No, the state did not ban speaking te reo in 19C schools.

While considering Elizabeth Rata's recent Research Report into the History of New Zealand Education -- which I recommend, by the way -- I remembered a long-ago 'Cue Card' that appeared here on the topic of Education, contrasting liberal, conservative, and libertarian views on the subject:

The 'liberal' view [of education] is that all that is wrong with state education can be fixed with more money, better staff-student ratios, greater control of curriculum, more qualified teachers and more paperwork. But as more and more money spent on education has shown that more of the same just produces more and more failure.  

The view of conservatives is generally that public education needs to be made more efficient. With more efficiency, they say, 'delivery' of education will be better.

Libertarians however maintain that state education is all too efficient: it has been ruthlessly efficient at delivering the state’s chosen values. After generations of indoctrination at the knee of the state we now have several generations who are 'culturally safe' and politically correct -- ‘good citizens’ unable to use the brains they were born with, unthinkingly compliant in every respect with the values in which they've been totally immersed; braindead automatons to whom group-think is good and for forty-two percent of whom the reading of a bus timetable or the operation of a simple appliance is beyond them.

In previous decades the government's chosen values included banning the speaking of Maori in schools; speaking Maori in schools is fast becoming compulsory, along with the teaching of the ordained versions of Te Tiriti and the inculcation of the ideas of multiculturalism and the inferiority of western culture. Governments and their values change, but their use of their factory schools for indoctination doesn't.

The government's recently chosen values are "fairness, opportunity and security." We know that because [then-Prime Minister] Helen Clark said so. Orwell would have recognised these words, as he might the rigid orthodoxies of what passes for teacher training. "What happens in our schools is a very big part of shaping the future of New Zealand," says Ms Clark in the same speech, acknowledging that this is the way to make subjects out of citizens. Libertarians agree with Ms Clark's statement, which is precisely why we want governments away from the schools and away from control of curricula. 

Both Liberals and conservatives endorse state control of schools and of curricula, and they both seek to be the state. Libertarians don't.

They still don't.

But I made an error in the above 'Cue Card,' which Ms Rata's Report neatly corrects.

It is of course a historical fact that it's wasn't so much that the state banned the speaking of Māori in schools. What actually happened, as she reports, is that from George Grey's Education Ordinance of 1847 on, Māori were insisting that their children be taught in English, the lingua franca of the day. This is from Māori parents, Māori politicians, and Māori tribal leaders.

This is unsurprising. English was the entry into 19th century industrial technology – metallurgy for the new era of factories, rail, road and steamships, animal husbandry for livestock farming, and soil cultivation for grain and fruit production. Older crafts included leatherwork and blacksmithing. Combined with the English language, technological knowledge added to the already established Māori involvement in national and international business and trade.

The 1858 Native Schools Act continued the 1847 Ordinance's requirement for English language and industrial training. ...

The purpose of the Native village schools was to ensure that children would be bilingual: Māori at home and in the community and English acquired at school. English was a foreign language to many children so second language teaching methods and English content was used.

These were schools located in Māori villages, at the specific request of Māori elders, often with Māori parents attending classes as well, And in those "native schools" as they were called 

W. Rolleston, first inspector of Native Schools ... noted [in 1867] widespread dissatisfaction with the syllabus and with Māori as the language of instruction.

There was too much of the Bible taught, and too little of other subjects. They were taught moreover in their own language, whereas what they wished to learn was English.

The 1867 Native Schools Act directly addressed these concerns. Māori Members of Parliament supported implementing the Act. Karaitiana Takamoana (Eastern Maori) noted that the missionaries had been teaching the children –

“for many years, and the children are not educated. They have only taught them in the Maori language. The whole of the Maoris in this Island request that the Government should give instructions that the Maoris should be taught in English only”

Four more petitions to Parliament followed: In 1876 from Te Hakairo and 336 others; in 1877 from Renata Renata Kawepo and 790 others; and in 1877 from Riripi Ropata and 200 others. 

The schools gently prised education from the hands of missionaries into those of the state. They were funded by the taxpayer, with control of government funding and the school management transferred to village committees "at least 5 who are elected annually by parents of the children at the school." But above all:

The [Native Schools] Act required teacher competency, English language instruction, and syllabus quality:

The English language and the ordinary subjects of primary English education [said the Native Schools Act, 1867, S. 21] are taught by a competent teacher and that the instruction is carried on in the English language as far as practicable.

In short, while training Māori in English was one of the state's chosen values, it was at the express invitation of Māori parents, patriarchs, and politicians -- and was not to the exclusion of the Māori language itself.

* * * * 

Ms Rata discusses this topic and much more in a fascinating podcast interview with the NZ Initiative's Michael Johnston:

#ANZAC: "And year after year, the numbers grow fewer, who remember what it was we're not to forget"

 

'Sacrifice,' by sculptor Rayner Hoff, inside the Australian War Memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park

"It's gratifying, in a way, that we start Anzac Day every year with a commemoration of a shambolic dawn landing that kicked off a pointless and wholly tragic military campaign that snuffed out some of the best young men of two young nations. It's not a victory march, but a sobering commemoration of the destruction of war.
    "This is healthy. This much is good.
    "'Lest we Forget!' we say"
    "It's said every year. And yet year after year, the numbers grow fewer who remember what it was we're not forgetting....

"THE MYTHOLOGY OF ANZAC is that the battle at the Dardanelles gave birth to two nations. If that’s true, it is an odd birth, fathered out of failure by way of disaster. 

"In the end, the attempted occupation [of the Gallipoli peninsula] was decided upon partly because in any bureaucracy once plans are begun they are very hard to stop ..." 

[T]he reason they embarked [was] not to beat the Hun, but to save the Czar [and to] gift Constantinople to Russia.... as an altruistic gift to an 'ally' who was the most autocratic in Europe, who had shown no sign of earning British trust ... the price for the sacrifice to be paid for in the blood of those Australian, New Zealand and British young men and their families.... 

    "Such is the code of sacrifice under which the decision was made to go.... [in pursuit, said Churchill, of] 'a victory such as the war had not yet seen.'
    "It never would. It never could. 
    "Instead, it all turned to omnishambles. The only thing in the end about which anyone had anything about which to boast was a successful and well-executed withdrawal. 
    "It was a bloody mess that achieved nothing, that could achieve nothing, purchased at the price of a wholesale sacrifice of young lives that could have meant something. It was a total unmitigated disaster, but at least, now, dear reader, some reason for the whole, sordid shambles might be clearer. 
    "The reason however for commemorating the shambles as the botched 'birth' (in some way) of our nation is very much less so."

