Chapter 11 of The Nationbuilders
The ex-cabinet minister had been through many battering years including the fag end of the Fourth Labour Government, losing a safe seat in the 1990 landslide. But his paper recalling the exhilaration of Norman Kirk’s time, lifted a quarter of a century off the mid-fifty year old.[1] Kirk alone among post-war New Zealand politicians was an inspiration:
“Let us have a sense of pride in being New Zealanders. Let us recognise the value of the unique way of life we have built here – a humane, non-violent society, free from the social and economic injustices that plague so many societies.
“Let us proudly cultivate a sense of nationhood and stand up for ourselves in international political and trade circles, not acting in a spirit of independence merely for the sake of asserting ourselves, but to protect our own interests, both political and commercial. Cooperation with other nations does not necessarily mean subservience or submission: we are seeking friends, not masters.
“Let us recognise the fact that a fierce competition exists in nearly every sphere of marketing between most nations, including between ourselves and our closest neighbour, Australia. Let us recognise that there is a conflict of interest between our own farmers in New Zealand and the farming community of our longtime friend, the United States. Let us recognise the nature of the impact on our own industry of an open-ended commitment to free trade with highly industrialised nations like Japan or Singapore.
“But let us not be frightened of all this or run for shelter. Let us have faith in our own ability and strive to protect our economic interests by energetic and imaginative marketing, and through hard-headed political negotiations at a high level.”[2]
This front-piece for Kirk’s collection of speeches Towards Nationhood, published just before the 1969 election. The booklet is mainly a mixture of policy pronouncements, and has no systematic account of nationbuilding. But it argues that New Zealand was in an early phase of its economic development, overspecialised in a basic industry – farming, and overdependent on a single export market – Britain. The strategy should be a more open trade stance, finding new export markets and new export products, including further processing of resources and commodities. ‘The Department of Industries and Commerce should ensure that industry uses New Zealand raw materials to the maximum.’[3]
It advocated setting up a three-tiered economic planning council, harking back to the war where the private and public sectors worked closely together. (The book’s editor anxiously adds that Kirk’s planning proposals antedate the National government’s 1968 National Development Council, arguably a response to Kirk’s rhetoric.) The effect would be to reinstall the sense of nation among the peak organizations and key players. But it also reflects the then conventional wisdom’s reluctance to rely solely on market decisions. We see this in Kirk’s preference for reallocating the use of import licences rather than abolishing protection; his preference for a different price control regime rather than its abolition.
There is a change in economic policy thinking going on here, moving away from a focus on the domestic market to greater emphasis on sending but of a wider range of exports to a wider range of markets. This shift in Labour Party thinking has never been fully documented, so here it can only be sketched, around the career of Arnold Nordmeyer.
Nordmeyer had entered parliament in 1935 as a radical, but given the portfolio of health in 1940, he had proved himself to be one of the few able cabinet ministers, and may well have been the next leader of the Labour Party if he had been in parliament when Peter Fraser died in 1950. Because Walter Nash was old, Nordmeyer dominated the second Labour Government in the 1957 to 1960 period, and has been described as ‘the best prime minister who never was’ by John Roberts. He is remembered as the author of the 1958 ‘black budget’, while a vocation as a Presbyterian minister, his quiet personal life style, and his high domed forehead and baldness all reinforce its public image of austerity. It was a consequence of generous 1957 election promises by both parties coinciding with the first significant downturn of the terms of trade in the post war era. Henry Lang recalls:
The Treasury always made tougher recommendations than they expected to be accepted. And Nordmeyer to our horror accepted the lot. And I remember fighting like hell in the last two days and he wouldn’t consult which was interesting. He had all these reports and then he produced his budget and the week before, he sent it down just for editing, we saw this and we went and saw him and told him ‘This is horrible. This is far too much’ despite the fact we had tendered the advice … As it was it cost him the election.[4]
Probably, but it was a budget which dealt with an uncomfortable – albeit short-lived – external shock without a major rise in unemployment, a feat beyond subsequent ministers. In 1963, Nordmeyer became leader of the Labour Party, now in opposition. The election manifesto was seen to contain a quite new industrialisation strategy with an emphasis on export manufacturing and manufacturing in depth and diversification of the agriculture sector. Its abandonment of insulationist economic development strategy was seen as a betrayal. Bill Sutch may not have thought so. He wrote in 1966:
