TOMORROW COMES THE SONG: A Life of Peter Fraser.

• Author: HARLAND, BRYCE
• Position: Review

TOMORROW COMES THE SONG: A Life of Peter Fraser Authors: Michael Bassett with Michael King Publisher: Penguin Books, Auckland, 2000, 445pp, $49.99.

As Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1940 to 1949, and before that deputy to Michael Savage for five years, Peter Fraser played an important part in our political history. Until now, there has been no detailed biography of him. One of his colleagues, James Thorn, published a book about him soon after he died in 1951, but it was more a tribute than a work of scholarship. Such also were some of the talks about Fraser edited by Margaret Clark after a conference at Victoria University of Wellington in 1997. Keith Sinclair's biography of Fraser's deputy, Walter Nash, underlined the need for a similar book on Fraser: its absence has tended to influence the perceptions of later generations, to the point where, at one Labour Party conference at least, Fraser was not included in the Party pantheon.

Now, at last, the gap has been filled. Sir Alister McIntosh collected a lot of papers on Fraser before he died in 1978. He talked at length about him to Michael King. King did valuable research on Fraser's early life in Scotland, and on his early years in New Zealand, from 1910 on. King then recruited the former Labour Cabinet minister, Michael Bassett, to deal with Fraser's period in power, from 1935 to 1949. The result of that collaboration is a major work, Tomorrow Comes the Song: A Life of Peter Fraser. It does justice to its subject, and creates a more even picture of New Zealand's first Labour government.

Fraser is sometimes seen as a rather Machiavellian politician who led by intrigue and manipulation rather than by personal warmth, as Savage did. This view is not entirely invalidated by Bassett and King. By this account, Fraser was a clever political tactician who complemented both Savage and Nash. They appealed to people's feelings much more than Fraser did. But from his youth in Scotland to his dying day, he was also an idealist, who played a critical part in putting Labour's policies into practice. If Nash can fairly be credited with making social security a reality, Fraser can be given much of the credit for opening New Zealand's schools to all who could benefit from a good education. The debt was fully acknowledged by C.E. Beeby in his Biography of an Idea. Beeby was also an example of Fraser's ability to pick out people who would not only put his policies into effect but also keep them in place...