~ composite quote excerpted from NOT PC's posts 'Lest we forget what?' and 'But what were the ANZACs fighting for, Grandad?'

"Everyone wants growth. But will ... they have the courage to upset vested interests on their own side?"

"The problem is that politics is not about good intentions, but trade-offs and results. Everyone wants growth. But will ... they have the courage to upset vested interests on their own side? The government still has promising changes in the pipeline on housing and infrastructure. But elsewhere? ...

"[H]ere’s [a] strategy, one advocated in a fascinating essay from 1989. The author opens by arguing that 'politicians tend, worldwide, to avoid structural reform until it is forced upon them by economic stagnation, a collapse of their currency or some other costly economic and social disaster. Politicians tend to close their minds as long as they can … because they believe that decisive action must inevitably bring political calamity upon their governments.'

"But the writer goes on to make precisely the opposite case: 'Political survival depends on making quality decisions; compromised policies lead to voter dissatisfaction; letting things drift is political suicide.'

"Voters, he argues, 'ultimately place a higher value on enhancing their medium-term prospects than on action that looks successful short-term but which sacrifices larger and more enduring future gains … There is a deep well of realism and common sense among the ordinary people of the community. They want politicians to have the guts and the vision to deliver sustainable gains in living standards.'

"Strategically, he also advises pursuing reform in 'quantum leaps' rather than small steps; 'otherwise the interest groups will have time to mobilise and drag you down.'

"The whole 35-page paper, 'The Politics of Structural Reform',' is worth reading, not least because so much strikes a chord today ('Inadequate politicians see instant popularity as the key to power. If their rating slips, they feel threatened. They look for policies with instant appeal to create continuous public bliss').

"But what is most striking is that the writer is a Labour politician: Roger Douglas, who, as minister of finance — equivalent to [the UK's] chancellor — led New Zealand through one of the most bruising periods of free-market reform in any nation’s history (a programme known as Rogernomics) and saw his party re-elected with an enhanced vote share at the end of it.

"Starmer’s Labour came to power by taking the opposite of Douglas’s advice. It told the public that spending would rise, growth would rise but taxes and borrowing would not. That no one would have to feel any pain. And when that turned out to be a lie, it got hammered for it.

"Wherever the government goes next, it is unlikely to be down a path of Douglas-esque, business-friendly radicalism. But I believe — I have to believe — that the public will still reward politicians who are honest about our country’s problems and visibly try their damnedest to fix them. Because if not, what hope have we got?"

~ Robert Colville from his London Times column 'https://archive.fo/E7HXi'

"It’s NZ’s own Emancipation Proclamation!"

Good to see more folk acknowledging that Waitangi Day should also be recognised as NZ's Emancipation Day. 

Posted on the 6th, by David Farrar, was this:

Today we celebrate the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi – a day which should be called Emancipation Day. ....

We should celebrate 6 February 1840 as the day slavery was made illegal in New Zealand and tens of thousands of Maori slaves gained the rights of British citizens.

Yes, we should. After all, as someone has been saying for a while now:

It’s NZ’s own Emancipation Proclamation! 

It's a heatwave?

"It's like a heat wave

It's burning in my heart

I can't keep from burning

It's tearing me apart"

~ Martha and the Vandellas

TERMINOLOGY IS CHANGING. WHAT USED to be called "swamps" are now wetlands. Heavy rain is now an "atmospheric river." A violent storm is now a "weather bomb" And extreme and large-scale warming events in the ocean have been dubbed "marine heatwaves."

It's said that recent flooding in New Zealand—a "glimpse into the future of climate change"—is due to our present La Niña summer and an increase in these "marine heatwaves." First arriving in the summer of 2017/18, they are now said to be "commonplace."

One of these "new" marine heatwaves helped cause the warm summer of 2018/19. Rainfall that summer "was below normal (50-79% of the summer normal) to well below normal (<50 % of the summer normal) in Northland, Taranaki, Nelson, Tasman and the West Coast as well as parts of Marlborough, Manawatu-Whanganui, Otago and Southland. Above normal rainfall (>120% of the normal) was observed around Hawke’s Bay and parts of Gisborne. Rainfall was near normal elsewhere (80-120% of the summer normal rainfall)."

The new arrival combined with La Niña conditions to get the blame for the unseasonably hot 2017/18 summer. Rainfall that summer was "highly variable from month to month and heavily impacted by two ex-tropical cyclones during February. Summer rainfall in the South Island was above normal (120-149%) or well above normal (>149%) over Canterbury, Marlborough, Nelson, and Tasman, and near normal (80-119%) to below normal (50-79%) around Otago, Southland, and the West Coast. North Island summer rainfall was above or well-above normal around Wellington and much of the upper North Island, and near normal or below normal over remaining North Island locations including Taranaki, Manawatu-Wanganui, Hawke’s Bay, and Gisborne."

2022/23's summer was "a summer of floods and droughts, and very warm," with "a protracted marine heatwave that peaked during January." Cyclone Gabrielle of course arrived a month later when the Antarctic Oscillation "dipped negative."

Summer of 2023/24 was warm, with another marine heatwave and, for most regions, drier. The narrative of causation is already breaking down.

As it did nearly a century ago in 1934/35 when New Zealand experienced its hottest summer because of a massive warming events in the ocean. Or 1938. But this time the floods came in winter. 

SURROUNDED BY OCEAN AND WITH warm air and occasional cyclones brought down from the tropics, flooding is this country's most frequent form of natural disaster—and always has been.

Māori legend includes a story of a great flood. Tāwhaki, god of thunder and lightning, was almost murdered by his brothers-in-law. When he had recovered, Tāwhaki took his warriors and their families and built a fortified village on top of a mountain. Then he called to his ancestors – the gods – for revenge, and they let the floods of heaven descend. The earth was overwhelmed by the waters and the entire population perished. This was known as Te hurihanga i Mataaho (the overwhelming of Mataaho – one of the places that were destroyed). ...

Māori history tells of a pre-European flood in the Tūtaekurī area of Hawke’s Bay in which a party of 50 men, women and children were drowned when two streams rose. 

The early European settlers failed to realise the intensity of rainfall in New Zealand and how rapidly rivers could rise.  The New Zealand Company's very first settlers were dumped on the Hutt Riverside in Petone to begin building Britannia, their new town. It was only a matter of weeks before they discovered what a stupid idea this was, relocating after a few months of regular flooding to Thorndon.

