The growing alarm in New Zealand over the development of a visible 'underclass' is underpinned by a wider concern in the face of the country's dramatic relative decline in the postwar period. In the generation after 1945, New Zealand was said to have 'full employment', the third highest standard of living in the world and an enviable record in the area of free education to university level. According to a popular self-image, and a central plank of New Zealand national identity, the country was egalitarian and universally prosperous. The development of an underclass, by contrast, seems to indicate that this former British colony at the edge of empires could not protect itself against the tide of international neo-liberalism. However, the view that an underclass has suddenly appeared does not take into account factors which always prevailed against the notion of social equality and inclusiveness -that, for example, most married women were not in education, employment or training in New Zealand in 1950; or that the indigenous New Zealanders, Maori, only began to enter paid employment in a systematic way as they urbanized. This article concentrates upon the shadow which New Zealand's egalitarian reputation casts upon the terrain of labour historiography. A national identity based upon the idea of egalitarianism is now the most difficult issue New Zealand labour historians face.
New Zealand and its egalitarian reputationDuring the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the settler colony evolved into an infant nation, New Zealand gained the reputation as a 'social laboratory' where experimental, progressive policies were implemented for the western world to watch and emulate. The country's reputation was global, influencing liberals and 'the Left'
Studies of domesticity tend to take a simple view of the state's role. If the state made reforms, it was because some interest group forced it to do so. These studies risk a charge of functionalism by emphasizing that the state necessarily acted to further capitalist or patriarchal interests. In this paper I argue that the state's response to interests was neither as coherent nor as predictable as is suggested by these approaches. The state is a conflicting ensemble of institutions rather than a monolith. Various state agencies act independently, sometimes in conflicting ways, over domesticity. At the same time, overall, the state has relatively independent imperatives of its own too. Historically, domesticity has not been one of its high priorities. We can see that the New Zealand state undermined domesticity before second-wave feminism of the 1970s. But state powers are circumscribed by its democratic context. Just as there were limits to the state's willingness or ability to impose domesticity, so too were there limits to its power to legislate for equality.
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