A history of socialist newspapers in New Zealand PDF Print E-mail
Tuesday, 23 June 2009 11:18
By Bert Roth

[From Socialist Action, v.8 no.7, 7 May 1976, p. 4]

(The following is an edited transcript of a talk given by Bert Roth to a workshop at the Young Socialists National Conference, held in Auckland on April 16-18. Roth is a labour historian and Deputy-Librarian at Auckland University.)

Lenin’s paper Iskra (Spark) is generally considered the model for a Bolshevik paper, a paper that actually organises a party.
In Iskra No. 4 Lenin wrote:
The first practical step to take towards creating the organisation we desire, the factor which will enable us constantly to develop, broaden and deepen that organisation, is to establish a national political newspaper. A paper is what we need above all. Without it we cannot systematically carry on that extensive and theoretically sound propaganda and agitation which is the principal and constant duty of the social democrats in general...
It is a political paper we need. Without a political organ, a political movement deserving that name is impossible in modern Europe. Unless we have such a paper, we shall be absolutely unable to fulfil our task, namely to concentrate all the elements of political unrest and discontent, and with them enrich the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.

Well, the same thought was put in more colonial terms by a paper called The Watchman in 1884. “A cause without a journal to support it is like a steamer without a propeller, all vapour and clatter with no progress.” The Watchman was one of the short-lived labour papers that appeared in New Zealand. The first one that has been traced is called the Auckland Independent and Operatives Journal, which was started in 1851 by a Chartist called William Griffin, who campaigned for the election of workers’ representatives on the Auckland City Council, which had just been established then.

And there were later papers, such as The Age, The Advocate, the Trades and Labour Chronicle. Unfortunately all we know is their names; there are very few of these labour papers still available.
One that’s worth noting partly because two copies actually survive in the Auckland Public Library, and also because it was one of the most radical of these early days, was called the Tribune. It was published in Auckland in 1890 and there were altogether eight issues.

Need for workers’ voice
These papers were all of course short-lived because they were usually not the paper of an organisatlon but of an individual. Just to give you the flavour of the Tribune, it pointed out that the manager of the Union Steam Ship Company was in the lower house of Parliament, and the chairman of the company was in the upper house:
How can we expect justice legislation and equal laws when those who control private plundering concerns are our legislators. We might as well expect Old Nick to advocate the abolition of his brimstone lake and red-hot toasting forks.

But like all other labour papers it had no theory behind it. The only remedies that were offered were education and reforms. The first paper that actually claimed to be socialist, to express a theory, was called The Socialist. It was published in Christchurch for six months in 1897-98 by the Socialist Church.
As is evident from the sponsoring body it was not exactly a revolutionary organ of class struggle. But it did urge the establishment of a separate labour party and this was an important step forward because it meant a break from the Liberals who then dominated the labour movement in New Zealand

An independent workers’ party, the Socialist Party of New Zealand, was set up in 1901 and it started its own journal called The Common Weal. The first issue of The Common Weal, in 1903, proclaimed: “Our aim is revolution, not reform, because we mean to abolish the foundation of all existing institutions.”
This really summed up the reason for the eventual decline of the Socialist Party. It was dominated by people who thought that working for reforms was a betrayal of revolution. They were called “impossibilists” - a word that has gone out of fashion - that is, they believed that it is impossible to do anything before the day of the revolution.
And they were opposed of course by more moderate labour groups who had their own journals like the Weekly Herald, and the Voice of Labour. These were pure reformist, they believed that reform was all that mattered, that revolution was somewhere in the far distance. The movement was really split between these two groups which were equally wrong - one only revolution, the other only reform.
Militant trade unionists tended to distrust both these groups - although they preferred the Socialist Party. Their line of action was again wrong - purely militant unionism through which to build the new society. They were largely anti-political. These groups joined in the “Red” Federation of Labour - as it came to be known - and founded their own paper, the Maoriland Worker.
This is possibly the most important paper in New Zealand’s labour history. It has quite an unusual origin. The Shearers’ Union in Christchurch was involved in a wage dispute in 1910, and they found the press unanimously opposed to therm. So they decided to have their own paper This was the Maoriland Worker, which began as a monthly.
When the shearers united with the miners to form the “Red” Federation of Labour, the paper was shifted to Wellington. An experienced editor called Bob Ross was brought over from Australia, and it became a weekly.
Circulation continued to rise - 8,500 by 1912, 10,000 by the beginning of 1913, which is far more than any labour paper sells today.
The Maoriland Worker was a true organiser for socialism. Pat Hickey, one of its editors, wrote in the Red Fed Memoirs:
Throughout New Zealand enthusiastic workers pushed its sales. The editor built up a band of never-failing voluntary correspondents all over the country. A strong advocate of industrial unionism, an internationalist of penetrating vision, a pacifist to the remotest depths of his frail figure, Bob Ross aroused working class enthusiasm to a pitch it had never reached before.