The South Island’s broad gravel-bed rivers were particularly deceptive: they were usually shallow enough to wade across, but when in flood their currents were powerful. By 1870, just three decades after European settlers began arriving in large numbers, rivers had been responsible for 1,115 recorded drownings. Drowning became known as ‘the New Zealand death’.

The greatest flood ever observed on the Clutha River Mata-Au, New Zealand’s largest river in catchment area and volume of flow, occurred in 1878. It was the result of a succession of weather systems bringing in warm wind and rain, which melted the winter snow cover. At the height of this flood, more than 5,700 cubic metres of water poured down the lower reaches of the river every second. ... A 1938 account described the Clutha in flood:
[i]ts angry surface [was] strewed with dead horses and cattle, houses, bridges, furniture, timber and farmstacks. Some days the spring sun shone with a ghastly pleasantry on the devastated towns, while 100 miles away more heavy rain on the mountains was preparing still greater strength for the flood. ...

Twenty-one people were killed in the Kōpuawhara flood of 1938 – the largest number of fatalities from a 20th-century New Zealand flood. It is a sobering reminder of the dangers of building on low-lying land close to rivers.

A reminder we're still receiving.

And those tropical cyclones just keep arriving, as they did long before CO2 levels were rising. The fifty-four people who died in the 1968 Wahine disaster, for example, are one tragic reminder of that. That was Sub-Tropical Cyclone Giselle. And we've been through several alphabet's worth of cyclones since then, everything from Bola to Hola, and worse, to come around again to Gabrielle's letter 'G.'

And there have been many worse cyclones in the South Pacific over the centuries before human industry began. But they either didn't hit these islands, thank goodness, or there was no-one here to record them.

WHILE THE NARRATIVE WAS breaking down on the ground in 2023, it was nonetheless ramping up in the world of climate modelling. A worldwide study (above) published in 2025 claimed '2023 Marine Heatwaves [Were] Unprecedented and Potentially Signal a Climate Tipping Point.' It's that study generally referenced by warmists here. Its "breathless tone is familiar," says Anthony Watts ("new records"! "unprecedented in intensity, persistence, and scale"! "may portend an emerging climate tipping point"!) but its "underlying logic is seriously flawed."

But as Watts argues, "context matters. Particularly in climate, which has cycles that span millennia, not just decades."

The foundational flaw in this study is its timescale. The research relies on satellite data beginning in 1982. That gives us about 40 years of observational history, which is virtually nothing in terms of Earth’s climate system. Prior to satellite coverage, comprehensive, high-resolution global measurements of sea surface temperatures simply didn’t exist. Claims of “unprecedented” events must be framed within that very limited context. As I’ve said before, declaring a “record” based on such a short window is like calling a coin flip streak a “trend” after four tosses.

Ocean temperatures fluctuate naturally over decadal, centennial, and even millennial scales. Our current observational capacity doesn’t cover even half of one oceanic oscillation cycle, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which paleoclimatology suggests runs as long as 50-70 years. To suggest a climate “tipping point” based on this short dataset is not just premature—it’s scientifically irresponsible.

Yet here we are. The marine heatwave cycle in the Southwest Pacific Ocean (our area) has an estimated return period of 141 years. Yet the longest-running evidence for this, says the study, is the coastal station in Leigh, whose records go back just 57 years.

Not just short on temporal context, but also on geographic. The climatic change is said to be global, due to increased global CO2, yet "the authors cite “region-specific drivers” for each major marine heatwave." 

In the North Atlantic, enhanced shortwave radiation and a shallower mixed layer were culprits. [Down here] in the Southwest Pacific, the heat was attributed to reduced cloud cover and increased advection. The Tropical Eastern Pacific was influenced by oceanic advection.

Notice anything? These aren’t unified, global changes due to increased CO2. They are local, meteorological, and oceanographic phenomena—exactly the kinds of natural variability we should expect in a dynamic system. The fact that these local causes are acknowledged undercuts the paper’s own argument for a singular, global cause rooted in greenhouse gas emissions.

Bad science and an unjustified extrapolation is the gist of this study and press release. Perhaps the most egregious leap comes in the suggestion that the 2023 marine heatwaves might represent a “tipping point” in the Earth’s climate system. The term “tipping point” implies a sudden, irreversible shift—a planetary point of no return. But what evidence is there for this? The authors provide none beyond the temperature anomalies themselves and vague references to mixed-layer dynamics.

No historical precedent is given. No paleoclimatic comparisons are offered. No quantitative thresholds are defined. It’s all speculation dressed up in technical language.

Meanwhile, as carbon emissions have been rising over this last century, rainfall has been going down, not up.

The highest frequency of global-scale extreme rainfall events occurred from 1960-1980 − when there were concerns about cooling. 

Since then, the frequency and intensity of rainfall events have “decreased remarkably” (Koutsoyiannis, 2020).

ALSO DECREASING—AND DECREASING REMARKABLY—is the world's s number of climate-related deaths.

One reason it's worth remarking is that severe weather events globally are themselves generally either decreasing or showing no particular trend. And that's not just me and climate scientists like Roger Pielke Jr saying that. It's the IPCC, who find no trends in flooding globally; no long-term trends in meteorological or hydrological drought; no upward trend either in so-called atmospheric rivers, and no upward trend in landfalling hurricanes or tornadoes either in the US or globally. 

None. 

And the US Govt, whose official metric records a general decrease in heatwaves since the 1930s -- or the international insurance industry, who record a decline in both US and European disaster-related losses. And the World Bank agrees. 

Meanwhile, even as alarmists talk about sea level rise inundating coastlines in the near future, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) records that ongoing sea level rise since 1880 amounts to only 240mm, i.e., just 17mm per decade -- measurable, but steady, and not accelerating -- and recent research shows many coastlines worldwide to be prograding rather than retrograding (i.e., shifting seaward) and at a globally-averaged rate of 260mm per year, reducing even this slow but steady threat. And the Department of Atmospheric Science at CSU records that cyclone frequency in the South Pacific (the very reason we're here talking about this stuff) has, since 1980, been declining. (Which is welcoming considering so many more people are living and building in these otherwise threatening places, in part because governments have foolishly absorbed so much of the financial risk.)

But the other main reason for climate-related deaths to fall so remarkably is the very thing warmists decry so loudly and so monotonously, i.e.,human industry, which is the very thing that keeps folk safer from the dangerous weather events that do occur. 

