A Civilized Community: A History of Social Security in New Zealand
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A Civilized Community: A History of Social Security in New Zealand
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Overview
A history of social security in New Zealand.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781775580010 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/1998 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 324 |
| File size: | 578 KB |
Read an Excerpt
A Civilised Community
A History of Social Security in New Zealand 1898â"1998
By Margaret McClure
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 1998 Historical Branch, Department of Internal AffairsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-001-0
CHAPTER 1
'Fortune Is So Capricious': The Precedents For Social Security 1898–1928
Introduction
The Old-age Pensions Act 1898 acknowledged the hazardous nature of life in the new world, and the insufficient resources of many immigrants at the end of their working lives. The pension took the sense of blame out of poverty, recognising poor old people as worthy members of the community who deserved both sustenance and dignity. In place of the uncertainties and stigma people experienced when they applied for charitable aid, pension law provided clearer criteria of eligibility and a defined level of income; old people now knew what was due to them. In its spirit and principles, this first pension set a precedent for the more comprehensive social security system of the 1930s.
The momentum of the old-age pension was short-lived, however, and its very success hindered government appraisal of other causes of poverty. Succeeding governments too easily relied on the myth of New Zealand's humanitarian status and failed to acknowledge the continuing poverty in 'God's Own Country'. Premier Richard Seddon's sentimental evocation of community support which would span a lifetime 'from the cradle to the grave' was not pursued as a comprehensive policy by any government before the Depression, and the development of pensions in the early twentieth century was erratic and reluctant. The civil spirit of the late nineteenth century seems to have dwindled while the community rested under the fame of what it had achieved and remained blind to what it had not. Political inaction over pensions through these years was more significant than any achievements. Governments were not only complacent, but also wary of the significant precedent set by granting a pension to one group in the community, and when pressed to act, they made minimal gestures. The state's failure to extend pensions to some very poor groups in the community meant that in hard times many people were still reliant on the secondary and more discretionary system of charitable aid.
'Fortune is so capricious'
The existence of poverty in the new world dismayed nineteenth-century Pakeha. The immigrant propagandists who encouraged English labourers to a new country had described a workers' paradise where 'everything betokened prosperity', and newcomers hoped that they had turned their backs on hardship. This early immigrant society took pride in its youth and vigour, and even as emigrants stood waiting to leave the old world observers commented on their stature. A Daily News correspondent watching emigrants on the station at Maidstone in England in 1879 claimed, 'It seems that ... the best men, the best instructed, the most muscular, in every sense the most valid men, emigrate, leaving the old decrepit, and inferior behind'.
Life in the new world brought comparative wealth for many colonists. Early immigrant letters and published pioneer tales celebrated the fact of meat on every table, and the distance from the shadow of the workhouse door. Some immigrants, however, faced hardship and misfortune. Labouring work was often irregular and under-employment was a common feature of colonial life. Farm work came in seasonal bursts. Manufacturing enterprises were small and struggled against foreign competition, and increasingly put off men to employ women and boys at lower wages. Building and construction went through cycles of boom and bust; as a contemporary commented, 'There is probably work to be got somewhere, but the impoverished worker, if left to himself, may find the somewhere hard to reach'. Even those who succeeded in establishing the colonial dream of home, garden and small farm sometimes found that their idyll was not permanent. High mortgages and poor harvests could undo years of work and the expectation of security in old age. One colonist wrote to Sir George Grey in 1890:
I have for the last four or five years been pained to see the sons of other settlers, most of them New Zealand born lads, having ... to go to Australia and America to look for work, work to give them bread, and in many cases bread for their fathers and mothers, who have spent halt their lives in cutting out homes for themselves and hoping that in their old age God would spare them to have enough to live on saved from their toil.
Maori insecurity was more severe. War and the confiscation of productive land devastated Maori communities and undid their earlier successes in cultivation and trade. The insistent attempts of settlers and the state to buy up the land which still remained in Maori hands left many Maori as landless, itinerant workers; Claudia Orange has written that 'settler interests obliterated almost all considerations of Maori welfare'. The arduous work that Maori took on, and their susceptibility to European diseases, further undermined whole communities.
From the earliest days of Pakeha settlement governments were reluctant to take on responsibility for people in need. An ordinance introduced in 1846 made families financially responsible for their own members, and central government reaffirmed this principle in the Destitute Persons Act 1877. But this law achieved little in practice, and the state subsidised benevolent societies and local hospital and charitable aid boards to give some assistance to people who had no family or insufficient family resources. The Neglected and Criminal Children Act 1867 provided institutional care in industrial schools for the children of impoverished or irresponsible parents, and training to enable children to work to support themselves at sea, on farms or as domestic servants from the age of twelve or thirteen onwards. The Hospitals and Charitable Institutions Act 1885 systematised hospitals and charitable aid boards, and their provision of health care and charitable relief for the poor. People who were helpless and poor (especially the old) were maintained within an institution. Others such as widows, deserted wives and their children, and the families of the unemployed could be granted 'outdoor relief': this meant relief outside an institution in people's own homes, usually payment in kind rather than in cash: food rations, rent relief or coal.