And I think that still stands true, though it was written 50 years ago.
Ross resigned in 1913 - he was replaced by Harry Holland, who later became leader of the Labour Party.
The Maoriland Worker remained a very radical paper until about 1922 - this included the war years when it had to cope with major libel costs, with censorship, and with police raids.
In 1924 it changed its name to the New Zealand Worker. It wasn't just a change of name because its subtitle had been “A journal of industrial unionism, socialism and politics”. After 1924 the subtitle was “A New Zealand paper for New Zealand people. It was still financed by the trade unions but controlled by Labour Party politicans. It became less and less radical. In 1935 it actually changed its name to The Standard. At the end of 1959 it died. By that time it contained hardly any politlcs

Labour Party papers
The Labour Party also attempted to have a daily paper on the West Coast. In 1920 the miners’ unions bought the Grey River Argus in Greymouth and it was run as a Labour paper until it collapsed in 1966. In Wellington in 1946 they started the Southern Cross, which died in 1951, at the beginning of the waterfront dispute. And in fact today as you know the Labour Party has no paper of any sort - daily, monthly, you name it, there is just no Labour paper in existence.
There were always groups to the left of what you might call the mainstream of Labour, that is, the Maoriland Worker, The Standard, and so on. The first radical paper was started by the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the “Wobblies”, who brought out their own paper called The Industrial Unionist.
Tom Barker was editor, and in his reminiscences he wrote:
We had a monthly called The Industrlal Unionist and it was decided to bring it out three times a week [during the 1913 waterfront strike]. We printed anything we could gather from American papers and stop press news about the strike. When we got an edition out we went down on the streets and sold it. The next day we went on the booze and the following day we got the next edition out. It was a catch-as-catch-can business. I learnt more about newspapers and emergencies on the press than I could have done anywhere else.
Everyone was buying the paper. I remember being in Queen Street, the main street of Auckland one afternoon, and I had sold over 700 copies of the paper. I was absolutely weighed down with coppers. I could hardly move and I had them stacked along the side of the street. I was just completing the sale of my last paper when along came a policeman who asked me quite courteously to go up to the police station with him. He didn’t know why I was wanted.

Well, he was charged with sedition. He left for Australia and became a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World there.

The communist press
In 1921 the Coomunist Party was founded in New Zealand. The CP started its own paper in Auckland in 1924, The Communist. Later it changed to the Workers Vanguard. In 1929 this became the Red Worker and then the Workers Weekly, and now the People’s Voice.
It was ignored by the authorities in the early years but there were frequent prosecutions in the Depression. In fact there were several months when the paper was unable to be published altogether because the entire staff was in jail. The entire central committee of the CP was in jail at one point. Their paper was again banned in 1940 - the printery was smashed - but it appeared in illegal editions on duplicating paper right through the war period until it was again allowed to come out legally.
It reached a peak of circulation at the end of the war with 14,000 copies in 1945. But since then there has been a steady decline, and today the People’s Voice has more readers in China than New Zealand.
The 1960s saw a fragmentation of the left in New Zealand. Previously the gospel came readymade from Moscow and there was very little intellectual debate. Today each group is forced to think out its position, to challenge the others, and to defend its ideas. There has been a return to the original works of Marxism-Leninism, instead of what you used to get - the Readers Digest-type versions, as in Stalin’s History or Mao’s Thoughts.
Today there are three papers, People’s Voice, Tribune, and Socialist Action. Socialist Action claims to have the largest circulation of the three. Still, as you know, Socialist Action is a small paper. But I think if it keeps its feet firmly on New Zealand soil, and reflects the social struggles here, then it has a good future.