It was the Netherlands' rising wealth, for example, that allowed them to build the dikes and dams that protected their sub-sea level provinces from flooding. And mortality from extreme heat in the US for example, as heat waves have recently kicked up and more and more people have moved to live in desert regions, has fallen pretty much all over the country over the past 50 years. In this case, it's because of things like air conditioning and better medicine that more and more people can afford.

And in the general case, as Bjorn Lomborg explains is succinctly, it's "because richer and more resilient societies are much better able to protect their citizens." 

The climate catastrophists don’t want you to know this [points out energy advocate Alex Epstein] because it reveals how fundamentally flawed their viewpoint is. They treat the global climate system as a stable and safe place that we make volatile and dangerous. In fact, the global climate system is naturally volatile and dangerous—we make it liveablethrough development and technology—development and technology powered by the only form of cheap, reliable, scalable reliable energy that can make climate liveable for 7 billion people.
As the climate-related death data show, there are some major benefits—namely, the power of fossil-fuelled machines to build a durable civilisation highly resilient to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on.

It's not just that GDP is correlated with fewer climate-related deaths and disasters, although it is; it's that the whole relationship between economic progress and human flourishing itself is actually causal. The richer and wealthier a society is, the better able it is to train the engineers and to raise the capital and to devise and build the infrastructure that allows human beings in all the many places on this fragile planet to master all the many things that nature is ready to throw at us.

And that's one phenomenon that really is global.

Here's Martha:

"The New Zealander prides himself on his common sense"

"The New Zealander prides himself on his common sense—that 'settled truth can be attained by observation'[10] and is 'knowable and graspable by our own experience.'[11]

"For the most part this is held so assuredly that 'to reason against the [evidence of sense and memory] is absurd'; these are held as 'first principles, and as such fall not within the province of reason, but of common sense.' [12]

"This was the argument of the enlightened Scotsman Thomas Reid, whose 'last phrase stuck' and came to New Zealand with Scottish settlers. 'It helped to produce a cultural type that some consider typically American, but which is just as much Scottish' and equally applies here: 'an independent intellect combined with an assertive self-respect, and grounded by a strong sense of moral purpose.'[13]

“'The teachings of these Scots became known as the philosophy of Common Sense: it was the real basis of the Scottish Enlightenment,'[14] and probably our own."

~ yours truly from my post on that other blog 'New Zealand: A Nation of the Enlightenment'

[10] McCosh, J. (1875). The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutchinson to Hamilton. London: MacMillan & Co, 194

[11] Herman, A. (2001). How the Scots Invented the Modern World. New York: Three Rivers Press, 262

[12] Reid, T. (1823). An Inquiry into the Human Mind: On the Principles of Common Sense. London: Thomas Tegg, Cheapside, 28; Herman, 2001, ibid, 262

[13] Herman, 2001, ibid, 263-4
[14] Fry, M. (2025). How the Scots Made America. New York: Macmillan

Yes, let's keep piling on Anne Salmond.

"Salmond claims to have been guided by a list that reads like a Who's Who in 

Postmodernity... What she does not discuss is whether these thinkers are sound guides."

Anne Salmond, who recently called for thinkers to engage with open rather than closed minds—arguing that "other cultures may have insights that elude us" —was recently called out by Dane Giraud for the very same reason: specifically, for ignoring the insights of Enlightenment culture. The only position that actively suppresses inquiry, pointed out Giraud, is her own. "What is more antithetical to free thought'" he asked rhetorically, "than declaring whole categories of knowledge off-limits to criticism because they belong to the wrong culture."

Salmond, of course, has form. Her own favourite cultural whipping person is Western. Her writing, said Michael King of her 2003 book Two Worlds, gives "a strong impression that, rather than attempting to represent both cultures dispassionately, Salmond [is] straining to case every feature of Māori behaviour in a favourable light and many features of European in an unfavourable one.” 

But in doing so, she fails to learn there either. Reviewing Salmond's work, historian and former Waitangi Tribunal director Buddy Mikaere reckons Salmond's work "turns  our tipuna into cardboard caricatures." Rather than learning deeply from other cultures, he says, she offers only a "one-dimensional characterisation." For her and several other Pākeha historians, he says, "Māori [are] invariably depicted as deeply spiritual beings who only ever acted on the basis of high-minded principles. Pākehā, on the other hand, [are] mostly unprincipled rogues or fools whose behaviour was always motivated by racial arrogance, greed and self-interest."

Such is the accusation, it will be remembered, Salmond throws at the Pākehas of the Free Speech Union. It apparently never gets old.

It begins to look as if Salmond is unable to learn much from either of the Two Worlds of which she writes.

What also never gets old is re-reading the demolition of Salmond's work by the grand old man of New Zealand history Peter Munz, who destroyed her whole platform of post-modern posturing and epistemic duplicity in his 1994 review of her first major book. In her work she is guilty, he says, of not just "disinformation, but of actual misrepresentation."

Salmond claims to have been "guided by 'Heidegger, Foucault, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Habermas, [Mary] Hesse, Derrida, Eco and others.' ... [a] list [that] reads like a Who's Who in Postmodernity ...  all of whom would have helped to confirm her in her prejudices and methods."

What she does not discuss ... [is] whether [these thinkers] are sound guides. It appears that she is under the impression that these postmodern thinkers have solved the problem as to how different systems of knowledge or belief are related or, rather, not related to one another. Could it be that she is simply ignorant of the fact that there is much modern thought which rejects these facile, politically motivated doctrines of Foucault and Derrida, of Eco and Ricoeur? If she takes her stand with these people, she ought, to say the least, have produced some evidence that she has also examined the counter-arguments and, perhaps, found them wanting. But as things stand, she appears simply as an  uncritical camp-follower — which is a poor show for a professional anthropologist.

Furthermore, 

the explanations of the differences in systems of knowledge that these thinkers provide should not, I trust, be considered final. In the pre-postmodern world of good sense, belief or knowledge systems are distinguished according to whether they are true or false. ... What is really at issue and what she is trying hard to disguise by her way of constructing the past, is the brute reality of cultural evolution. ... 

[I]nstead of jumping on the postmodern bandwagon which is nothing more than a belated overreaction to the Victorian age, it is time scholars like Salmond caught up with modern thought and revised their view of evolution.

The limitations of the early mind are the result of isolation and of absence of the kind of contact which would expose beliefs and taboos to criticism. Societies and cultures, which for demographic and political reasons are exposed to contact with others, are more likely to question their own traditions, change their taboos and develop eventually a more universal system of knowledge — that is, beliefs which are more than validations or legitimizations of their own parochial cultures. In a nutshell, this is the heart of cultural evolution.