The charitable aid system was imperfect. Funding varied from province to province, and administration depended on the personalities of local governing board members and the sympathy or antagonism of the relieving officers who interviewed applicants for relief. Homes for the elderly were spartan and sometimes filthy, and to many people they retained the nightmarish character of the old-world workhouse. The methods of assessing eligibility for outdoor relief reflected the charitable aid board administrators' distrust of the behaviour of poor people; applicants had to bring a letter of reference from a 'respectable person' and answer searching questions. Applying for charitable aid was demeaning, and immigrants felt it was a return to old-world begging when they had hoped for new-world independence.
The reluctant, suspicious nature of charitable aid's ethos was epitomised by Duncan MacGregor, the first Inspector of Hospitals and Charitable Aid from 1886. MacGregor was a powerful spokesman in New Zealand for the theories of 'scientific charity' that were strong in England and the United States in the late nineteenth century. He opposed the sentimentality that led to indiscriminate charity, and advocated a 'rational philanthropy' which granted assistance only to deserving people who would profit most from it. He suspected that most of the poor were a feckless, lesser breed of people, and made an extraordinarily thorough tour of New Zealand in 1888 to inspect the homes of those who had been granted charitable aid. MacGregor opposed outdoor relief and central government's role in assistance to the poor, believing that these taught men and women to rely on government and 'disbelieve the scripture, "He that will not work, neither shall he eat"', and claimed that 'we mortals have the capacity to consume the solar system on such terms'. In his view, 'Society attempts to cheat both God and the Devil by giving money out of ... taxes, and soothes its conscience by thinking it is providing for the poor; whereas in sober fact it is merely drugging itself and poisoning them'. And although he regarded poor old people as the 'deserving poor', he believed that the only answer to their needs was within institutional care where they could be supervised.
The old-age pension
Despite MacGregor's antagonism to central government involvement in providing income assistance there were others who advocated a fuller role for the state. Although the state had been reluctant to take on the support of individuals, it had already taken an active role in opening up the country: it had shaped the flow of immigrants, distributed land, established telegraphs and telephones, built roads, railways, bridges and ports, and set up a national education system. The Fabian reformer William Pember Reeves could claim by 1890 that 'the State is more and more'. The Liberal Party's accession to power in 1891, and Reeves's innovative drive, brought a wave of further state intervention: factory legislation, work-place arbitration and land reform. A broader conception of the state's powers was also advocated by newly emancipated women who had gained the vote in 1893; both the National Council of Women of New Zealand and the Women's Christian Temperance Union argued for old-age pensions among other social reforms.
The notion of the state's duty to ameliorate poverty was strengthened by late nineteenth century Western reform movements. In England, Charles Booth's analysis of the London poor showed 'the other country' within a civilised nation, the third of the population that lived in poverty not of its own making. Booth encouraged a more realistic appreciation of the struggles of working-class families in which wage-earners were often under-employed. In a period when poverty was a subject of intense discussion, his claims that most of these poor workers could not be blamed for their poverty contributed to a marked shift away from laissez-faire individualism. In New Zealand, Booth's reform ideas were well known and his writings were tabled in Parliament. Colonists were influenced by the social reformer John Stuart Mill and English Fabians; they read the writings of the American land reformer Henry George, and in Dunedin bought out the stocks of Edward Bellamy's 1887 Looking Backward, a Utopian romance set in a state-controlled paradise.
While a range of people sought charitable aid – men who had lost work, women who had lost a husband's support, children who had been abandoned – it was old people who first captured sufficient attention and sympathy to stimulate the government to improve on its treatment of poor citizens, and consider a state pension for ordinary people. The number of old people was growing rapidly in the colonies: in New Zealand the number of men and women over 65 grew by about 20 per cent between 1891 and 1901. When Edward Tregear, the Secretary of Labour from 1892 to 1910, attempted to match job-seekers with work available around the country, he and his officers saw that older men were unwanted in the workforce, and were excluded from contractors' gangs where competition was 'grinding and ruinous'. While most younger men found employment in the improving economy of the mid-1890s, older men were visible and pitiable figures stumbling along the roadsides. Tregear planned ideal rural farm communities where old men would contribute to their sustenance by joining in gentler women's work, poultry raising and gardening. But by 1896 he recognised that the number of old men who could be absorbed by the State Farm system was minimal, and that it was impossible to find appropriate work for all the aged. Helen Staveley, the officer in charge of the Women's Branch of the Labour Department, had similar problems placing older women who were experienced in household duties and willing to do any work 'no matter how small the pay', but were overlooked by employers who preferred young women for domestic service. Tregear was sympathetic to the plight of these elderly workers, and advocated the principle that aid to the aged have an element of reciprocity rather than charity, for they 'deserved well of the colony by previous long and hard service'.
