Sam Day All politics is local. What a cliched saying! Yet in New Zealand, that edict is demonstrably true. Few people in our parliament, however, have demonstrated the force of local politics as strongly as William Andrew Veitch, the member for Whanganui from 1911 to 1935. Veitch was not born in Whanganui, but rather in Perthshire, Scotland, in 1870. He did not retire in Whanganui either, instead living out his last years on the Kāpiti Coast. But it is beyond doubt that Veitch was a product of Whanganui and its politics. How? Two months before the 1911 election, a meeting of 150 workers was held at Whanganui’s Druid’s Hall “for the purposes of considering the selection of a worker’s candidate for the Wanganui seat.”[1] That “worker’s candidate” was to be William Veitch. Yet when Veitch officially opened his campaign a month later, he immediately referenced the sitting Liberal party, declaring that: “his party had realised the Liberal party had deviated from the policy enunciated by the late Mr. Ballance, and [Labour] wanted to revert back to that policy.”[2] Veitch, one of the first Labour MPs in the country, did not even join the (then first; the modern day party is the second) Labour party until after his election. In Whanganui this odd political positioning worked wonders. The town was a working-class, left-leaning, one; yet it was also prosperous. Unlike other provincial centres, Whanganui in the early 20th century boomed; its population grew from 8,175 in 1906 to 14,702 in 1911, with factory numbers increasing from 160 to 259 (in neighbouring Palmerston North, both the number of factories and workers employed dropped).[3] It was still however small enough so that both working and middle class groups relied on- and regularly interacted with- one another. Veitch understood this. Indeed, all of Whanganui’s MPs since the great John Ballance, the Liberal Premier from 1891 to 1893, did. Ballance, whilst ushering in progressive change, had opposed sectional demands, urged the working and middle classes to cooperate, and stressed broadly humanitarian goals. The Liberal party of 1911 had, in the eyes of many, failed to live up to this image. Veitch’s uncanny ability to promise change whilst protecting Whanganui’s social structure was certainly reminiscent of Ballance. And so he was in December 1911 elected as Whanganui’s member of Parliament. Veitch’s attitude towards Labour was indeed cooler than his attitude towards Whanganui. Whilst he strenuously attacked monopolies and advocated for workers in Parliament, he made it clear that he despised the “party boss” system. When Labour started to gravitate towards supporting strike action, attacking a shadowy capitalist class, and opposing conscription, Veitch backed away. In distancing himself from Labour, Veitch was again following Whanganui’s trends. When the national secretary of the Socialist Party, Fred Cooke, visited Whanganui in 1912, he found that “the people here are about ten years behind the main centres in progressive thought. Socialism is a sealed book to most of them. They know nothing of it and declare that they don’t want to know anything of it…”[4] Veitch’s decision to break away from the Labour movement entirely in 1916 was surely due just as much to this Whanganui apathy as it was to his personal feelings. As the Wanganui Chronicle put it in 1916: “Mr Veitch is not lacking in astuteness and he knows none better than in the estimation of the majority of his constituents he would have been discredited beyond all hope of redemption had he lent himself to the furtherance of the obstructive tactics of the labour socialist elements.” Veitch had his finger on the pulse of Whanganui politics; his advocacy for the worker gained him all but the most radical votes on the left, whilst his disownment of Harry Holland and personal moderation made him respectable in the eyes of Whanganui’s middle and upper classes. Whanganui electors kept on voting for Veitch the man. In the early 1920s, he sat as an independent. Just as the Liberal party was fracturing and failing, he joined them, leading his own segment before the disparate strands joined to form United. When United unexpectedly won the 1928 election, he served - unremarkably - as a Minister. The coalition government formed with Reform during the Depression however was too much for Veitch. Whanganui was not a right-wing town; and with the Government appearing more and more right-wing, Veitch left it. Veitch’s views remained surprisingly consistent despite these defections. In 1934 he complained that “each [Parliament] has got a little further away from the people than the last. That has been due to domination of private members of the House by party interests.”[5] He warned that “no section of the community could become permanently prosperous by simply living at the expense of all other sections.”[6] And in 1935, when he joined the Democrat party and ran one last time in Whanganui, he made it clear that their “policy… would have been acceptable to such men as Grey and Ballance.”[7] Yet the mood had changed in New Zealand’s politics. Labour was not the radical party it once was. Reform and United had failed to maintain the confidence of New Zealanders. And in Whanganui Joe Cotterill, the Labour candidate who would go on to represent the town for 25 years (beating Veitch by one), claimed that the mantle of Ballance had descended on the Labour party. In a sense he was right, and Whanganui’s workers, doing the only thing they could do given the economic conditions of the time, voted en masse for Labour. William Veitch continually demonstrated the importance of situating the local in the national. On this site, you can find representatives for Labour, United, National, and any other political party. You can build a picture of their political philosophies and personal backgrounds. But one of the most important things you can do is find out what constituency they represented; that might just reveal their psyche more than anything else. References [1] ‘The Coming Elections’, Wanganui Herald, 21st September 1911, p. 5 [2] ‘The Coming Elections’, Wanganui Herald, 25th October 1911, p. 3 [3] Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1906, H-11, p. 22; AJHR, 1912, H-11, p. 47. [4] ‘National Secretary on Tour’, Maoriland Worker, 24th January 1912, p. 5 [5] ‘Party Domination: Criticism by Mr Veitch’, New Zealand Herald, 4th July 1934, p. 14 [6] Ibid. [7] ‘The Party’s Policy’, Evening Post, 27th August 1935, p. 10 Samuel Day is a MA student in History at Victoria University of Wellington, studying activism surrounding Pacific Issues in 1970s New Zealand. His keen interest in politics and society extended in 2021 to focussing his dissertation on W.A. Veitch and interning at Parliament.
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