Social Innovation Investment Group An Historical Checklist — Page 1

Social Innovation Investment Group — fostering social entrepreneurship in New Zealand —

Social Entrepreneurship in New Zealand

— an Historical Checklist

by Tony Simpson

August 2006

Introductory comment

In compiling this list I have used the broad definition contained in the briefing material

i.e. ‘change makers who pioneer systemic and sustainable solutions to our social

problems”. But I have used this definition flexibly in the New Zealand context because

of the unique nature of our historical and economic experience, which puts a particular

spin on this definition. In particular two factors are of importance in that unique

experience as a community.

The first of these is the interchange between the public and private sectors. Because of

New Zealand’s relative youth as a society and as an immigrant community (in which I

include the tangata whenua) there is no clear boundary between those two sectors,

probably because one of the defining characteristics of an immigrant society is its

pragmatism and capacity for innovative approaches to the resolution of social problems.

People have no preconceived notions about the best place or way to solve such

problems, and might find themselves or deliberately set out to place themselves in either

sector or in creative combinations of both – what we would call today a ‘public/private

approach’.

Thus, many of our most effective social entrepreneurs have been public servants who

have had no problems with basing themselves accordingly to drive an agenda and from

that position have successfully implemented the social innovations which have

contributed to the unique nature of our community from that base.

The second factor is the cross over between the social and economic in our society. The

economic bulks large simply because we are an international trading nation (and have

been since well before 1840 as a part of the south Pacific economic maritime nexus) and

so everything we do is directed ultimately to earning our living in the world. But

because we are an immigrant society, those who came here brought particular social

ambitions with them which have to be set alongside our economic imperatives.

As the historian James Belich has pithily expressed the matter “no-one ever emigrated

to New Zealand to be worse off”. Even more than that, the eras in which our major

European immigration proceeded – the eighteen forties and eighties – coincided with the

pursuit of certain political agendas in British society in particular which came to form the

bedrock of our social ambitions, and so social entrepreneurship in this country has

always taken a particular political form – an egalitarianism, the key to which has always

been the opening up of opportunity to all.

One should add a footnote to that. The social historian Bill Oliver once remarked on New

Zealand’s particularly vulnerable dependence on international markets, the need for

investment capital from outside, and the difficulties inherent in specialising in

trading commodities i.e. agricultural products, which are notoriously

problematical and unstable as an economic base. Consequently, he comments

(in The Story of New Zealand) that our social ambitions commonly outpace our

capacity to support these by way of our economic performance. This has been a

major continuing factor in the development of a particularly innovative tradition

of lateral thinking when it comes to finding our way through that conundrum.

Social Innovation Investment Group An Historical Checklist — Page 2

What impresses is not that we have to deal with this problem but that our social

entrepreneurs have consistently successfully done so for over a century and a half.

So – to the list:

Sir Truby King

Any list has to include King as a primary member. His work in setting

up the Plunket Society is very well known but it is important to be

aware that his commitment to children’s health entailed much more

than this and included a successful business operation which produced

the nutritional products best suited to growing babies, and an

educational infrastructure which produced the paramedical

professionals who were the bedrock of the system.

Dr Edward Hulme

King’s work built on the public health innovations of a number of

medical professionals, mainly originating in the Otago provincial

area which early developed a tradition of scientific medical research

which eventually led to the development of Dunedin as the principal

academic medical centre of this country, a role it played for about a

century. Hulme was just one of a group of doctors, albeit the most

prominent, who kept the local authorities in New Zealand in touch

with the latest public health research on the sources of epidemic

disease (a significant cause of infant mortality in particular) and the

need to develop practical and comprehensive schemes in the new settlements to deal

with clean water reticulation and the disposal of sewage and garbage.

Sir Apirana Ngata and Princess Te Puea

This work was extended into the Maori field

under the auspices of Ngata and Te Puea, who

worked closely together to ensure that Maori

communities were in a position to take

responsibility for their own public health and

economic development, particularly when it

came to significant epidemic introduced

diseases such as tuberculosis. One at the

political end and the other at the community

end, they formed a formidable team. Their

emphasis was on local and individual

responsibility through iwi affiliation thereby

pioneering an approach which has paid social and economic dividends for Maori ever

since.

William Soltau Davidson

It is not an exaggeration to say that Davidson invented the New

Zealand rural economy through his work in not only organising and

introducing the technology of refrigerated shipping to this country

but also the infrastructures of both abattoirs at this end and

reception and marketing at the London end. This was not just

an economic matter. The whole rural family based farming

social economy was brought into being by this initiative, and

it is one of the richest ironies of our social history that

Davidson is virtually unknown and is only now beginning to

receive the recognition he deserves.

Social Innovation Investment Group An Historical Checklist — Page 3

Kate Shepherd

Shepherd is usually associated first and foremost with women’s

suffrage but her approach and impact was much more holistic than

this suggests. In company with a group of like minded reformers –

notably the Christchurch radical Liberal politician Tommy Taylor – she

saw women’s suffrage as instrumental rather than an end in itself, to

mobilise the active citizenship of the adult female population to play a

full role in the public life of their communities.