… the development of cabinet recommendations [in the Second Labour Government] was much more with Nordmeyer and P.N Holloway, the Minister of Industries and Commerce, … Despite cabinet’s general lack of interest and sometimes the opposition of individual members, Nordmeyer and Holloway began to influence policy towards changing New Zealand’s industrial structure.[5]
Nordmeyer, who became first New Zealand born leader of the Labour Party in 1963, obtained his greatest political satisfaction as Minister of Health and then Minister of Industries and Commerce in the 1940s.[6] Presumably, he saw the 1963 manifesto policies as a logical development of those industry policies. He continued to promote them after he returned to the back benches after Kirk replaced them as leader in 1965. It is not extravagant to argue that the open economy stance which the current Labour Leader, Helen Clark, exhibits (neither insulationist nor uncritically free trade) can be traced back via Mike Moore and Norman Kirk, to Nordmeyer and thence to Sutch, although Sutch also directly influenced Kirk. (At the 1973 opening of a West Coast factory, aimed to stimulate regional development, Kirk singled out him for his contribution to nationhood.) .
The difficulty with export-oriented strategies is that they depend upon domestic political responses in the foreign markets. While the New Zealand government could control the local market, the usual situation would be a small New Zealand firm exporting to a much larger foreign market, which was being controlled by its government in the interests of the domestic producers. In the past Britain had been a sort of exception, based on the belief that mother will treat a child fairly, although by the late 1960s the view was on the wane, as Britain applied for entry into the European Common Market. Elsewhere, the history of exporting pastoral products is one of exclusions, restrictions, and penalising barriers.
There is an economic argument that since protection is not in the interests of a nation as a whole, the protection will be reduced once the special interest lobbies are overcome. However, it is not at all obvious that all protection is against the entire interests of a nation, once a realistic description of the production process is assumed. Given the considerable difficulties inherent in an export led (or open economy) strategy, how to persuade the nation to embark upon it? One option is to argue there is no alternative to free trade. But since there are a lot of people who argue the contrary – that domestic protection and expansion is an alternative – the trading naked approach has not been very persuasive (except to those whose direct interest is involved).
Kirk used nationhood to offer a vision which enabled the open economy strategy. New Zealanders could work together to survive in a not altogether benign world. Exporting from New Zealand could succeed if the nation worked as a cohesive collective in the task. He asked, ‘[c]an we really pursue relentlessly and vigorously the search for new and expanding markets without making a conscious effort to cultivate a sense of nation, a sense of independence and self-reliance?’[7] The rhetoric remains popular. Witness the parallels that are drawn between New Zealand’s successful defence of the Americas Cup in 2000, and a national business strategy.
In 1973 Britain joined the European Economic Community. There are still those who blame that event for the subsequent difficulties of the New Zealand economy – colonials wringing their hands because Mummy has rushed off with those Continentals. In fact the ties were already loosening. Between 1966 – just before the wool price shock, and 1972 – just before Britain entered the EEC, Britain’s share of total exports fell from 45 percent to 31 percent. The share continued to decline. It was below 20 percent after 1975 and is about 5 percent today. While some sectors – notably cheese producers – were hit hard, the common perception of economic impact of Britain joining the EEC is an exaggeration, reflecting the psychological dependency of many New Zealanders on Britain, rather than the economic dependency.
It is not true that up to 1972 foreign policy was run as though New Zealand was on the Dogger Bank in the North Sea. At the officials’ level it could be run with considerable subtlety, even when the politicians were not so inclined. But New Zealanders’ colonial nostalgia often located it there, and the issue was to find another economic and political protector. New Zealand increasingly shifted into the US political sphere, symbolically with the accession to the ANZUS pact in 1951, but practically with the arrival of the US servicemen in 1942. But the US, more conscious of its voting farmers’ needs, rather than those of a country on the farthest side of the Pacific, was never the economic saviour. It was not until 1980 that it was a bigger export destination than Britain, and today the biggest economy in the world ranks but third behind Australia and Japan as a New Zealand export market.
