Feature
Thinkers slake their thirst
by Jane Tolerton
A desire for economic alternatives revives the NZ Fabian Society.
The Fabians were Britain’s original chardonnay socialists, and early on they must have had the best chat in the chattering classes, with members such as HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Emmeline Pankhurst and sexologist Havelock Ellis.
In Australia, Julia Gillard, Paul Keating and Bob Hawke have all been Fabian Society members.
By contrast New Zealand has had only regional and reasonably short-lived groups – until March, when the New Zealand Fabian Society kicked off with a seminar series on making a resilient economy, held in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch (a Dunedin group has formed since).
Mike Smith, who retired as general secretary of the Labour Party last year, decided to start it, having seen the British and Australian Fabian groups in action.
Since 1884, Fabians have been intellectual reformist socialists, rather than revolutionaries, named after Roman general Fabius Maximus, who delayed fighting Hannibal’s army head-on while figuring out other tactics.
“What I like about the Fabian tradition is they are hard-working intellectuals and they have a tradition of rigorous, high-quality work in economic and social policy,” says Smith. “Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw set up the London School of Economics. So they were educators and activists as well as researchers and writers. Our values are that we are independent of all political parties, open and progressive.”
The society’s tagline is “inciting debate”, and hundreds have joined, says Smith. “People are looking for fresh ideas, not the same old, same old – those brought in in the 1980s and pushed by the [Business] Roundtable. We do not believe ‘there is no alternative’. We believe not enough alternatives are being presented or debated.
“There’s a lot of rhetoric about how we are going to catch up with Australia – but no one believes the policies put forward will do this. We need to reshape New Zealand’s economy and we invite people to come and discuss and contribute to that.
“We are politically located not on the right, without being much more defined than that. We are deliberately not identified with any party.”
Council of Trade Unions secretary Peter Conway was an obvious presenter for the first seminar series, but it also featured the Manufacturers and Exporters Association’s John Walley, and high-tech entrepreneur Selwyn Pellett, driver of the Productive Economy Council. Pellett has joined “to promote the debate there needs to be to protect the productive sector. For me that’s mission essential. The problem in New Zealand is that the debate isn’t happening. I’m a businessman who’s wealthy, and I’m associated with the Fabians because they believe these policies should be debated.”
New Zealand’s most famous Fabian was Liberal Government minister William Pember Reeves, who went to England as our Agent-General in 1896 – having named his son Fabian the previous year – and later became director of the London School of Economics.
His wife, Maud, also a Fabian, did pioneering social research, asking Lambeth housewives how they managed on their husbands’ low wages. The resulting Round About a Pound a Week, written in 1913, has just been republished.
Their daughter, Amber, with a double first from Cambridge, caused a Fabian scandal by having a – planned – baby with the married HG Wells, though early in the pregnancy she realised the idea was literally ill-conceived and married fellow Fabian Blanco White. Wells based his novel Ann Veronica on her.
When the Webbs visited New Zealand in 1898, Beatrice’s Auckland diary recorded, “No reading or debating clubs among young well-to-do people.”
Smith says members of the new Fabian Society are young and old, academic and non-academic. The first seminars each attracted about 100 people, but he expects double that turnout for “What will fix New Zealand’s economy?” in Auckland and Wellington next month.
www.fabians.org.nz
