Onward With Executive Power: Lessons from New Zealand 1947-57.

• Author: Alley, Roderic
• Position: Book review

ONWARD WITH EXECUTIVE POWER: Lessons from New Zealand 1947-57

Author: Harshan Kumarasingham

Published by: Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, 2010, 193pp, $27.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

How suitable that this title's cover portrays a sombre Peter Fraser shaking hands with an ebullient Sid Holland during the handover of office following Labour's defeat at the polls in 1949. Fundamentally different--Fraser genuinely internationalist, reformist and ever mindful of inter-generational needs; Holland the archetypal provincial Canterbury politician determined to place New Zealand on a 'sound business footing'--these warhorses, nevertheless, displayed at least one remarkable similarity. This was the alacrity with which they exploited New Zealand's sparse constitutional restraints to better centralise power within one pair of hands. How was this possible--even allowing for the political cunning, at times extending to the unscrupulous, that was readily evident in both individuals?

This study's answer is not reassuring, conveying a not distant New Zealand contemptuous of rule-governed politics. Emerging from world wars and Depression, this was a society demanding material results from its politicians and not unduly bothered as to how they achieved them. Compensating for insular drabness was fealty to British royalty and the symbolic trappings of what the Westminster model offered to impart some sense of belonging, national reassurance, and wider recognition as a better version of what was British.

Harshan Kumarasingham's adaptation of a still recently completed doctoral thesis explores these themes and finds the decade under study one where an already highly streamlined constitutional order was shorn back still further. Resistance to the erosion of such checks and balances as existed against a rampant executive was limited. However, the author underlines the barely remembered Sir Cyril Newall (Governor-General from 1941 to 1946) as one who took the 1917 Letters Patent seriously, where the monarch's representative could backstop an unwritten constitution by following the Bagehot dictum of asserting a right to be consulted, to encourage and to warn political masters. As is described, Newall was fully tested here by Fraser's 1945 abolition of the country quota, and where he confronted the prime minister over concerns expressed to him by farmer interests. Preferring that the issue of abolition first get tested by the electoral...