Fitzgerald in Politics.

It was natural that from the very first days of the Canterbury Settlement Fitzgerald should be concerned with politics, and that he should be in the forefront of the agitation for local and Colonial self-government. When the Constitution was granted to the Colony and Provincial Councils were set up, he became the first Superintendent of Canterbury Province, and in the following year (1854) he entered the first General Parliament as member for Lyttelton. He was Premier of the first Representative Ministry, under Acting-Governor Wynyard, at Auckland, but the position was a temporary compromise; Fitzgerald and his colleagues found that their powers were extremely limited, and they resigned in a few weeks.

He went to England for the sake of his health, acted as Emigration Officer for the Province while he was there, and returned in 1860, full of his old enthusiasm for the advancement of colonisation and of the Province he had assisted to establish. He re-entered politics in 1862, and he plunged into the thick of the wordy battles over the Maori Wars problem.