The other option for the transferring of the colonial affection was to Australia. Relations got politically closer in the 1940s – especially with the signing of the Canberra Pact in 1944, again as a part of the war effort. There had been trade posts in Sydney and Melbourne as early as 1906, the Canberra High Commission was not opened until 1943. The New Zealand Australia Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed in 1966. It was broadened to the much more comprehensive Closer Economic Relations (CER) in 1982. But again, while Australia is an important market for some New Zealand exporters – usually the largest destination – it still has only around 20 percent of the export share.
Besides, the US and Australia have political interests – including the Atlantic for the former, the Indian Ocean for the latter – which hardly touch New Zealand. As early as 1943 Alister McIntosh, in the Prime Minister’s Department between 1935 and 1966 (and head from 1943) and the founding secretary in 1943 of the Department of External Affairs (now the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade), was to ponder, ‘I never did think New Zealand had anything to gain by teaming up with Australia either in the ANZAC command or, for that matter, in any other common enterprise, and I am certain now as I was then that our rightful place is in the South Pacific paddling our own canoe as best we can.’[8] McIntosh’s forebodings were nicely illustrated as he retired in 1966. Vietnam is halfway around the world, and yet New Zealand was getting involved, not because it had a strategic interest there, but because it was in the interests of its US and Australian allies. Participation in the Vietnam war hangs over New Zealand foreign policy to this day, not least because of some of the most vociferous critics at the time have since become publicly influential.
Vietnam posed a dilemma for Kirk. Within the party and among its supporters there were many who opposed involvement, and saw this as a key issue to take a stand on. The country was not so persuaded. In any case Kirk knew as prime minister he would have to work with the US and Australia. In the end Vietnam may have been the crucial reason why, despite a sudden sharp deterioration in the economy, Labour lost the 1969 election (although an industrial dispute did not help). Even so, Kirk belonged with the ‘canoe paddlers’. New Zealand had to run its own independent foreign policy. In some ways it is epitomised by a nation having only interests rather than friends. They who offer protection do so in their interests, which rarely fully align with the protected. The path by which Kirk reached this conclusion is far from obvious.
He was born in 1923 at Waimate. His Baptist father was a cabinetmaker, but there was no specialised work for him after 1930, and when he was not unemployed he did odd jobs. Kirk spent most of his childhood in Christchurch, leaving school at the end of standard six in the depths of the depression. Working life as a ‘stationary engine driver’ (Kirk’s joke) was not that much easier as the economy went into upswing, at the end of the 1930s. His account of his Katikati house where the rats ‘literally chewed the wallboard up like Weetbix’ illustrates the 1935 housing report’s estimate that many houses needed to be replaced.[9] Kirk had health problems even then, and was not called up for war service. In the early 1950s he settled down in Kaiapoi, where he built his own house. He became Kaiapoi’s mayor (the youngest Mayor in the country) in 1953. He entered parliament representing south Christchurch (first the Lyttelton electorate, later Sydenham) in 1957. His maiden speech was strong on foreign affairs, as well as passionate about the needs of the workers and his electorate.
Kirk first travelled overseas at the age of 37, on a parliamentary delegation in 1960. It was part of the education which parliament gave him. He was bright enough to have had a university education, but the modern welfare state was younger than he was. He became a prodigious reader, using the parliamentary library. But the autodidact was suspicious of those better educated. Some justified his mistrust by sneering at Kirk for his calloused hands, his large and sometime overweight frame, his gaucheness, his lack of sophistication, and his lack of qualifications. His image was made over when he led the opposition, but the resentment remained. Many reports suggest Kirk was suspicious to the point of paranoia. Any able working class boy, who makes good in the way that Kirk did, is bound to be sensitive and resentful of such treatment. To the late overseas experiences, one could add other factors (all his grandparents were born in New Zealand; he had succeeded by his own efforts) which led him to the vision of an independent New Zealander. Whatever such sociology and history of his personal factors, Kirk articulated a vision, which remained an inspiration three decades later.
