When We Talk About 'Vogelism' We Are Talking About a Scheme Whereby Massive Amounts Of

1. Vogelism

When we talk about 'Vogelism' we are talking about a scheme whereby massive amounts of money would be spent by central government to build roads, bridges, railways and to bring immigrants to NZ to help in construction. In effect he was to create an infrastructure. But where was the money to come from? It would have to be borrowed from overseas.

The problem stated 1870

* Wool prices down

* Declining imports

* Diminishing land sales

* Declining gold

* Provinces in financial difficulty

* Decline in tonnage and ships entered and cleared

* The NZ Wars

* NZ credit rating poor

* Poor communication

* Small population

Make up a diagram that uses the ideas above to show how the Central Governments revenue would be affected by the items above.

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2. Vogel biography (Copy from OHT).

VOGEL AND HIS POLICIES 1870s

Vogel was the dominant figure in the 1870s.

Public Works and Immigration

As Colonial Treasurer in the Fox Ministry, Vogel announced in June 1870 a scheme to borrow pounds I 500 000 overseas to build railways and encourage immigration.

VOGEL AS PREMIER (1873-5) (1876-7)

In 1872, Fox was defeated but Vogel won support for continuing his policy. In April 1873, he became Premier. There was a great clamour for railways. Vogel had to seek more loans to continue.

Immigration

In 1872-3, 6000 Scandinavian settlers settled in the Wairarapa region. But immigration was limited. In 1873 Vogel introduced free passages for approved immigrants (young men and women who were farm labourers and of good character) .Some 5000 farm labourers came as result of an informal agreement with National Agricultural Workers Union. By the end of the decade 140 000 persons had arrived, of whom 100 000 were assisted or nominated. One-third were farm labourers rather than town dwellers. There were small numbers from trades. Unassisted migrants included 5000 Chinese.

Results of Immigration

Some became unemployed. But most of these working class settlers reinforced the democratic and respectable character of New Zealand society. Their desire for small farms challenged large- scale pastoralism. Most came from areas in Britain where wages were better and increasing. They wanted better opportunites.

The Boom

It began in 1873 and peaked in 1875. Prices for staples rose. Land values soared. Banks lent money, accepting land as security. Merchants and manufacturers prospered. The expanding railway network generated employment, linking the country to urban and international markets. Government encouraged industry with subsidies. Harbours were dredged, wharves built and the coal of the West Coast attracted investors.

Auckland

As the north began to flourish, Auckland grew rapidly in the 1870s.

1. Capitalists invested in the Waikato, buying confiscated land. Railway construction increased land values.

2. Auckland had a monopoly over the kauri forests and a colony- wide market. The industry required investment. Joint-stock companies were set up to acquire expensive milling machinery and reserves of forest.

3. The growth of Auckland-based financial institutions and high levels of private borrowing fed the boom. Head offices for major companies were in Auckland.

In Small Towns Business flourished.

Each town was a service centre, a small industrial centre. In the long run the railway threatened many small industries, but it made the town a local centre and entrepot. River and sea transport was still important. Extractive industries such as saw milling, whaling (fading), flax, kauri gum, gold and coal dominated the economies of significant areas.

Small Industries: The only industries with a total capital of 200 000 pounds were sawmilling, gas works, breweries, grain mills, printing establishments and clotheries.

Settlement

Railways made settlement and capitalist production possible. By 1881 more than 40% of the land was occupied (1867, 28.1% occupied by Europeans, mostly in South Island). The proportion of leasehold land to all occupied land fell from 72% to 38% .By 1881 there were more than 24000 holdings of I acre or more (twice that of 1869). Owner-occupied small farms dominated the 1870s. Considerable aggregation occurred, but not on the fern and bushland of southern North Island and the fertile areas near the main centres of the South Island.

Farming Development

Sheep numbers rose to 9.7 million. Cattle herds grew to almost 700 000. The acreage for wheat, for oats and for supplementary feed grew similarly. Farmers used the greater stock carrying capacity of sown grasses such as cocksfoot, rye, white clover, and mixed pastures.

Clearing the Bush

Much of the North Island was covered in dense bush. Scandinavian immigrants helped transform the upper Manawatu into settlements. Within a few years dairy farms were established. Saw-milling was an important source of employment. Immigrants were put into special settlements at various points in the bush and employed in building the main trunk road and later the railway. The wages earned paid for the land. However, the initial 4O-acre allotments were too small and many settlers had to sell up and start again.

