reporters made records of parliamentary debates, and in time newspapers were contracted to provide a more comprehensive service. In 1867 an official and independent Hansard service of parliamentary staff began to record the speeches, 42 years before an official Hansard was established at Westminster. Newspaper reporters in the Parliamentary Press Gallery continued to describe and analyse the politicians and their lives, helped by often entertaining and occasionally viciously satirical cartoons. Some of the more interesting later debates covered non-economic issues such as women’s suffrage, prohibition, abortion and homosexual law reform.
For much of its history, the House was a men’s club, and by the 1880s it provided ‘sumptuous dinners, engaging a professional French chef cook, reputedly the best in the country’; it also ‘reputedly supplied the finest liquor’. Most of the men were Pakeha. Women are almost invisible for the first two-thirds of the book because, even though they gained the vote in 1893, they were not eligible to stand for election until 1919, and the first woman MP, Elizabeth McCombs, did not enter the House until 1933. One of the earliest women MPs, Mabel Howard, is also one of the most interesting. Martin recounts stories about her waving bloomers and a dress in Parliament to make a point, threatening to climb in a bathroom window if she was denied the right to take a bath in the Gentlemen’s bathroom in Parliament’s basement, and campaigning against salacious literature and books about crime in the library, which led to Truth reporters being banned from the library for a year.
Maori men do make an appearance after 1867, when the debate over whether Maori should simply have ‘full and equal enjoyment of civil and political privileges’, or be represented in and by separate indigenous institutions, or elect separate Maori Members of the House of Representatives was decided by the creation of four separate Maori seats. Because some of the first Maori MPs did not speak English well, and also wanted to communicate the work of Parliament to their constituents, interpreters sat with them in the House. Standing orders, petitions, bills, parliamentary papers and speeches were translated into Maori from English, and vice versa. A Maori-language Hansard published between 1881 and 1906 contained the speeches of the Maori MPs, and other members’ speeches on native affairs.
The early Maori MPs were ‘besieged’ for their support, and Henare Tomoana changed his allegiance when John Hall apparently reneged on a promise to appoint a Maori Native Affairs Minister in 1879. In 1893 James Carroll, a Liberal minister who was to be acting Prime Minister, chose to switch from the Eastern Maori seat which he had represented since 1887 to the general seat of Waiapu. He remained a general MP until his defeat in 1919. Tau Henare gave Massey a one-seat majority after the 1914 election. Apirana Ngata, an MP from 1905 until 1943, was a minister from 1909 to 1912 and between 1928 and 1934. Carroll and Ngata had much greater status and influence in both the House and the executive than did the Labour-Ratana MPs who came later.
Fascinating but lesser-known MPs include John Sheehan, who became the first New Zealand-born Pakeha MP in 1872; the prohibitionist T. E. (‘Tea’) Taylor and the anti-prohibitionist R. M. (‘Rum’) Taylor; and Peter McSkimming, who made only four one-minute speeches in his three years in Parliament. Dunedin ’s Peter Neilson also disliked speaking, and when ordered to do so would simply read a list of quotations from the Bible to Stalin. Obviously, all MPs could not be mentioned, but one unexpected omission is that of the interesting Country Party MP for the Bay of Islands from 1928 to 1938, Captain Harold Rushworth.
For most of its history each Parliament was elected for three years. Massey observed that ‘during the first session we break in the colts; during the second session we do the country’s work; and during the third session we prepare for the coming elections’.
Perhaps significantly, the Liberal and Labour parties drew their MPs much more from immigrants than did the more conservative parties, Reform and National, both of which had more locally born MPs.
Since the 1970s MPs have enjoyed much better salaries, allowances, accommodation, conditions and support staff than their predecessors. However, the workload has also increased considerably because of larger electorates, longer sittings and constant committee work. Since the advent of the MMP electoral system, constituency MPs have had much greater demands placed on them than those borne either by past MPs or by the new breed of MPs elected on party lists.
The final chapter of the book shows clearly that Parliament has not escaped the revolutionary transformation that has been seen everywhere else in New Zealand since 1984. Indeed, the House has possibly changed more in the last twenty years than it did in the preceding 130, for a number of reasons: Geoffrey Palmer’s crusade to reform the legislature after 1984; the formation of a Parliamentary Services Commission; an expansion in the number and powers of select committees; much greater resources for MPs; and the effect of MMP on the composition and working of Parliament. Despite these changes, however, it can be argued that functionally the dominance of the executive, especially the Prime Minister, over the legislature remains largely unchanged. Martin, however, makes the confident assertion that recent reforms and MMP have ‘shifted the balance between Parliament and the executive significantly back towards the former’.
Martin concludes that by 2004 ‘Parliament had entered a more settled period’, and that the ‘trend towards greater stability … offers encouragement that the institution is settling down again’. That judgment is both premature and tendentious. The future of some smaller parties is uncertain. There may be a new Maori Party in Parliament, but then again a future National government might well abolish the Maori seats or hold a binding referendum not only on those seats and the number of MPs but also on the MMP system itself. As Martin shows so well in this book, the House has developed and changed in many, sometimes surprising, ways over 150 years; there is every reason to believe that it will continue to do so.
The book is superbly illustrated with numerous black and white photos, portraits and cartoons throughout, and sixteen pages of colour photos in the middle. Among the most interesting are Parliament Buildings in 1880 and 1928; the destruction of Parliament Buildings by fire in December 1907; what Parliament would have looked like if it had been rebuilt according to the architect’s final design in 1911; MPs wearing lava-lavas while visiting the Cook Islands in 1903; MPs touring the ‘winterless north’ in 1917; and the unemployed massed outside Parliament in 1932.
There is an excellent index and the text is extremely well end-noted, although a reader may be somewhat frustrated if unable to find in the short ‘Select Bibliography’ the detailed source of a reference abbreviated in the notes. The Bibliography is restricted to secondary sources. Another significant omission is a list of former MPs and others whom the author interviewed, though several are included in a brief ‘Acknowledgements’ on page 339, as is Linda Evans of the Turnbull Library’s Oral History Archive, though there is no indication outside the end-notes of what Martin consulted in that or any other archive. One person who is inexplicably not even included in the ‘Acknowledgements’ is the current Speaker, Jonathan Hunt, who, judging by the large number of citations, was responsible for many of the anecdotes and observations in Chapters 7, 8 and 9.