At the heart of his nationbuilding was national identity. Kirk saw foreign policy – in the Pacific, South Africa, nuclear disarmament, racialism foreign aid and speaking on small independent nations – contributing to national confidence. Lee Kuan Yew said ‘Norman Kirk was by far the most impressive New Zealand Prime Minister I have known. He was a heavyweight. He had “gravitas”.’ His head of the Prime Ministers’ Department, Frank Corner, added that ‘a component of that “gravitas”, indeed a vital enhancement of it, was the warm humanity and intellectual conviction that pervaded all Kirk’s thinking and actions in the field of foreign policy.’[10]
The nationbuilder operated domestically too. He promoted the arts – the public lending right for authors and a requirement that all public buildings should acquire paintings and cultural artefacts are his initiatives. The environment became politically important. He cancelled the Springbok Tour proposed for 1973 (avoiding the social chaos generated by the failure to cancel the 1981 Tour).
Kirk opened a dialogue between Pakeha and Maori. His speeches on the Waitangi Marae still bear repeating. On February 6 1973 he said:
“We have come to Waitangi to mark an occasion that founded a nation and it founded a nation in a way that was unique. At that time the great countries of the world were scrambling for overseas possessions which they seized without regard to the wishes or the interests of the occupants of those lands. Hobson’s visit to New Zealand was unique. The Captain was under instructions that the annexation of New Zealand was not to be offensive or without the consent of the occupants of that country. And indeed it was because of those instructions that the Treaty came into being.
“There is a tendency to think of that as a monumental milestone in the history of the Maori people but Waitangi is not just for the Maoris or for Northland, it is for New Zealand. And we want to remember that those of us whose ancestors came from across the sea, some of these left countries that no longer held opportunities. They came to this country of scope and opportunity, and there set down their roots in a bi-cultural togetherness and tonight we mark the gift of opportunity that was given to all peoples of New Zealand by the wisdom and agreement of those who stood on this spot 133 years ago. …
“The Treaty of Waitangi has stood for 133 years. The focus and dignity of that agreement should and will be recognised by Parliament in a form that signifies and symbolises the importance of that Treaty to every New Zealander, and tonight I want to say that we observe together in New Zealand not a society that demands that some give up their identity in the interests of a majority, but that we each can preserve our culture and our identity and concentrate on building a society in which we have equal opportunities to participate in the development and responsibility of New Zealand. Let Waitangi Day be both a memorial and a milestone, and let us remember that the future that we as a country achieve by ourselves is a future we must face to better ourselves.
“Because the generation my young friend represents cannot wait too long to seize the opportunity that we must create. This is our nation, our opportunity to foster and encourage New Zealand’s nationhood. Let it be marked with pride and gratitude for what has been, and resolve that for the future together we work to build a society in New Zealand that gratifies us and becomes the envy of others.”
A year later
“Here at Waitangi, 134 years ago today, representatives of the Maori people and Captain William Hobson representing the British Crown, signed a treaty which has become the foundation stone of our nation. …
“Other nations celebrate on their national day acts of violence, a revolution, a coup, or perhaps a war. But we achieved our independence and our nationhood gradually and peacefully. We have no desperate revolution as the focus of New Zealand’s day. We remember no martyrs who fought to overthrow a tyrant or drive out alien powers. We were the lucky country. Others before our time caused the Government of Great Britain to consider new ways. The genius of the British people has been to learn from experience and to adapt. For us independence was handed on a plate in the most friendly, gentlemanly, rational fashion. We came to nationhood with no legacy of bitterness, no old scores to pay off. True, Maori and Pakeha came to blows but there was valour and honour and restraint on both sides.
“We emerged from this testing period with a great respect for each other and so now we look to Britain, to each other, to other countries with respect, with friendship and yes, with love. We are born in peace and so we commemorate as New Zealand Day not an act of violence but an act of trust and a pledge of cooperation. This is part of our nation’s inheritance and we should never forget it. We were born in peace and justice and we shall deal peacefully and justly with each other, with our neighbours and with all peoples.
