Class Formation and Political Change: A Trans-Tasman Dialogue

The retreat from aggregate representations of class has opened the way for a reassessment of its role in both Australia and New Zealand's history. This article focuses on two recent New Zealand research projects to review our traditional interpretations of class-based coalitions, interpretations that have often been deeply shaped by the Australian and British scholarship.1 The first and oldest of these projects has related political change nationally and locally to analyses of demographic class formation in New Zealand's oldest industrial suburbs and its most densely populated urban region, southern Dunedin; the second set out to explain the dominance of conservative parties for most of the twentieth century by investigating electoral behaviour in ten provincial towns.2 The article concludes with some comparative remarks on how this 'class work' might inform similar studies in Australia. Labour in New Zealand: The Historiographical Inheritance Just three decades ago, most scholars in New Zealand thought that the major social, cultural, and political fault-lines ran along a rural-urban axis, but that within the towns, as if in a minor key, social class generated the most significant and enduring divisions.3 As early as 1948, R.M. Chapman set out to provide a sociological taxonomy of electorates. A number of his points are relevant to this article. First, within the towns, he categorised working-class electorates - for he was mainly interested in explaining electoral behaviour - by their poverty, although he was rather vague about defining it, and separated the four largest towns from the fast-growing provincial ones. Dunedin, the smallest of the main towns by 1928, had five electorates, whereas the largest provincial town in that year straddled two electorates, each of which contained some rural ridings. He also distinguished farming from rural electorates and introduced a category for those rural seats dominated by extractive industries such as coal mining or forestry.4 It was axiomatic, of course, that New Zealand was a capitalist society and that the stratification or class structure of all towns was rooted in the industrial division of labour. This was the conventional wisdom and nobody doubted that from 1840 onwards New Zealand had been but an outpost of British capitalism with a 'normal' class structure.5 How to characterise family farmers occasionally caused a problem, but much of the best work ignored them and focused, as W.B. Sutch did in The Quest for Security (1966), on the colonists' attempts to remove the sources of insecurity and the consequences of poverty. That the colonial economy came to be dominated by the owners of the largest runs and estates, and those who financed them, remains indisputable. The origins and aspirations of this colonial bourgeoisie remains both under-researched and contentious, but we cannot ignore those arguments. The large number of relatively unskilled seasonal labourers on which this economy depended have been largely ignored. So have the semi-subsistence modes of production that were transplanted around the world. The local census, anxious to measure the extent and pace of industrial growth, ignored such aspects of the local economy just as it also ignored the Maori.6