An evolution — a progress — only made possible by being open to new ideas. Says Munz:

Darwin or no Darwin, we are all descended from black Eve, and every single culture which has ever existed is a departure from the culture of black Eve, whoever she was. [I am using the notion 'black Eve' metaphorically to indicate that all existing cultures are descended or transmuted from a common stock.] ...

I would suggest ...  that one can rank the distance of societies from black Eve according to their exclusiveness. The earliest societies were totally exclusive and would not admit people other than those who belonged to their descent group. Next came societies which would admit people through marriage; and at the other end of the scale, farthest removed from black Eve, there are societies which potentially include anybody who wants to be included. Ranking in these terms is completely neutral and value-free. All it says is that while one cannot 'become' a Maori, one can 'become' a New Zealander, and that, for that reason, there is a structural difference between these two kinds of societies, and that that difference defines the distance of these societies from black Eve and that the actually exclusive structures are earlier than the potentially inclusive structures. Since this criterion is neutral, there can be no question of 'progress', only of progression. ...

[W]hatever criteria one likes to choose, the distances from black Eve can be ascertained because evolution, including cultural evolution, is a reality of life. 

If one wants to understand the coming together of two different cultures, as Salmond does, one must take into account, as Salmond does not, the different distances they have moved away from the earlier forms. Salmond has explicitly rejected evolution. 'Contemporary literature on traditional thought is still bedevilled", she writes, 'with implicit sometimes explicit evolutionism.' If she had her way, it would soon cease to be so bedevilled! I suppose she rejects cultural evolution in the face of overwhelming evidence because by making all cultures more or less equal she thinks she can heal wounds and pour oil on troubled waters and be 'politically correct'. But in the long run, there is no point in burying one's head in the sand: a distortion of reality brings about its own nemesis even if one does not quite yet know what shape that nemesis will take.

Can one say 'Ouch!'? 

Seeking to find a te reo word to describe the unfamiliar concept of property rights has made for a disastrous confusion

"Article Two of Te Tiriti promises to preserve tino rangatiratanga; courts have interpreted this in various ways to mean that chiefs (Rangatira) retain some kind of chiefly power. But Te Tiriti itself fails to fully clarify of what that power consists. Lawyers since have taken full advantage of this imprecision ... 

"In seeking to find a te reo word to describe the unfamiliar concept of property rights, [Te Tiriti's authors have] unfortunately conflated a legitimate recognition of an individual right to property with an analogy to feudalism and a non-existent claim to a collective right. But feudalism is a busted flush. And "the expression 'collective rights' is a contradiction in terms.”

"This then makes for a disastrous confusion. Confusion, because the intent of Article Two is to impart property rights, an individual right. But the reference to "chieftainship" makes the promise about collective tribal rights over land with the tribes' rights embodied in a chief.  Disastrous because Te Tiriti should have treated all Maori as individuals instead of as members of a tribe. But it really does nothing of the sort except by implication.

"Instead, as written, it cemented in and buttressed the tribal leadership and communal structures that already existed here —encouraging the survival of this wreck of a system until morphing, as it has today, into this mongrelised sub-group of pseudo-aristocracy: of Neotribal Cronyism. 

"This is not what was aimed at, but it is what was written. But the law cannot protect a non-existent right. As [former Chief Justice] William Martin wrote in 1860, in seeking to understand the intent of the authors,

'This tribal right is clearly a right of property… To themselves they retained what they understood full well, the "tino Rangatiratanga,""full Chiefship," in respect of all their lands…"'

"This is not trivial. This is why sovereignty, was ceded. This is what we must understand. Tino rangatiratanga ('a right of property') under kāwanatanga katoa (the 'complete Government') of the British Queen.

“'EVEN THE 'TINO' OF the Māori version is better understood in this context,' argues [Ewen] McQueen. 'It does not mean that the chiefs’ authority is unqualified in a government sense. Rather it is Henry Williams’s translation of how the chiefs would retain possession of the lands, forests and fisheries. The English version emphasised such possession would continue ‘full exclusive and undisturbed.’ Williams has rendered this concept as ‘tino’ rangatiratanga. It is about Māori retaining full agency over their land and resources. It is not a statement about unqualified political sovereignty.' [Emphasis mine.]

"So 'rangatiratanga' relates to ownership. 'Tino' gives force to this relationship, giving it the force of a property right."

~ Yours Truly from my post 'Rangatiratanga means "Ownership"'

"The American Revolution brought about enormous net benefits not just for citizens of the newly independent United States but also, over the long run, for people across the globe."

"[T]he American Revolution ... brought about enormous net benefits not just for citizens of the newly independent United States but also, over the long run, for people across the globe. ...

"[W]hat specific benefits came about because of the American Revolution. There are at least four momentous ones. They are all libertarian alterations in the internal status quo that prevailed, although they were sometimes deplored or resisted by American nationalists.

"1. The First Abolition: Prior to the American Revolution, every New World colony, British or otherwise, legally sanctioned slavery, and nearly every colony counted enslaved people among its population. ... [T]he Revolution’s liberating spirit brought about outright abolition or gradual emancipation in all northern states by 1804. ...

"[E]mancipation had to start somewhere. The fact that it did so where opposition was weakest in no way diminishes the radical nature of this assault upon a labour system that had remained virtually unchallenged since the dawn of civilisation. Of course, slavery had largely died out within Britain. But ... Parliament did not formally and entirely abolish the institution in the mother country until 1833.

"Even in southern colonies, the Revolution’s assault on human bondage made some inroads. Several southern states banned the importation of slaves and relaxed their nearly universal restrictions on masters voluntarily freeing their own slaves. Through resulting manumissions, 10,000 Virginia slaves were freed, more than were freed in Massachusetts by judicial decree. This spawned the first substantial communities of free blacks, which in the upper South helped induce a slow, partial decline of slavery....

"2. Separation of Church and State: ... With the adoption of the Constitution and then the First Amendment, the United States become the first country to separate church and state at the national level. ...

"3. Republican Governments: As a result of the Revolution, nearly all of the former colonies adopted written state constitutions setting up republican governments with limitations on state power embodied in bills of rights. ...

