Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Voters at election booths, 2008

It has been fascinating to observe the speed with which New Zealanders have put winning the seventh Rugby World Cup behind them and turned their attention to the country’s 50th parliamentary elections.

As a political scientist, I personally applauded the prime minister’s decision to forego the usual petty politicking that surrounds the choice of an election date and, instead, announce the date of the election 10 months in advance. At the same time I wondered whether the five-week period between the final of the Rugby World Cup on 23 October and the general election on 26 November would provide enough time for people to switch focus. I am happy to say that the answer appears to be yes.

Less than a week after the final rugby referee’s whistle had been blown, the minor party leaders held their first televised debate, and the following evening the two prime ministerial contenders – Phil Goff and John Key – squared off on Television One. Radio programmes have been replete with political interviews, and referendum ‘specials’ have already been broadcast on radio and television, as well as published in a host of newspapers.

I’m delighted to say that Te Ara, too, is playing its part in putting the election into perspective.

Seven entries in Te Ara’s Government and Nation theme have been deliberately fast-tracked through the editorial production-line and are now available for all to see on New Zealand’s online encyclopedia.

Each of the entries is of relevance to elections in New Zealand, and every one of them has been written by an expert in the field. In alphabetical order, the entries are:

• Electoral systems
• Labour Party
• Māori representation
• National Party
• Parliament
• Political parties
• Premiers and prime ministers

The entries have been written by well-known historians (such as John E. Martin and Gavin McLean), political analysts (such as Colin James and Rawiri Taonui) and political scientists (such as Peter Aimer, Jennifer Curtin and Raymond Miller).

Each of the entries in this ‘election special’ will provide anyone reading them with a great deal of authoritative information about the history and politics of New Zealand.

What is more, a tool that has been specially created for Te Ara is now available online for the very first time. It charts the numbers of seats held by political parties (as well as by independent MPs) in the House of Representatives after every election from 1890 through to and including 2008 (and, yes, the results of the 2011 election will be added once they’re known).

As one of the co-editors of Te Ara’s Government and Nation theme, I cannot give enough thanks to Heath Sadlier and his creative design team for the work that has been done to bring this idea to fruition. To see the explanatory and teaching power of the chart, go – for example – to the chart headed Parties making up Parliament, 1949–1984 and click on the election years from 1960 through to 1975.

You will get a clear picture of the glacial decline in National’s share of the seats in the House of Representatives in the three general elections that followed the party’s election victory in 1960, and you will then see how the party’s dramatic loss of office in 1972 was literally mirrored in its return to power in 1975.

Likewise, the chart labelled Distribution of parties in Parliament, 1996–2008 shows the changing patterns of representation in the House of Representatives and the consequent coalitions during the MMP (mixed-member proportional representation) era in New Zealand.

Our sister site, NZHistory.net also has good features on Election Days and The road to MMP.

We don’t know what’s going to happen when New Zealand’s 50th parliamentary elections are held in three-and-a-half weeks’ time. After nearly half a century of studying elections in New Zealand and overseas, I have learnt that one must frequently expect the unexpected.

As a result, I am going to be paying particular attention to a line in one of the entries in Te Ara’s election package. It’s in the Premiers and prime ministers entry, and it reads: ‘Thirty-eight prime ministers have led New Zealand since the country was granted internal self-government by Britain in 1856.’

Will that line have to be altered as a result of how we vote on Saturday, 26 November?

In late 2009, when Stephen Levine and I lodged a joint application to be co-editors of the Government and Nation theme for Te Ara, New Zealand’s official online encyclopedia, we thought the work would be interesting and challenging.

We were certainly right there!

In 2010 our first two tasks as co-editors were to define the scope of the theme and to come up with a list of roughly 100 topics that would be included in the section of the encyclopedia focused on Government and Nation.

Stephen and I fairly quickly decided that the Government and Nation theme should centre on the establishment and evolution of a New Zealand approach to government, and on the development of a sense of nationhood.

We divided the theme into seven broad sub-themes: from colony to independence, institutions of government, public policy, defence and war, New Zealand and the world, participation and citizenship, and symbols of nationhood.

Once we’d agreed on these parameters, we turned our attention to the specific areas that needed to be covered. They included topics such as the Declaration of Independence – Te Wakaputanga, Parliament, the judicial system, the musket wars, the First World War, the Second World War; empire and Commonwealth, relations with the US, New Zealand’s party system, political values, New Zealand identity, the national anthem and the capital city.

Discussion and debate about the topics with Jock Phillips, Te Ara’s general editor, followed, and after the three of us had reached agreement on the topics, we submitted the full list of 102 topics to two advisory groups: Te Ara Wānanga (chaired by Dr Ranginui Walker) and a theme advisory committee (chaired by Sir Geoffrey Palmer) for their consideration and approval. The advice and encouragement that the members of both bodies gave us – based on years of academic and practical experience – was invaluable.

What is more, the fact that both the wānanga and the advisory committee endorsed the list of the Government and Nation topics that we’d constructed gave us the green light we needed to go ahead and commission authors to write the encyclopedia entries.

An insight into the importance of Te Ara was the willingness of the people we approached to write for the online encyclopedia. A range of outtsanding senior diplomats, geographers, historians, law professors, public servants and political scientists – to mention just a few of the most obvious categories of contributors – agreed to contribute to Te Ara (usually without any hesitation whatsoever). I found this not only encouraging, but also frankly heart-warming. It’s an instance of Kiwis not standing on ceremony and pitching-in together.

For the past 10 months contributions for the Government and Nation theme have been coming in from authors, and we are in the process of preparing them for publication on the web.

I said at the start of this blog that Stephen and I thought the work would be interesting and challenging, and how right we were. What I hadn’t realised, though, was just how much fun the work would be. The staff in Te Ara’s open-plan office have got used to hearing peals of laughter whenever writers, theme editors and the encyclopedia’s gifted team of resourcers get together to choose illustrations to accompany the online stories. Five people arguing about which is the best of, say, four possible photos to accompany a paragraph in a Te Ara entry tends to generate a lot of both good-natured heat and intense light.

From now until the middle of 2012, entries in the Government and Nation theme are going to be rolled out – that is, they are going to go live online. We have chosen the entry about New Zealand’s postage stamps to start the process.

One of New Zealand's rarest stamps

All countries promote themselves via their stamps. New Zealand is no exception to this rule, and a great deal about New Zealand’s view of itself can be seen in the country’s postage stamps.

When New Zealand was a young British colony, Queen Victoria’s image adorned our stamps. However, in the late 19th century New Zealand became one of the first countries in the world to put scenic views on its stamps. As the entry in the encyclopedia notes, ‘The first pictorial stamps, in 1898, recognised that stamps had propaganda value.’ More than a hundred years later, we’re still using stamps to promote the idea that New Zealand is clean and green.

The Te Ara entry about stamps was written by Carl Walrond – the grandson of a pre-eminent New Zealand stamp dealer. It’s a colourful and fascinating account of the subject. You could say that it literally puts its stamp on Te Ara’s Government and Nation theme.