Innovation

New technologies and practices developed. A new plough was invented by James Gray in 1870. The breeding of thoroughbred horses, stud cattle and sheep was improved. Other introductions such as rabbits became pests.

POLITICS AND VISIONS

Vogel wanted to link New Zealand with international markets; to make it the industrial Britain of the South Seas, the metropolis of a Pacific Empire. The government subsidised mail carrying and fostered manufacturing. Its attempt to persuade Britain to annex island groups was rebuffed by the Colonial Office.

Abolition of the Provinces (1876)

The boom made Vogel and the national policy very popular. The opposition in Parliament disintegrated. Only the superintendents of the wealthiest provinces made difficulties. When Vogel's proposal for an amibitious afforestation scheme was thwarted by the provinces he decided on their abolition. The relative poverty and weakness of North Island provinces gave him a base of support. Raising another overseas loan would also be easier. Abolition come into effect in 1876.

Vogel Loses Power

Vogel's popularity waned. He resigned to become Agent-General in England.

Atkinson (1876-7)

In 1877 Atkinson's government passed two important laws:

1. The Education Act provided a state system of secular and compulsory education for all children between 7 and 13 years.

2. The Land Act consolidated various provincial regulations and imposed deferred payment across entire country, making it easier for men of modest means to buy land.

As wool and wheat prices fell in 1876, government revenues fell. Atkinson tried to retrench, lost a no-confidence vote and resigned.

Grey (1877-1879)

Grey formed a new ministry and continued borrowing. The flow of immigrants was now altered. The Irish equalled the English and exceeded the Scots. An anti-Irish mood led Macandrew, Minister of Public Works, to devise a new formula. For every 7 immigrants from Britain, no more than 4 Irish and 3 Scots could come. However, the onset of depression ended immigration. Grey claimed to lead a reform party with liberal principles. All politicians were reluctant to accept the conservative label.

THE EFFECT OF VOGEL'S POLICIES

By 1880 Vogel's policies had transformed the South Island and much of the North.

1. Communications: Nearly 1200 miles of railway linked the main centres. Some 2000 miles of macadamised roads were also completed. By 1876 there were 3170 miles of telegraph lines. Regular mail services were established.

2. Population: The European population increased from 24 800 in 1870 to 399 000 by 1876. The North Island now had more Pakeha than Maori for the first time.

3. Growth in Manufacturing.

4. Unitary State: With the abolition of the Provinces New Zealand was a unitary state.

5. Role of Govemment Expanded; The role of government was expanded to promote economic growth and colonisation.

Economic consequences

Some historians have assumed borrowing got out of hand and caused the Long Depression. More recently historians have been kinder in their judgement, feeling it is too harsh to hold Vogel responsible for rising land prices. He represented the settler view that the government must playa role in development.

The Progress Industry

Read through the notes on the 'Progress Industry'

This is Belich's idea of 'what went on during the 19th century by Pakeha New Zealanders to get ahead, make money and settle New Zealand'.

For reinforcement, I want you to outline the key features of this so-called 'Progress Industry'. You need to include:

Public works - road, rail

Immigration

War

Gold

Timber

'Natural Allies'

Progressive colonisation

Successes??

Problems??

Set your answers (notes) as bullet point notes using the highlighted parts of the text as a guide.

The Progress Industry

The Progress Industry = a linked group of economic activities. It had two prominent components: public works, that attacked distance: roads, bridges, railways, postal and telegraphic communications, and port facilities and organised immigration itself: the founding of instant townships and the government assistance and encouragement of subsequent immigration.

War was an ally of the progress industry: attacks on Maori 'obstacles to progress' had a similar purpose to attacks on physical obstacles; both were mounted by governments and both had similar demographic and economic effects, suddenly injecting large amounts of people and money into particular regions and leaving a residue after they had served their initial purpose. Gold rushes also had these effects -they, too, were natural allies of the artificial progress industry.

Public (government) enterprise was always important to the progress industry and its allies. From the 1840s, the companies, which were quite state-like organisations, local authorities, imperial, colonial and provincial governments mounted and funded the various military, public works, immigration and propaganda campaigns. From the 1850s, they tried to kick -start various industries by offering bounties to first producers -of colonial-made paper, tableware, woollen cloth, preserved meats and dairy products, and many other things, as well as preserved protein products. There was even government support for goldmining. State ownership of businesses began in the late 1860s, when the State Life Insurance Office and the Post Office Savings Bank were established. From the 1870s, government increasingly ran large chunks of the transport and communications infrastructure, as well as built them.