"4. Extinguishing the Remnants of Feudalism and Aristocracy: ... The U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on titles of nobility may seem trivial and quaint to modern eyes. But such titles, still prevalent throughout the Old World, always involved enormous legal privileges. This provision is, therefore, a manifestation of the extent to which the Revolution witnessed a decline in deference throughout society. No one has captured this impact better than the dean of revolutionary historians, Gordon Wood, in his Pulitzer Prize winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution. He points out that in 1760 the “two million monarchical subjects” living in the British colonies “still took it for granted that society was and ought to be a hierarchy of ranks and degrees of dependency.” But “by the early years of the nineteenth century the Revolution had created a society fundamentally different from the colonial society of the eighteenth century.”

"One can view this transition even through subtle changes in language. White employees no longer referred to their employers as “master” or “mistress” but adopted the less servile Dutch word “boss.” Men generally began using the designation of “Mr.,” traditionally confined to the gentry. Although these are mere cultural transformations, they both reflected and reinforced the erosion of coercive supports for hierarchy, in a reinforcing cycle. ...

"Global Repercussions ...

"The impact of the American Revolution on the international spread of liberal and revolutionary ideals is well known. Its success immediately inspired anti-monarchical, democratic, or independence movements not only in France, but also in the Netherlands, Belgium, Geneva, Ireland, and the French sugar island of Saint Domingue (modern Haiti). What is less well understood is how the Revolution altered the trajectory of British policy with respect to its settler colonies. Imperial authorities became more cautious about imposing the rigid authoritarian control they had attempted prior to the Revolution. Over time they increasingly accommodated settler demands for autonomy and self-government. In short, the Revolution generated two distinct forms of British imperialism: one for native peoples and the other for European settlers.

"This was immediately apparent in Canada. ... [with] Parliament’s Constitutional Act of 1791 divid[ing] Quebec into two colonies, Upper and Lower Canada, each with its own elected assembly. ... Although Australia upon initial British settlement in 1788 began as a penal colony with autocratic rule, agitation for representative government emerged early and was consummated with the Australian Colonies Government Act of 1850.

"British New Zealand was originally part of the colony of New South Wales in Australia, but it was separated in 1849 and got a representative government three years later. South Africa fell under sustained British rule in 1806. By 1854, the Cape Colony had its own parliament. ...

"Conclusion ...

"[R]evolutions are always ... messy and produce mixed results. It also explains why so few revolutions actually bestow genuine benefits. ... The anti-slavery movement, first sparked by the Revolution, is one clear case.

The American Revolution is another such case. The embattled farmers who stood at Lexington green and Concord bridge in April 1775 were only part-time soldiers, with daily cares and families to support. Their lives were hard. The British redcoats they faced were highly trained and disciplined professionals serving the world’s mightiest military power. Yet when they fired the “shot heard ’round the world” that touched off the American Revolution, they initiated a cascade of positive externalities that not only U.S. citizens but also people throughout the world continue to benefit from today, more than two centuries later. They had no hope—indeed no thought—of charging for these non-excludable benefits. Nonetheless, they took the risk. What better reason to celebrate the 4th of July?

~ Jeffrey Rogers Hummel (Professor of economics at San Jose State University and the author of Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War), from his article 'Benefits of the American Revolution: An Exploration of Positive Externalities'

Land, the rights and wrongs of it

"Although the Pakeha have progressively acquired land, they have always argued about the rights and wrongs of it. That remains true even today. Many Pakeha New Zealanders sympathise with the view (which is taught in schools) that the Maori have been shamefully dispossessed. They join Māori land marches and protests. The present Government declares itself sympathetic to the Māori case, and looks to compensate where past wrongs are clearly manifest. But Pakeha go on buying Māori land. And though Māori insist that for them the land has a spiritual value which the Pakeha does not understand they go on selling it. Their sense of its spiritual value is always sharpest once the material value has been realised — and that has always been the case."

~ C.K. Stead, from his review of Witi Ihimaera's 1986 novel The Matriarch

Price controls, rationing, and war. I'm pretty sure Chris Trotter doesn't want those either!

UNFORTUNATELY CHRIS TROTTER, WHO OFTEN writes so well, can be found peddling another dangerous historic myth. This one, this time, about the Great Depression. (about which there are many, many myths, most of which would be destructive if believed.)

If were to be believed — if his recommendations were to be followed, on the back of his myth-making — it may well cause another.

Writing to advocate that the Luxon government be more spendthrift, Trotter says 

When the 1929 Wall Street Crash sent the economy of the United States into a tailspin, the experts of the day called upon the administration of Herbert Hoover to apply the accepted remedies. Accordingly, Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, responded with his now infamous instruction to:

“Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system.”

In following this advice, however, the Hoover Administration inflicted extreme hardship on millions of Americans, and in so-doing not only liquidated itself, but also came alarmingly close to liquidating the whole capitalist system. It took an American aristocrat, Franklin Roosevelt, with more intelligence and a bigger heart than Hoover and his conventional wisdom, to rescue American capitalism from itself.

Mutatis mutandis, the response of successive New Zealand governments to the Great Depression mirrored the conventional economic thinking of Mellon and his advisers. Saddled with obligations it could no longer afford, the Reform and United Parties cut, cut, cut, and cut again – unleashing massive deprivation and misery across the country. This time it was Labour that came to capitalism’s rescue.

He could not be more wrong.

And wrong in virtually every sentence.

LET'S START WITH MELLON'S alleged "instruction" to "liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate" —liquidate all monetary assets in summary, at whatever price may be gotten for them, in order to "purge the rottenness out of the system."

Fact is, it would have, if that programme were followed — as it had been following the much greater crash in 1921. (Sometimes called "the forgotten depression," or "the crash that cured itself.") But the “quote” was not Mellon's but Hoover’s, his president, and it was him contrasting the “liquidationist” programme of the type successfully followed in 1920 with the “interventionist programme” he intended to follow instead. 

It didn't work. 

The more Hoover tried to carry out his interventionist programme from 1929 to 1932— inflating wages, trying to raise falling prices, spending like a drunken merchant-man, adding enormous debt to a government all but crippled by the inability to pay it down — the more things spiralled down into the mire.

From 1929 to 1932 Hoover did the exact opposite of sitting on his hands as he should have done. Instead, he was virtually Keynes-Lite, as he himself boasted in his 1932 presidential campaign:

We might have done nothing [said Hoover]. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action.... No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times.... For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered.... They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.
    Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for ... "the common run of men and women." Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom.... We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction.

Featured in Hoover's plan were increased taxes, lowered interest rates, huge deficits, public dams, public works, restrictions on immigration and trade, and government regulation of banking, finance, industry and labour markets.