Ettie Rout

Rout is most commonly associated in the public mind with what her

generation saw as a scandalous approach to the use of contraception

by our troops in wartime. In fact her work was much broader than

this and was principally concerned with preventative health therapies

in a pre-penicillin age confronting a venereal disease epidemic and the

effect this had on the health of women, particularly in marriage.

Beyond that she was also a pioneer of therapeutic exercise.

Rev Rutherford Waddell, Harriet Morison, William Pember Reeves and Edward Tregear

This group belongs together because it was largely

their collective efforts which ensured the basic

regulation of the New Zealand labour market from

the eighteen nineties. Waddell led the protests

which led to the establishment of the Sweating

Commission, ably assisted by Morrison who was a

leading light in the setting up of the Tailoresses

Union.

From this and the outcome of the Maritime Strike

(which illustrated effectively that New Zealand workers did not, by and

large, have must interest in industrial militancy but wanted only fair

pay and conditions) Pember Reeves created an orderly system of

administrative law within the workplace to replace the contract based

systems which had pertained prior to this. But it was Tregear, as

Secretary of Labour, who largely implemented the outcomes.

Tregear has a second claim to recognition as a social entrepreneur. It

was largely at his initiative that the Seddon government passed the

Workers’ Dwellings Act in 1905, which became the basis of the

comprehensive state housing schemes initiated by the Savage

government in the thirties and the subsequent home ownership

schemes under State Advances auspices in the sixties.

Social Innovation Investment Group An Historical Checklist — Page 4

Sir James Fletcher and Ernst Plischke

As a corollary to the work of Tregear in pioneering

the role of the public sector in setting the standard

for and creating the conditions for decent housing for

all New Zealanders, the social entrepreneurship of

both Fletcher and Plischke needs to be recognised.

It was the business and organisation acumen of

Fletcher which made the state housing schemes

of Lee and Tyndall a reality in the thirties. Plischke,

an architect associated with the Bauhaus and a

refugee from the Nazi regime, and in association

with a likeminded group, injected modernist

concepts into the planning and construction of

housing in this country from the forties until his return to his native Vienna and a

prestigious academic post in the sixties.

George Hogben

Hogben was Secretary of Education under Seddon and Ward. He was

instrumental in effectively opening secondary schooling to merit and

talent and for pioneering a much more practical and workplace

related approach to education as a means of mobilising a much

broader pool of talent within our community than had hitherto been

the case.

Dr Clarence Beeby

Hogben’s work was extended and complemented by that of Beeby

who effectively, as Secretary of Education under Peter Fraser,

created our current education system through his child centred and

holistic approach to the development of talent. It was largely on

the basis of his work and that of his mentor, Fraser, that we opened

tertiary education to talent in the sixties and to the present in ways

which were a logical extension of the work of Hogben in respect of

secondary education, thus opening the way to a fully skills based

economy.

Jessie Mackay and Hubert Church

These two early twentieth century poets and prose writers laid much of the groundwork

for the cultural renaissance of the forties associated with the names of Glover, Fairburn,

Mulgan and others by creating an infrastructure of publication which enabled many of

our fledgling writers to see the light of day. Although their work is today sometimes

derided as ‘colonialist’ and derivative they nevertheless helped to create a positive

publishing climate for our own stories.

Their name lives on in two annual prizes for first

time writers under the auspices of the New

Zealand Society of Authors and the Montana

Awards

Social Innovation Investment Group An Historical Checklist — Page 5

Joseph Heenan

Heenan was Secretary of Internal Affairs in the forties. Through his

initiatives the NZ Symphony Orchestra and the State Literary Fund came

into being, thus providing the foundation on which the Arts Council, the

Historic Places Trust, and ultimately the Ministry of Culture and Heritage

could be built. It is hard to overestimate the effect that these

originating initiatives have had on our cultural life.

William Sutch

Sutch will always be a controversial figure, not least for his unsuccessful

prosecution for treason in the seventies. To see his role as a social

entrepreneur it is therefore necessary to look beyond such incidents into

his broader role as one of the initiators of the welfare state in the thirties,

as one of our pioneer social historians, and for the wide range of social

initiatives he championed, such as the setting up of the Design Council

and the Consumers’ Institute.

Scientists and Technicians

I have added this category at the end because to a very marked extent the way we live

and develop our social mores and communities in this country is a tribute to the

economy we have created. New Zealand, if we followed the pattern of most of the rest

of the single or limited crop agricultural economies of the world, ought to be a

subsistence third world country. In fact we are a member of the OECD, which is a

remarkable accomplishment and enables us to live up to our social ambitions. This is

largely a tribute to generations of scientists and technicians who have created the added

value in a myriad of ways which lies at the very core of how we earn our living as

international traders. It would similarly be incomplete to prepare a list of

social entrepreneurs without paying tribute to them … they have played a

very large role in making us who and what we are.

While it would be invidious to try and single out just one or two of those

scientists, an example is found in the engineer and inventor Henry

Shacklock, who designed what became our archetypal kitchen appliance.

His cheap and easily installed coal range created to consume our

abundant lignite coal cleanly and efficiently, created the traditional New

Zealand domestic economy and the cuisine which went with it. The

pavlova owes its very existence to Henry Shacklock.

Tony Simpson

August 2006

published by the Social Innovation Investment Group

August 2006

contact: vivian Hutchinson

Social Innovation Investment Group

P.O.Box 428, New Plymouth, New Zealand