But private companies, such as Union Steam Ship Co., also contributed to the transport infra- structure; the state contribution subsidised business profits and boosted business activity. Public and private providentially converged and were closely allied. Both were run by the same people, and both were locked in to the progress industry. Private enterprise was locked in through such things as the speculative building of houses in large towns, which was predicated on the assumption that governments would keep immigrants coming. Many other businesses and speculations operated on the same assumption. It was progress that made land values, for example, 'sure to rise'. Public roadmaking, railmaking and military campaigns required private supply and support. Imperial military expenditure and colonial, provincial and local authority loans provided much of a massive inflow of overseas capital.

The government-nurtured image of New Zealand as an investors' paradise was important to private overseas borrowing, as were the high interest rates progress made possible. War, gold, roads and rail 'opened up' the interior in more ways then one. They cleared bush and created camps, which had to be fed and might subsequently turn into towns. The progress industry created a temporary but huge domestic market: for food for its crews and fresh immigrants, for horses, bullocks, and food for them, and for fuels and construction materials.

A key distinction was not between public and private enterprise, but between 'natural' steady growth and 'unnatural' artificially boosted growth. Agriculture lay at the heart of the former, and towns were a useful symbol of the latter. The concept of natural, slow but steady, farm-led growth has deep roots in eighteenth-century European and twentieth-century New Zealand ideology. It was the progress industry and its allies that created most towns, which then grew farming hinterlands, or died if they did not.

Unlike sheep and gold, something like the progress industry was always an implicit part of crusader plans. Indeed, it was the colonising crusade on the ground and is conveniently summarised in the term 'progressive colonisation'. There was always an element of pyramid selling, about which Hursthouse made no bones. 'Emigrants of 1840 sell their surplus to the emigrants of 1842, and both do the same by the emigrants of 1844. This logic was inherent in the paradises offered working men and serving women, who were to acquire property and so join the middle classes after serving their term, being replaced by infinite fresh cohorts of migrant labourers and servants. Such factors underpinned the ideology that demanded progress; the essence of the game was that the inflow of people and money, and their spread across the land, should not stop, though they might lurch and spasm. Very often, growth came through growth.

Between the 1840s and the 1880s, progressive colonisation mounted a quadruple assault on nature, natives, emptiness and distance, each of which served the others. The best-known campaign was the Vogelian spurt of public spending in the 1870s, for which central government borrowed £10 million between 1871 and 1876. Julius Vogel became Treasurer in William Fox's colonial ministry in 1869, which in 1870 launched a drive to 'recommence the great work of colonizing New Zealand to re-illumine that sacred fire' through massive borrowing for public works and immigration. This was the climax of progressive colonisation. Public debt actually expanded more rapidly in the 1860s than in the 1870s - eightfold between 1862 and 1869, compared with threefold in the 1870s. Even in the 1840s, the companies spent perhaps £1 million attacking emptiness through settlement, and the imperial government spent as much attacking natives. The assault on nature was the process of 'opening up' or 'clearing' the country, and then replacing one ecosystem with another, as when native bush was displaced by alien grasses, mostly English. Progressive colonisation physically converted raw New Zealand into Greater Britain.

Railmaking was the centrepiece of Vogelism/Progress Industry. In 1870 46 miles of public railway yet be 1879, a further 1,100 miles had been laid. Rail knitted the eastern South Island first. Christchurch and Dunedin were linked in 1879; Wellington and Auckland 30 years later. Rail was not necessarily superior to sea or river transport, but it did mean you could put the 'rivers' roughly where you wanted them. Ultimately, railways changed the shape of New Zealand and entrenched the dominance of the four main centres, Dunedin and Christchurch first. They helped shrink the country to a fraction of its former size in travelling time - the same process that had occurred a few decades earlier in Britain. Railmaking represented about two-fifths of all public capital formation between 1870 and 1900, with a very heavy bias towards the 1870s. Government spent £10 million on rail between 1871 and 1881. Rail construction was a significant industry in itself; its workers had to be fed, clothed and housed, and raw materials and equipment supplied.