Hoover's heavily interventionist programme — doing everything to raise prices when demand had already collapsed — failed miserably. Unlike the solution found in 1921 (to lower prices to meet lower demand), which saw things turn around within eighteen months, things were still dire four years after the 1929 crash when Trotter's hero Franklin Roosevelt took over.

And then, with even less intelligence and much less honesty, Roosevelt doubled down. 

In the 1932 election campaign, Franklin Roosevelt accused Hoover (accurately) of “reckless and extravagant” spending, of thinking “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,” and of presiding over “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.” 

And that was all true.All of it—all the spending, all the alleged “stimulus”—all an attempt to keep up wages and prices and keep the engine ticking over in the manner to which Trotter et al suggest we do today with far less reason, and much less room to manoeuvre. . 

And it had failed. It had failed spectacularly.

it failed just as monumentally when Roosevelt tried it.

By 1933, when Roosevelt took over in the States, nearly 13 million Americans were unemployed. Yet when the Second World War began, after eight years of further intervention by Mr Roosevelt (whose advisers conceded their New Deal was based on the “Hoover New Deal”), nearly 12 million were still unemployed (unemployment had never dropped below 20% for the whole of the decade) and Roosevelt was to embrace a world war as a way to get the unemployed out of his hair.

We do NOT want any sort of repetition of that!

BUT WHAT ABOUT TROTTER'S  argument that the Reform and United Parties here had followed the liquidationist programme and failed, and had to be rescued in 1932 by Michael Savage's Labour.

Well, Trotter has finally hit on the one fact in his screed in which he's right. Gordon Coates's and George Forbes's  Reform and United Parties did inadvertently follow a semi-liquidationist programme. Despite their own interventions, and despite the US's disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs, they did allow prices to fall, which (along with Australia and the UK adopting similar programmes) did eventually allow green shoots to appear here by 1932. So that by 1935 when Savage's Labour was elected ... well, things were already on the upswing.

It wasn't at all that "Labour that came to capitalism’s rescue," as Trotter alleges. 

It was, instead, that capitalism, even in the muted form allowed to it, allowed Labour to take the credit for a job already done, and to spend up heavily — helping poorly-informed writers like Trotter to confuse effect for cause.

Fat is: the First Labour Government simply reaped the benefits of the recovery that was already under way. As economic historian John Gould outlines:

From 1934 overseas prices were recovering and the country [New Zealand] could not help but be better off. The [Labour] Government benefited, too, from a balanced budget, a buoyant public revenue, and a healthy reserve in London, inherited from its predecessor. It made good use of these propitious circumstances. Its initial step was simply a Christmas bonus for the unemployed – a symbolic if small pledge of humanitarian readiness to cut corners. 

It went on, in the busy session of 1936, to restore wage and pension cuts, to bring in a basic wage, a 40-hour week, and a major programme of public works; it built up the unions by bringing back compulsory arbitration and adding to it compulsory membership of unions; it embarked upon a great housing construction programme; it brought in a price scheme for dairy products which guaranteed the farmer a reasonable income; it tried, without notable success, to encourage secondary industry so that there would be more jobs for wage earners. 

The Government's opponents never tired of inquiring, “Where will the money come from?”; the Government's answers were never explicit, but in fact a good deal of the money came from State credit created by the Reserve Bank. This institution, by an Act of 1936, had become a fully governmental body; where these expensive programmes could not be financed out of current revenue or overseas funds, the Government simply borrowed from its own bank. Neither the housing programme nor the guaranteed price could have been financed without such credit. Labour had collected most of the Social Crediter's votes in 1935, and this, which was far from their desires, was their reward, a policy a good deal more Keynesian than Douglasite, however.

The cornerstone was set in the arch in 1938. Already the government had shown its concern with public health and welfare; in 1938 the two were integrated into a “social security” system by which the State guaranteed medical advice, medicines, hospital services to all whatever their means, and a wide range of pensions to all likely to suffer hardship. In part the scheme was financed by special taxation, in part from general revenue. It was, among other things, a ready vote winner in 1938; its attractiveness, together with the Government's energetic record and the National opposition's general nervelessness, proved irresistible.

But the spending, while just as irresistible, proved too much. The Labour boom ended in another bust, confusing later writers who were less than careful at their economics. Because the Labour victory in 1938 came just in time ...

Hard on the heels of the victory came tribulation. Thanks in part to public works construction ... draining overseas reserves, in part to a flight of private capital from the country, scared by a government that still seemed “socialistic”, in part to a sag in prices for exports jeopardising the guaranteed price system, and in part to the unsympathetic attitude shown by London financiers to some £16 million of debt shortly falling due, things looked ominous in 1939. The debt was converted on rather stringent terms; exchange and import controls were applied. 

But the real saviour [for Labour] was the war that broke out in September. Once again farm exports were at a priority and the mobilisation of resources for the war effort permitted the introduction of more thorough controls than would have been tolerable in peacetime.[1]

From 1929 to 1935 the United/Reform programme was semi-liquidationist, and it semi-succeeded.

It succeeded to such an extent that from 1935 to 1938, Labour could take the credit, apportion blame elsewhere, and deliver profligacy as from a horn of plenty.

And then, as Margaret Thatcher observed so sagely many years later, like all socialists they began to run out of money.

What saved Labour however was price controls, rationing, and war. 

I do trust that Mr Trotter does not want any of that either.

---

[1] John Gould, ‘1935-49: The Labour Regime,’ in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, ed. A.H McLintock, 1966

Bob Jones: "proof, if any were needed, that God doesn’t make the same mistake twice."

"I detested Bob Jones for many years. My loathing had its genesis in the run-up to the 1975 election when Bob was the brains and financial brawn behind billboards mushrooming across the capital depicting Labour leader, the able, affable and unfailingly courteous Bill Rowling as a timid mouse. It was a malicious propaganda campaign that contributed hugely to the landslide victory of National’s coarse, unfailingly belligerent Rob Muldoon. ...

"[W]hen our paths finally crossed [in 1979] at a cartoon exhibition ... I sported a flaming-red lumberjack beard and had a ginger Jimi Hendrix Afro to disguise my receding hair that wasn’t fooling anyone – least of all Bob. He said, “You’re losing your hair, old man, and you’re fat!” I told Bob that next time I drew him I would make him look even more like PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, who he uncannily resembled. ...

"Early on I had no reason to report on Bob in my Listener columns, but in 1983, disgusted with the National government’s wage and price freeze and authoritarian ways, he formed the New Zealand Party with the express intention of removing his old chum Rob Muldoon from office. This left me no option but to cover him. He was great copy, amusing and disarmingly candid to the point where the news media often had to protect him from himself.

