On Thursday, August 07, 2003 8:20 PM I wrote: > as is Michael Savage (a blatant racist and a generally idiotic > > person). > > Not to be confused in that case with "Michael Joseph Savage", the first New > Zealand Labour Party Prime Minister in 1935. > My comment may be at least partially mistaken. In the latest issue of Revolution, published by the New Zealand Radical Media Collective (no. 21, August-October 2003), my friend Philip Ferguson writes:
"[The New Zealand] Labour [Party] was founded in 1916 and very quickly began campaigning for the "White New Zealand" immigration policy which was being developed by the Liberal and Reform parties. Labour MPs urged unions to adopt "White New Zealand" policies and, in the parliamentary debates over the 1920 Immigration Restriction Act, Labour MP after Labour MP rose to his feet to declare in favour of a "White New Zealand" and for the rigid restriction of immigration into New Zealand by people whose skin was not white. In those days, it was primarily Asians, especially Chinese, whom the "socialist" Labour Party wanted to keep out." (p. 12-13). This is an aspect of New Zealand Labourism which I did not study in detail, but Philip has. I do not know the exact position which Michael Joseph Savage took on the issue, which I could verify only by looking at the Parliamentary Hansard. I do know that racist attitudes, policies and institutions as regards Asian immigration existed already at least in the 1860s in New Zealand, and were quite common. James McPherson, a New Zealand worker who, according to Herbert O. Roth's research, wrote to the secretariat of the First International in London to warn British workers not to come to New Zealand, because there was a lot of unemployment and low wages in a recession, also expressed, according to my own research, racist views about the Chinese. This topic was also researched by a another friend of mine, Dr Charles Sedgwick, in his Phd thesis in Sociology at the University of Canterbury. But what I can say in favour of MJ Savage, is that he was certainly not an idiotic person, and cultivated Maori reformers, and that many workingclass people sympathised with him as a sort of benign "father of the people". Jurriaan
