Former Prime Minister Norman Kirk. Photo / NZ Herald Archives
Former Prime Minister Norman Kirk. Photo / NZ Herald Archives
Opinion by Trevor Richards
OPINION
Fifty years ago today, Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk stopped the 1973 Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand.
Frank Corner, Secretary of Foreign Affairs during Kirk’s Prime Ministership, has said that “Kirk could see that if he stopped the tour, he could lose the next election. But the tourdid not fit in with his view of what New Zealand should do in the world, and what its standing would be should it proceed.”
It was probably the first time that a New Zealand government had sought to change both the way New Zealand viewed itself and the way it wished to present itself to the world. It was a brave decision, and it engendered strong opposition, much of it absurd.
Jock Wells, the President of the Wellington Rugby Football Union called the tour’s cancellation “the worst news I have heard since 34 years ago when Chamberlain stated that England was at war with Germany”.
The incoming National government openly welcomed a resumption of rugby contact with racially-selected South African teams. Prime Minister Muldoon’s enthusiastic support for the 1976 All Black tour of South Africa resulted in around 30 countries, mostly African, boycotting the Montreal Olympics in opposition to New Zealand’s presence.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon. Photo / NZ Herald Archives
In 1981, the Springbok tour of New Zealand brought the country the closest it had come in the 20th century to civil war.
The 1976 and ‘81 tours are better remembered than the cancelled 1973 tour, probably because of their disastrous outcomes.
Yet in one major respect, it was the most important of the three, as it was the 1973 decision which heralded the beginning of a seismic shift in New Zealand society.
In the years following World War II, the country was largely rural, male-dominated and conservative. Pakeha citizens - well, most of them - believed that New Zealand had “the best race relations in the world”.
Abortion and homosexuality were illegal. Internationally, we identified with Empire. We were a country whose cultural landscape was dominated by rugby, racing and beer.
Until the mid-1960s, short back and sides were the universal hairstyle for men, and ladies were always expected to “bring a plate”. Within the space of a little more than two decades, all this changed.
By the time the fourth Labour government left office in 1990, we recognised Māori as tangata whenua and saw ourselves more as a South Pacific/Asian nation rather than as a territory of Empire. We were proudly anti-nuclear and anti-apartheid.
On abortion, New Zealand was pro-choice. Old laws discriminating against homosexuals had been repealed. These changes did not occur overnight.
It was a long and gradual process, but it had to begin somewhere, and if one was to put a date on when this change started to gather real momentum, it would be the election of the third Labour government at the end of 1972.
Two months after the tour’s cancellation, the HMNZS Otago sailed to Mururoa to protest against French nuclear testing in the Pacific. Prime Minister Norman Kirk told the crew of the Otago that they were to be “silent witness[es] with the power to bring alive the conscience of the world”.
In the same year, the Labour Government announced that from 1974, February 6 would be a national holiday known as New Zealand Day. With the exception of the 1940 centennial celebrations, this day had barely registered with most New Zealanders. A public holiday only in Northland, it was regarded as no more than a local event.
Kirk sought to change that, to make the day a celebration of New Zealand’s multiculturalism.
In March 1974, Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere visited New Zealand, the first time an African head of State had set foot on New Zealand soil.
In 1975 the Labour government set up the Waitangi Tribunal, providing a legal framework for the investigation and resolution of Māori Treaty claims. The third Labour Government was critical in initiating a number of the changes which laid the foundation for New Zealand’s shift into a more progressive social and political space, both nationally and internationally.
Approximately 3000 Māori land marchers crossed the Auckland Harbour Bridge in 1975 on the Northcote to Te Unga Waka Marae leg of the journey, which began at the Te Hapua settlement in the Far North and ended at Parliment. Photo / NZ Herald Archives
The cancellation of the 1973 Springbok tour had been one of the first steps in that process.
And the impact of the tour’s cancellation in South Africa? In 1995, Nelson Mandela told Norman Kirk’s son Phillip, that learning of the 1973 tour’s cancellation from his prison cell was the first time he thought that apartheid might actually end in his lifetime.
- Trevor Richards was the National Chairperson of the Halt All Racist Tours movement (HART) from 1969-80, and International Secretary from 1980-85
