The Prime Minister our nation forgot

By TIM WATKIN

At a Labour Party conference in Wellington, about 1980, pictures of the great Labour leaders were hung behind the stage - images of paternity, pride and philosophical roots.

Biographer Michael King remembers his amazement at one omission.

"They had Walter Nash, they had Mickey Savage, they had Norman Kirk. I said to David Exel, who was in charge of Labour Party public relations, 'Good Lord, why isn't Peter Fraser there?' He said, 'I don't think Peter Fraser's that highly regarded.'

"So there certainly was a period where Fraser's reputation became almost entirely eclipsed within both the Labour Party and the country. I thought then, and I still think, that was outrageously inappropriate because you could argue he's a person of much greater stature than all those other leaders."

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that most New Zealanders would be vague, if not blank, if asked about Fraser.

It's staggering because Fraser, in political columnist Colin James' words, "saw to the erection of the world's first comprehensive welfare state." He set up New Zealand's free, universal education system, was minister of health when universal health care and superannuation was introduced, was so successful in leading the country through the Second World War that Winston Churchill famously said New Zealand "never put a foot wrong," and then helped to form the United Nations in 1945. Through the 40s he had more power than any New Zealand politician before or since.

At last some of Fraser's time-shrivelled stature is about to be regained with the publication of his long-awaited biography, Tomorrow Comes the Song, a title drawn from the 1901 hymn Be Strong by American Maltbie Davenport Babcock, a verse of which Fraser kept in the front of his diary through the dark days of 1940.

The biography is a product of perseverance by two of the country's most prominent historians: King, who began the research, and Michael Bassett, who took over that research and wrote the book.

Born into poverty in the Scottish Highlands, arriving in New Zealand as a 26-year-old socialist firebrand in 1911, Fraser was, Bassett argues, "the country's greatest ever Prime Minister. His impact on the lives of the people in his adopted country was probably greater than that of any other 20th-century person."

Bassett and King vouch a few ideas as to why he is not remembered more widely. Fraser ended his career in a fight over conscription. His support for it, despite going to prison during the First World War to oppose it, was seen by many as a betrayal. Further, he suited the austerity of the war years but, like Churchill, was a man out of his time after the war.

"The public's quid pro quo for having given all that energy to a war, is that they wanted to whoop it up afterwards. Fraser wasn't a whooper-upper," Bassett says.

Tomorrow Comes the Song had its genesis nearly a quarter of a century ago when King was introduced to Sir Alister McIntosh, who had been head of the Prime Minister's Department from Fraser through to Keith Holyoake in the 1960s. It was 1977 and King would talk with McIntosh, in fading health, collecting stories of Fraser's career, particularly the war years. Over the years King interviewed Fraser's other surviving colleagues as and when he could, but time and again applications to fund his work were turned down.

"People make decisions about priorities," he says, "and I think many people decided, at the time that I applied anyway, that Peter Fraser wasn't an important enough figure to justify that."

The project stalled. King, even now without the book, having lent his copy to Jim Bolger, sighs and says "it's lain on my conscience for a long time.

"To cut a long story short, it got bogged down. I was ill in the mid-80s and stopped work for about 18 months. When I was well again I had to take commissions to actually earn money and Fraser went further and further on to the backburner.

"In the end I decided that rather than reactivate it myself, I'd approach Michael Bassett, who by the mid-90s had a lot of experience in political history and biography."

Disappointed as he is at not being able to write the book himself, he's grateful to Bassett for taking it on. He believes he would have placed more emphasis on behavioural considerations had he written it, but the book's political analysis is stronger for Bassett's hand.

Bassett is supping a beer on a humid afternoon, sitting beneath a bookcase both high and wide, which, full of biographies and histories from around the world, is testament to King's faith in his expertise. His smile is wide, remembering how he asked King every time they met how the Fraser book was going.

"Eventually I paid a high price for my queries because I was sitting at home one day and the telephone rang and it was Michael. 'Look, I can't finish Peter Fraser. Will you do it?'

"Soon after agreeing, six large creamy New Zealand Dairy Board boxes turned up in my front room and they were stacked in my office for years. They were full of all the stuff that Michael had collected, and what a treasure trove," Bassett says with delight.

For all that, Bassett did a huge amount of research himself, searching through the Labour Party's newspaper from 1914 until 1950 and the papers of Nash and union leader F. P. Walsh, among others. He was frustrated at the lack of personal stories about Fraser, but that material doesn't exist and anyway, "Fraser's whole life was political."

Bassett, a former Te Atatu MP, has been wading through the swampy, largely untravelled ground of New Zealand's political history since he himself chose to become political history when he retired at the 1990 election. While not regretting his political career, he says leaving Parliament was the best thing he's ever done. He has since taught at universities in New Zealand and Canada, although he's recently stopped lecturing, and sits on the Waitangi Tribunal.

"I've been able to keep busy, more particularly to write. This is my fifth book in little more than 10 years."

King describes Bassett as a "participant observer," a role with a strong tradition in Britain, where political figures have gone on to write acclaimed histories and biographies, but almost unknown in New Zealand.

Bassett has specialised in prime ministers, writing the life stories of Sir Joseph Ward, Gordon Coates and the Dictionary of Biography's entry on Norman Kirk. Despite being figures of huge significance, they are not fashionable in history circles, where the trend is for local and niche stories.