“For 134 years we have been a nation. Men and women from many lands and many cultures have left old lands to make a new life in these lovely islands in the South Pacific. Already, as we have seen tonight, we are a distinctive nation unlike any other in the world. This is so largely because the history, the culture, the lifestyle of the Maori is woven in a rich gleaming thread in the fabric of our society.
“For 134 years, we have been making a nation and we should perhaps ask ourselves, ‘Are we yet a completed nation? Have we yet achieved a true New Zealand civilisation?’ Not yet. But the very ease with which independence came slowed down the process of establishing a clear New Zealand personality. We didn’t have to react against another country so we have not yet fully developed ourselves. Now as a nation we are independent and on our own. As Britain joins her destiny with Europe’s we must draw more upon the spiritual and cultural strength of the people who make our nation. We are ready. I know that we have not reached the end of the road; we have scarcely started on the journey. The Maori people similarly have not reached the end of the road. They are in the middle of a great migration as significant and meaningful as the migration that brought them to the shores of New Zealand. As they move from country to town as the lifestyle changes, as the old traditions of strength of history and culture are drawn upon, so new methods, new traditions are in the making. Here in these islands great things are happening. All of us together are in our way making New Zealand.”[11]
The cynic might say that Kirk appropriated Maori culture to resolve a Pakeha problem. New Zealand nationhood could not be simply based on an Anglo-Celtic culture with its roots in the British Isles, even if it is added to by other immigrants. It requires roots much deeper in the soil than the 130 odd years of European settlement.[12] Of course, but Kirk’s response was intuitive rather than calculating, even if the conclusion was the correct one. Genealogical research rejects the myth that Kirk was part-Maori, but its persistence reflects a belief that his spiritual origins could not be wholly European.
One of the vivid images Kirk invokes is the huge man walking hand in hand with a tiny Maori lad on the Waitangi Marae in 1973. The Maori rewarded Kirk amply and with sincerity by their public expressions of grief following his death. In doing so they articulated an emotional response which although felt by the Pakeha too, could not be then publicly expressed by more repressed public traditions which came from Britain. For while he has precursors in Gordon Coates and Fraser, it is Kirk – in the television age – who opens the dialogue between tangata whenua and tangata tauiwi, today so central to New Zealand nationbuilding.
Where Kirk failed, was to offer an economic component to that vision. Certainly he was good at identifying the objectives of economic policy, perhaps best summarised in a 1973 essay ‘The Philosophy of the Labour Party’.
“We must be a country that is fair to its own people, a country that seeks the expression of its nationhood in the strength of family life, social justice, and steady progress. Our objective always has been social justice for all people in the sense that everyone is able to live decently without having to face constant hardships.
“Social justice relates to four basic principles, four basic rights on which, in an industrial society, the security and freedom of the individual depend.
– the right to work …
– the right to housing ….
– the right to good health …
– the right to education …
“We believe that freedom, social justice, equality, and prosperity are not alternatives between which people must choose, but are, in fact essential prerequisites for human fulfilment. We believe that the material resources of our whole society should be used for the good of the many and not for the exclusive enrichment of the few.
“It was the misguided approach which put money before people that led us to the social mire where people wondered what the next day might bring.
“I made it clear when we took office that from the outset, the Government would determine its actions and its policies on the concept of human values and human needs.
“Money will be running second and people first. [13]
Now as noble as this account is, it is has difficulties. It confuses health with health care. It is not strong on human rights. (Kirk’s position on women’s rights was quaint, even for the times.) But the biggest problem is the implementation – the economics.
Paul Samuelson, the twentieth century economist second only to Keynes, remarked that economics is based on the laws of thermodynamics, which can be summarised that you cant get something for nothing. There are real world constraints on what can be produced and so be available for consumption. It is very easy to announce the objective that everyone should have a decent standard of living of X (although to be considered a visionary, do it with more rhetoric). But what if the sum of all the Xs adds up to more than the total production of the nation? Produce more, but what if insufficient can be produced, or the additional producers require an additional share of their product? These far from trivial underpin much of economic analysis. An especially acute problem is if the decent standard of living includes items that can only be sourced from overseas. How are these to be paid for? If the production capacity exists in New Zealand – say for housing as it did in the 1930s – they can be paid for by the issuing of New Zealand money, up to the point that people are willing to hold the money. But they may try to convert it into goods which cannot be produced causing inflation. Or into imports, causing a loss of foreign currency. How is it to be replaced?
