A ‘most imperial’ contribution: New Zealand and the old age pensions debate in Britain, 1898–1912

Abstract

The extent of imperial influences upon nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British life, including in the development of social policy, has attracted significant scholarly interest in the past decade. The bearing of New Zealand's 1898 Old-Age Pensions Act upon the British debate over elderly poverty exemplifies the contested transfer of social policy ideas from settler colony to ‘Mother Country’. Reformers in Britain hailed a model non-contributory pension system with an imperial pedigree. However, the widely acknowledged distinction between ‘old’ countries such as Britain, and ‘new’ countries of English-speaking settlement, characterized the New Zealand example's reception. While progressives identified the colony as a ‘clean slate’ lacking the obstructive historical inheritance of the Poor Law, critics of state-funded pensions warned against drawing policy-making lessons from New Zealand. Yet when a reformist Liberal government introduced an Old Age Pensions Bill in 1908, it used Britain's age to justify the legislation's relative conservatism.

Bearing tales: networks and narratives in social policy transfer

“…Some turn on axes of time, such as the fiction of New Zealand as a 'younger' Britain that helped sell New Zealand's old age pension scheme to British advocates of more adequate old age security, as Edmund Rogers shows in this volume. 20 Some turn on the narrative of a 'clean slate' from which the past has been erased overnight. Revolutionary stories work in this way, with powerful export effects.…”

Introduction: International Interdependencies and the Impact on Social Policies

“…Historical studies have provided insights into why and how Asian countries imported European and US concepts and ideas and adapted them to national needs (Nishizawa 2014). But imperial contexts did not exert a unidirectional influence: New Zealand's pension scheme for example was decisive for the remodelling of the Old Age Pensions Bill in Britain in 1908 (Rogers 2014).…”