In 1853, New Zealand, by the imperial parliament's New Zealand Constitution Act, established a quasi-federal system by which authority was shared between provincial governments (six originally) and the colonial government based in Auckland. The provinces were not like British municipalities, though they had elective councils modelled on the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act. Their wide powers included immigration and public works, especially railway construction. In 1858, they were given a substantial share of the revenue accruing from the disposal of crown lands.
André Brett's Acknowledge No Frontier: The Creation and Demise of New Zealand's Provinces, 1853–76 is a timely book, not least because it might serve to revive interest in the politics of the New Zealand colonial society, much neglected over the last half-century apart from the occasional biography of high-strutting premiers and the like. More important, this is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject since W. P. Morrell's The Provincial System in New Zealand (1932)—reprinted in 1964 to make the point of its continued indispensability. It is good that Brett is generous towards his now long-gone predecessor. The wealth of material Brett deploys (about 450 items are listed in the bibliography) indicates well how within a lifetime there has been a huge expansion of available sources and writing on New Zealand history. Neither has Brett let the embarrassment of riches obscure the overall argument of his work. In the concluding chapter, there are even several pages of useful reflection on whither local government after the abolition of the provinces.
Brett, fairly enough, sees the demise of the provincial system as sooner or later inevitable. Governor Grey, as its chief architect and promoter, was responding to a situation where, however small in area New Zealand was in comparison to Australia or Canada, the six main European settlements existed in virtual isolation from each other, separated by bush and mountain and by precarious sea links along the country's stormy coasts. Colonists, too, were understandably focused on local development, and from the Britain of their own time took full possession of the idea of local self-government to press the point. Trouble was that there was never enough money to meet the requirements, let alone expectations, of settlers who wanted roads, bridges, railways, and port facilities. Of all the provinces, only Canterbury, generously recompensed out of the crown's land revenues, could make a go of it.
Things came to a head in the late 1860s, when the obvious truth dawned that the London money market was extremely wary of lending large amounts to the provinces. The colonial government stepped to the fore when Julius Vogel, a political entrepreneur if ever there was one, took office as colonial treasurer and later premier with a policy of raising loans to fund large-scale immigration and public works, the very matters on which the provinces had failed to deliver. Earlier, the building of a telegraph system by central government had shown the possibilities of colonial integration. Provincial shortcomings and central initiative finally ensured the passage of an abolition act in 1875, confirmed by a decisive election result a few months later.
Brett's solid achievement apart, another book remains to be written on the politics of the period. His account of the failure of the provincial system emphasizes the advance of colonial government authority, thereby implicitly contributing to the established interpretation of state formation in New Zealand and the continuing rise of the central state after 1876 until today, when ministers exercise “unbridled power” (G. W. R. Palmer, Unbridled Power: An Interpretation of New Zealand's Constitution and Government, 1979). An alternative view places importance on the relationship between the localities and provincial governments and points towards a post-1876 equilibrium of local and central authority by which the latter left the former a generous measure of self-government supported by permissive legislation and financial handouts—subsidies, grants, and loans—with minimal conditions directing on what projects the money should be spent. Previously, the provincial governments had recognized the force of colonial localism by creating and funding road boards—some three hundred existed in 1876. Several municipalities had also been constituted before the New Zealand parliament passed the 1867 Municipal Corporations Act, which set up town governments that were to a high degree self-reliant for the next three-quarters of a century—much of the development in the largest centers was funded by overseas loans negotiated by councils. Brett gives the boroughs negligible attention, though town dwellers were just as avid for town amenities as country settlers were for roads and bridges.
The model of the state, then, that had most influence in nineteenth-century New Zealand, and arguably the empire, was not the continental one of firm centralized control but the British one of self-governing local or subnational bodies empowered to take charge of whatever the central state could do less effectively. A premium was put on satisfying local wants and using local resources as far as was practicable. Call it a cynical ploy to curry favor with localists if you will, but the payments made to provincial governments for distribution to the road boards commenced in 1870 by Vogel the centralist also fully acknowledged realities. The idea of local self-government was perfectly evident in New Zealand's provincial system, and it had equal resonance in the county and borough system that succeeded it.