Out of government it is easy to ignore such constraints, assuming that once the objectives are set, they can be implemented without compromising other goals. It is like designing an engine by assuming thermodynamics do not matter – the politics of perpetual motion machines. The left – concerned with foreign policy, human rights, the environment and so on – tends to be prone to this fallacy, and vigorously critical of those who think practical constraints limit possibilities. But it is not just an oversight of the political left. Other persuasions can be as blind. The US sharemarket boomed in the late 1990s under the misapprehension that changes in the value of financial paper can produce something for nothing in perpetuity.
It can be a fundamental attitudinal cleavage between those whose concerns are economic and those whose concerns are elsewhere; those who try to understand the economy and those who do not bother. Kirk belonged to the second group, but unlike Fraser he lacked an outstanding economic adviser of the calibre of Bernard Ashwin. (Corner was, like his predecessor McIntosh, superb in his specialist areas of foreign affairs, race relations, and cultural affairs.)
A consequence of this cleavage has been a dual leadership of the government, which frequently appears in New Zealand politics (but also elsewhere, as in the Blair-Brown leadership in Britain), where the Prime Minister is the public and political manager of the government and the Minister of Finance (Treasurer) has the dominant role in the management of the public organizations and resources. The dual leadership of David Lange and Roger Douglas is the best-known New Zealand example, but there was a similar arrangement in the Kirk government. Underpinning Kirk’s success was the solidity of his Minister of Finance.
Four years younger than Kirk, Bill Rowling missed the worst of the depression which together with his tobacco farmer family being a little socioeconomically higher, meant he got to university. After serving in the army, he won his childhood home seat (Buller, later Tasman) in 1962. (Ironically he took over the seat following the death of deputy leader Jerry Skinner, who had won the seat from Keith Holyoake in 1938, with Rowling’s father an active part of the campaign.)
As president of the Labour Party Rowling successfully ran the 1972 election. Although in opposition he had had responsibilities for overseas trade, he was made Minister of Finance, ‘a portfolio intended under the new ministry to be a service portfolio rather than a dominating one as it had been under the Holyoake one’ (a reference to Rob Muldoon).[14] Kirk was seen as the shrewd politician bestowing on a rival an onerous and unpopular task. The overseas trade portfolio was given to Kirk’s close political associate Warren Freer, ranked in cabinet above Rowling (who had supported Nordmeyer over Kirk in the 1965 leadership vote). But Rowling was better qualified than most and ‘[a]fter a few months of controller of the purse strings, … Rowling began to assert his old authority … [from when he was president of the party. He] … quickly won the respect of officials in Treasury and those from outside who deal with him, and must inevitably become a power to sit alongside Freer and Kirk.’[15] Barry Gustafson describes him as matching Rob Muldoon for ‘intelligence and determination’, and ‘more willing … to take hard decisions. But while he was a capable and compassionate man, he lacked Kirk’s or Muldoon’s presence, flair and instincts.’[16]
When Kirk came to power in late 1972, the economy was in a strong expansionary phase from an international commodity boom which temporarily lifted prices for New Zealand exports. Because foreigners were willing to pay more for the wool and meat that was exported, so the farmers were better off, and as they spent some of their earnings on domestic producers, so was the rest of the country. The boom had been accelerated by a fiscal stimulus (notably an income tax cut) from Muldoon’s 1972 budget. To the economically inexperienced, the economy appeared to be on a strong growth trend, although others might wonder whether the boom was only the upswing phase of a business cycle. The Kirk government continued to stimulate the economy in 1973. The past six years had been of fiscal austerity and it was easy to say ‘yes’ to every worthy public expenditure proposal. The situation was further inflamed by the abandoning of wage controls in 1973, a short explosion, followed by a reimposition.