New Zealand, however, has never been a country that honours its political leaders. Wellington hides a few statues in quiet parks or behind old government buildings, and Auckland has the minimalist Savage Memorial at Bastion Pt, but as King notes down the phone from Washington D. C., "we are very hard on our politicians."

From a city filled with memorials to colonial fathers - Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln - whose names are more familiar to most New Zealanders than our own - Ballance, Coates, Fraser, for example - King says our "stronger leaders tend to be needed and tolerated by the electorate at the time, but not especially loved and not especially missed afterwards."

Bassett thinks the need to "trample on a few fingers" and New Zealanders' egalitarian suspicion of power means few successful politicians are lovable characters.

In a country where the names of past All Blacks fall from the tongue while past political leaders are seldom mentioned, Savage is perhaps the exception, captured in many minds as a photograph hanging over the fireplace or carrying furniture into that first state house with sleeves rolled up. But if the late 30s are remembered as our golden age and Savage as our King Arthur, Fraser is the forgotten Merlin.

Direct, arts-loving, uncharismatic and all-powerful - doesn't Fraser remind Bassett of Helen Clark?

"Yeah, a lot. Tough as old boots. Confronts a problem head-on. Thinking about the consequences if you don't deal with it. She has the same ability to look around corners that Fraser had and has the right mixture of direction and fear that all good leaders have."

The three most effective Labour leaders so far, he believes, have been Fraser, Kirk and Clark. But the greatest of these three, to paraphrase, is Fraser.

He was, Bassett says, central in turning a movement into a disciplined political force, and then into an electable government. He was the core tactician and publicist and got Labour elected for four consecutive terms between 1935 and 1949. Second World War veterans still remember him fondly and he was "at the high end of the rectitude scale."

King says, "Savage gets much of the credit for what the first Labour Government did, but he was the benign frontman, whereas Fraser was actually the operator. He was the engineroom and ensured the ideas became policy and the policy became legislation."

"To a considerable extent," says Bassett, "he was the Labour movement ... And in saying that I firmly believe that the 20th century, to a considerable extent, was the Labour century. All politicians, really from before the First World War through until 1984, are contending with the Labour Party arguing that the Government can do things, can make life better for people."

Until 1984 ... an intriguing feature of the book is the tense relationship between the author, as health minister in the fourth Labour Government, and the subject, Labour's first Minister of Health. Bassett readily admits he felt part of the story he was writing. Those two most reforming of governments are historically intertwined and as one of those who began unpicking the welfare blanket Fraser had wrapped the country in, Bassett personifies that historical link. It's hard not to see Fraser as part of a beginning and Bassett as part of an ending.

"I think that's a slightly simplified version of what happened," Bassett says. "I'm one of those who believes firmly that the goals the first Labour Government had are still my goals and funnily enough, while I don't agree with him on much of the detail of his policies, Roger [Douglas]'s for that matter."

The click from historian to politician is unmistakable. The analysis of the outsider battles with the justification of the insider. As Tom Brooking says in today's book review , "one is left with the sneaking suspicion that Bassett, whether consciously or unconsciously, is engaged in defending the excessive zeal of his own government's attempts to correct Fraser's mistakes."

Tellingly, when it comes to the fourth Labour Government's role in undoing the welfare state, Bassett points to the previous government ("Muldoon really put the final bricks in the saddle bag between 1975 and 1984, which really brought many aspects of Peter's welfare state crashing down") and the following government ("people have come to think of us as socially a skin-flint government largely because of what Ruth Richardson did after us"), as the culprits.

They are both strong points, but the argument that the first and fourth Labour governments only differed in method, not in aim, is not. The first Labourites were committed to social security that was universal and state-funded and an infrastructure that was state-owned. The fourth stands in stark contrast.

King, without hesitation, says, "It was certainly the Labour Party that consolidated it and gave the welfare state its modern shape and it was the Lange-Douglas Labour Government that started to dismantle it."

Bassett rejects the notion that their economic reforms opened the door for National's wider social reforms. But he does concede that Fraser would not have supported the fourth Labour Government's reforms and comes close to acknowledging its role in the end of the welfare state when he says, "In a way, we were the best government to introduce the welfare state in the first place and the best government to deal with it when it ran amok. We were at least dependent on and beholden to the people who would be most affected by the changes."

Later he adds, "I think 1984 will be seen as the beginning of a new dispensation between governments and peoples [in New Zealand]."

What is indisputable is that both governments shared a sense of purpose, unusual discipline, determination to be re-elected and reforming zeal unique in the 20th century.

Bassett ends the biography observing that "while the nature of the New Zealand economy has changed, and few now share Fraser's profound faith in beneficent intervention, the values underpinning today's civil society owe more to the first Labour Government, in which he was the pre-eminent figure, than to any other administration of the 20th century."

So do those values that were Fraser's legacy remain? King thinks not.

"Labour succeeded in forming a consensus right across party lines about those values. That consensus, of course, broke up in the 1980s and I think it's fair to say that we still haven't formed a new one."

Bassett, too, grants that those values have changed, but says Fraser's influence remains.

"In one sense, even the most dedicated Act person would say there is a bigger role for the state today than there was when Labour first came to power in 35 ... Every government from 1935 until 2001 accepts those values of a civil society. Fraser's hand is there, and it's the Labour hand."