"Bob invented Fake News long before it became a thing. After Muldoon called the snap election in 1984, [his] New Zealand Party swung into action and selected an impressive raft of candidates. Bob allowed television news crews a quick peek from the door into their campaign headquarters in downtown Wellington – it resembled the Houston space flight control centre on steroids. Gorgeous women sat at clacking keyboards and flickering screens while fax machines and printers buzzed and hummed. Bob told me later that computer companies renting office space from him were induced to provide the electronics and he provided the women. It was an elaborate ruse designed to demoralise National and it worked. Their normally well-oiled machine corked and hamstrung morale, and discipline crumbled. ...

"I attended a rowdy lunchtime speech Bob gave standing on a trestle table in the smoko room of the local freezing works. Taking questions from the floor Bob was asked by a burly slaughterman if New Zealand’s problems stemmed from our short, three-year parliamentary term, meaning economic policy changed all the time, and as a result 'interest rates went up and down like a whore’s drawers.' 'Can I just correct you there,' grinned Bob, 'trust me on this, whores don’t wear drawers!' Deafening applause, the stamping of boots on concrete and hearty laughter rolled on for ages. ...

"Despite running the best campaign, saturation advertising and Bob’s noisy, colourful presence ... David Lange’s Fourth Labour Government romped into office. Despite getting 12 percent of the vote and contributing to National’s crushing loss, the NZ Party failed to win a seat. [But it was their manifesto that Lange's Government implemented - Ed.] ...

"Bob’s death, while a shock, was not entirely unexpected – for most of his life he burnt millions of candles at both ends. There was no one else like him and there will never be anyone like him again, proof, if any were needed, that God doesn’t make the same mistake twice."

~ Tom Scott from his obituary ahead of today's memorial service for Bob Jones: 'Tom Scott farewells Bob Jones'. Read on there for Steve Braunias's postscript on the very best of Jones's twenty-four books ...

Did you know you can see shit political economy from space? [update 2]

Auckland: Eden Terrace's workers' cottages on the right, Mt Eden's California Bungalows 

beginning over the railway line lower left. (Photo showing the area before the Dominion Rd flyover,

from the Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 580-9498']

Did you know you can see shit political economy from space? Here below is the Black Hole of North Korea at night, too poor to have enough lights to switch on.

And you can see shit political economy in Auckland too, in aerial photographs. To be accurate: you can see shit political economy in the form of the effect of tariffs. ...

Let me explain.

Workers' cottage, Freeman's Bay

Victorian Villa, Grey Lynn

The first houses built here en masse were workers' cottages and then villas. When you fly over the city, you can see a ring of these villas around the inner parts of the city — especially so in Ponsonby and Grey Lynn — built right up until the First World War.

But after that war, something changed. It seemed to some that the United States had rescued Europe from its Great War, and had a lifestyle to which an increasingly prosperous population could aspire. It was the Jazz Age — the age of radio, electrification, automobiles, and the mass production (Fordism!) that made them affordable. In love with Americanism, in housing here it became the decade of the California Bungalow.

California Bungalow, Mt Eden

A villa is not a bungalow.  Like the California lifestyle it aped (and which the world would fully fall in love with after another war), the California Bungalow was freer than the more uptight Victorian villa, and reached out for sun and air. Their broad spreading gables form a second ring around the city in what we now call the "tram suburbs," a ring from Pt Chev through Mt Albert, Sandringham, Mt Eden, Greenlane, Ellerslie, and right around to the border of Meadowbank/Remuera.

Their popularity was immense. 

Their takeover seemed unstoppable. 

Until something happened.

That something involved a tariff. Brought in by US Senators Smoot and Hawley, their Smoot Hawley Tariff Act raised tariffs on imports by an average of twenty percent. Their intention (we're told) was to quarantine American manufacturers from the effects of the 1929 stock market crash. What it did do instead was to spread the misery and contagion around the globe, kicking off the Great Depression and all but shutting down international trade for nearly two decades.

John Bell Condliffe's "wagon wheel" showing the dramatic death spiral of world trade
following the disastrous implementation of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act

New Zealand economist J.B. Condliffe has a world-famous diagram describing the accelerating downward spiral of trade as every country and trading bloc in the world put up their own tariff walls in response. It was one of the most successful acts of intentional self-destruction in all modern history.*

Almost at a stroke, we fell out of love with the US.  In Britain, still the head of something called an Empire, an Imperial Preferences Act was swiftly passed making trade within the Empire roughly tariff-free — allowing many Commonwealth countries to escape the Depression first. (Not so the US of A, which had to wait until the death of a President and the end of a war to boom again.)

And trade amongst the Empire, rather than outside it, meant many more British goods replacing the previous love affair with American. Not least in housing. If the twenties was the decade of the California Bungalow, then the thirties was the decade of the English Cottage/English Revival. We can see these crabby, restrained offerings around the outer parts of the tram suburbs. (And you can see all these styles described in the Auckland Council's 'Style Guide,' pp 14-24)

In insulating itself from the world, America had not only shot itself in the foot economically, it also lost its influence with the rest of the world. 

Turned out it was a not-so-great way to Make America Go Away Again.

* * * *

* Until April 2, 2025, that is, with what Johan Norberg calls "the longest suicide note in economic history."

UPDATE 1: David Farrar notes that our average two-percent tariff rate (world's second-lowest after Singapore) becomes in the mind of the Toddler-in-Chief a twenty-percent tariff. (I use the word "mind" loosely.)

Johan Norberg has more on the effects of what he jokingly calls '"Liberation Day June 17 1930":

As he says, " I think the US was heading for trouble even before, but it certainly deepened the depression and spread it around the world, with devastating effects for European democracies. We would have had a depression anyway, but perhaps not a great one."

UPDATE 2: 

"Thomas Rustici identified the role of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in exacerbating the Great Depression, particularly through its effects on trade, banking failures, and economic contraction. His seminal work, *Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression: A General Equilibrium Analysis* (2005), presents a compelling argument that Smoot-Hawley initiated a trade war, triggered mass bankruptcies, destabilized the banking system, and led to deflation and depression. ... 

"Conclusion Rustici’s work provides one of the most comprehensive and rigorous explanations of how the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act triggered a trade war, bankrupted farmers and businesses, destabilized the banking system, and created deflationary collapse. His analysis is central to understanding how protectionist policies can create economic catastrophe by disrupting credit, trade, and monetary liquidity. His insights remain critical in debates over trade policy and economic crises."