It was Rowling who tried to restrain the spending, steady the ship, maintain policy coordination. As Kirk’s health declined, he became increasingly powerful, holding the cabinet and government together, and was not unexpectedly appointed Kirk’s successor following his death in August 1974 from a heart attack induced by a string of medical problems. Rowling was a pre-television politician in a post-television age. Had he gained office two decades earlier, he might have ranked with some of the great prime ministers – it is hard to imagine Peter Fraser or Keith Holyoake performing adequately on the box either.
Successful politicians have luck. Rowling did not. He led a party which won more votes in the 1978 and 1981 elections than did Muldoon’s National Party. Even so it won fewer seats. Perhaps more unluckily, just before Kirk’s death the first world oil price shock collapsed the world commodity prices and put the world economy into recession. Kirk had had the benefit of the economic boom, better managed than his natural inclinations deserved, because of Rowling’s effectiveness, and he left his successors – Rowling and, subsequently, Muldoon – to struggle with the aftermath.
But as critical as one may be of Kirk’s economics, perhaps he understood his own inadequacies, and chose the best man for the economics job not just to sideline him, but because he needed that competence. He could have marginalised Rowling to, say, the overseas trade portfolio. It would have kept him busy and out of the country, without providing a path to power. Was Kirk that understanding of his personal deficiency? Keith Eunson says Kirk had a high regard for Rowling, and described him as an honourable man in an interview when he was freely criticising his other colleagues.[17]
Just as the generation knows where they heard of John F. Kennedy’s death, a New Zealand one recalls hearing of Kirk’s. Karl Stead captured in a sonnet which ended.
Beyond the dunes blue of the sky out-reaches
The blue ocean where the spirits of our dead
Stream northward to their home. Under flame-trees
By Ahipara golf-course someone’s transistor tells me
The news again, and down on the hard sand
In letters large enough to match the man
The children have scrawled it: BIG NORM IS DEAD.[18]
Kirk had been able to progress his vision into a reality in the short time he was in office: in foreign policy, in culture, in race relations. Twenty-five harsh years later Bill Jefferies and his generation would still recall the vision and honour the man. As Wordsworth said at the time of the French Revolution:
Bliss was it in the dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Biographical Sources
Bassett, M. (2000) ‘Kirk, Norman Eric’, DNZB, Vol V, p.271-274.
Clark, M. (2001) Three Labour Leaders, Palmerston North.
Dunmore, J. (1972) Norman Kirk: A Portrait, Palmerston North.
Eagles, J. & C. James (1973) The Making of a New Zealand Prime Minister, Wellington.
Garnier, T., B. Kohn & P. Booth (1978) The Hunter & the Hill, Auckland.
Hayward, M., (1981) Diary of the Kirk Years, Wellington.
Endnotes
1. W. Jefferies (2001) ‘Kirk’s Prime Ministership 1972-1974′, in Clark (2001), p. 107-116.
2. Kirk (1969) p.10.
3. Kirk (1969) p.12-14.
4. Recorded by T. Bollinger 2/5/96.
5. W.B. Sutch (1966) Quest for Security in New Zealand: 1840-1966, Wellington p.426.
6. This was his response to a question in a Stout Research Centre Seminar at which the author was present.
7. Kirk (1969) p.14.
8. I. McGibbon (ed) (1993) Undiplomatic Dialogue, Auckland, p.31
9. Dunmore, p.41.
10. F. Corner (2001) ‘Kirk Presents a New Zealand Face to the World,’ in Clark (2001), p.146.
11. Quoted in Jeffries (2001) p.111-113.
12. While it is true that the European cultures were often only formally articulated in the nineteenth century, their roots usually go back many more centuries. See E. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger (1983) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge.
13. Quoted in Garnier et al p.193-5.
14. Eagles & James, p.27.
15. Eagles & James, p.229.
16. B. Gustafson (2000) His Way: A Biography of Robert Muldoon, Auckland, p.157.
17. K. Eunson (2001) Mirrors on the Hill, Palmerston North, p.161.
18. C.K..
Stead (1983) ‘Twenty Two Sonnets: 1 (1 September 1974),’ Poems of a Decade,
Auckland, p.42.