Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 33, No. 3 18 March 1970
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towards Rhodesia is an example. The Aid Rhodesia Movement claims—probably correctly—that Cabinet really sympathises with Smith; doesn't really favour the Idea of sanctions, and only impose them because of pressure from Britain.
Market dependence is the most obvious limit on our freedom of action, but it isn't the most important. In each of the above cases a less gutless government could have ignored the pressure from Britain. Admittedly the consequences might have been serious, but we could have chosen to accept them. Where a particular industry is dominated by foreign capital we do not even have this choice. The decision are made for us by foreigners, often without our realising it.
In recent years we have had a series of development conferences culminating last year in the National Development Conference. The delegates to these are bureaucrats and businessmen. Seemingly, New Zealand industry is co-operating with the New Zealand Government in planning for New Zealand's future. The Agricultural Committee of the National Development Conference must have been dominated by representatives of British concerns; the recommendations made reflect not so much what New Zealand thinks New Zealand should do in the future, but what London thinks New Zealand should do in the future.
The same would be true for other sectors of the economy. This is most strikingly demonstrated in our shipping. So long as it is dominated by the British Conference Lines we can only haggle about things like freight charges. We cannot decide. Containerisation, an enormously costly project for New Zealand and ruinous for a number of provincial centres, was decided on by the Conference Lines. The Government and the Harbour Boards organise and pay for the new port facilities; but they are providing them for the Conference Lines. It isn't everyone who can demand a several-day conference with the tour senior members of the New Zealand cabinet, as the shipping line's officials did in 1967. The Lines, of course, are responsible to their shareholders, not to New Zealand. Whatever the value of their particular decisions, the motives behind them are wrong.
A particularly alarming feature of the Conference Line's containerisation report is the underlying assumption that the future markets and the products sold will be the traditional ones. This is in line with the reluctance of the Lines to service our newer markets which are less profitable for them.
Nowadays we notice the power of foreign capital more than we did, say, ten years ago. Possibly this is because we are importing more of it. Balance of payments difficulties have necessitated the development of secondary industries, and foreign capital has established many of these. Another possibly is that recent foreign investment is more international in character.
We don't, however, have the emotional hang-up or the illusions about such countries as Japan and America, that we have about Britain. Americans are seen as grasping capitalists; no-one likes the Japanese anyway. The British, however, are thought of as legitimate businessmen. Foreign investment was acceptable while it was predominantly British. It did not seem foreign. Britain still supplies more than anyone else, but enough of it comes from other countries to upset
Even the left-wing writers, Sutch and Rosenberg, have a sentimental regard for Britain. With them it takes the form of denying our dependence on Britain and asserting that New Zealand is becoming a colony of America and Australia They quote as proof figures for recent investment that show that the American and Australian share is growing. As left-wingers both men have a political interest in abusing America; neither seems interested in criticising Britain. But this cannot excuse their misuse of statistics. The figures quoted by Sutch and Rosenberg demonstrate only the cosmopolitan (not American or Australian) nature of our new industries. Obviously the British haven't relinquished control of our financial system or of our primary industry. They still, therefore, have more power in New Zealand than in any other country.
Still, the fact that our colonial status is being discussed at all is an improvement. It has been discussed so much just recently that the argument has become routine. Colonials take a helpless attitude: we cannot provide our own skills and capital; they must come from abroad. How can we stand alone in a hostile world, without allics?—or is it masters? Nationalists complain about the loss to the country of profits, interest, royalties and freight charges (the invisibles that convert a trading surplus into a balance of payments deficit). They resent the power that foreigners have in New Zealand, and the Government's humble acceptance of this.
Even the concessions each side makes to the other have become routine. Nationalists agree that not all foreign investment is bad; but in practice they oppose every instance of it. Colonials agree that our exports should be processed to a greater degree; but they know it won't happen, because the highly processed article attracts far more import duly than the raw material.
These arguments are important, not because they convince anyone (they don't), but for what they reflect: a developing New Zealand nationalism. The difference between the nationalist and the colonial is basically one of attitude, and the more abstract the issue the sharper is the clash in attitudes. In some ways Royalty has a kind of abstract nature and so argument tends to be futile. It is simply a question of preference. If someone likes the "Britishness" of royally there is little point in telling him that the British live in the United Kingdom. If he wants to extend the definition of "British" to include people of British descent he might as well; ifs his definition no matter how idiotic I think it is. If he is a member of New Zealand's large, status-conscious middle-class and the class angle of royalty appeals to him, it is pointless calling him a snob. He probably thinks snobbery is a good thing. This difference in attitude derives from a number of things: age, sex, intellectual activity and social position (this really means class but we are a little sensitive about that word).
The colonial attitude often derives simply from self-interest. The parasitic occupations (advertisers, importers, lawyers, Canterbury's landed gentry, the managerial caste) make a good living out of colonial New Zealand. They support royalty, not only because of sympathy for a fellow-parasite, but also because they take New Zealand's colonial function seriously. This is why the colonial attitude is so strong in the university. Most students are either being trained to be parasites or to work overseas. Usually they do not support royalty. They are a bit soung for that yet. But they apologise for it, which is just as bad.
In a way students are worse than the royalty-conscious older generation who at least have the excuse of having formed their attitudes at a time when Bill Masses was pledging the last New Zealander to defend the British Empire. No-one is really surprised when the Mt Eden Borough Council offers to show the Queen around Mt Eden (the hill), or when the mayors of Ngarawahia and Huntly complain about being left off the royal itinerary. 'The kids will be disappointed,"—but then the kids don't gel to shake the royal hand like some people .. .
All that can be said in defence of the students is that they are being trained in a university system that is little more than an extension of the British one (the modelling of the experimental University of Waikato on the University of Sussex is the most striking recent example of this). They consequently miss out on the healthily-bigoted nationalism that lesser-educated New Zealanders spontaneously develop. Even intellectual nationalists pick up British habits of thought in the universities, such as an aversion to going to extremes and a refusal to see issues in black and white. Unfortunately they tend to be the spokesmen for nationalism, which probably accounts for its lack of vigour. So long as the leaders of New Zealand nationalism are peopk of this kind the only hope for nationalism is for Britain to sink beneath the North Sea. With any luck the British might do something very similar (join the Common Market?) but even this is unlikely to incite irate New Zealanders lo pogroms against Poms. Still, one can always hope.