Germany had introduced a social insurance scheme for old age in the 1880s, and Denmark instituted a non-contributory scheme in 1891. These precedents showed that action on old-age pensions was feasible. In 1894 New Zealand's Liberal government set up a select committee to examine possible schemes for New Zealand. The committee recommended an old-age pension for men and women, and claimed that the nature of employment in New Zealand was too precarious, 'one week in work and another out of it', to enable working men to contribute to a pension fund. It advocated a fund 'provided entirely by the State'.
The idea of a pension for old people was argued around the country, in pubs and back gullies and through long sessions in both houses of Parliament, over the three years from 1896 to 1898. These debates centred on issues which would recur throughout social security's development: the tension between individual responsibility and community responsibility for poverty, and the effects of a pension on people's character. Opponents of state pensions emphasised the despicable qualities of poverty and dependence, depicting the poor as 'skulkers, malingerers' and 'dead-beats'. Instead of a pension they advocated the reform of charitable aid or a return to the earlier idea of an insurance scheme, which Harry Atkinson as Colonial Treasurer had advocated in 1882 and 1883. Despite evidence from England that working men were unable to maintain their payments on insurance policies right through their lives, opponents of pensions argued for an extension of friendly societies and contributory insurance schemes, and denounced non-contributory state pensions. They argued that pensions would discourage thrift and encourage carelessness, and would 'tend to destroy our civilisation'.
Supporters of a pension argued that the community must recognise the diversity of colonial experience, and accept hardship and failure as a common fate – not as cause for blame. As one advocate claimed, 'The only necessity for a pension Bill is that fortune is so capricious, circumstances so various, family history is so extraordinary, calamities sometimes come down upon people nobody knows how – from this variety of circumstances it is necessary that something should be done.' Pension advocates described the continuous hardship of a working man's life, and the difficulty of saving while providing for a family on £1 5s earned in intermittent weeks of the year. For the working man with five children, said John Hutcheson, 'thrift is a mockery'. Another argued that a state pension was consistent with the immigrant values of self-reliance and vigour, a renewal of pioneer gallantry in which the sturdy carried the weaker members on their backs through the waves to shore.
The pension was conceived with a sense of a citizen's rights and in opposition to the humiliation of receiving charity. A pension would reciprocate a colonist's social and financial contribution to the community: poor old people had 'borne the heat and burden of the day' and 'built up the colony'. Workers had also contributed to the nation's taxable wealth in customs taxes which government levied on everyday goods. Legislators intended the pension to be seen as an annuity. The title of 'pension' rather than 'relief' was important because it acknowledged a lifetime of toil; it would replace the charity of the workhouse or family, and the cold charity of the world. Supporters compared an old-age pension with other civil pensions, and claimed there should be no humiliation in receiving a state pension when judges and sailors were already recompensed in old age for their earlier services.
* * *
The Old-age Pensions Bill was enacted in November 1898. A small regular pension would be payable to every person 65 years and over, subject to certain qualifications. To prevent an influx into New Zealand of old men and women attracted by the pension, applicants were required to have been residents of the colony for 25 years, with only two years' total absence during that time. To emphasise the dignity and respectability of pensioners, and as a reflection of fears of granting spending money to unworthy recipients, an attempt was made to distinguish between deserving and undeserving applicants. Criteria for moral disqualification from the pension included imprisonment for four months or on four occasions for an offence serious enough to have involved potential imprisonment for twelve months or more; a male applicant must have supported his wife and family, and not have deserted his wife for more than six months; a wife was not to have deserted her husband and children. More ambiguous was the stipulation that the applicant be 'of good moral character', and have for the five years preceding the claim been 'leading a sober and reputable life'. A pensioner's conviction for drunkenness would lead to temporary forfeiture of the pension; an habitual drunkard would suffer cancellation of his or her pension. Applicants were to present their claims to a stipendiary magistrate for assessment in open court.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Civilised Community by Margaret McClure. Copyright © 1998 Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Acknowledgements,
Abbreviations,
Introduction,
1 'Fortune is so Capricious': The Precedents for Social Security, 1898–1928,
2 'A Civilised Community': The Origins of the Social Security Act, 1929–1939,
3 'A New-born World': War and Reconstruction, 1940–1949,
4 Wealth and Welfare, 1950–1969,
5 Generous Years, 1970–1983,
6 The Reluctant State, 1984–1998,
Conclusion,
Bibliography,
Index,
Copyright,