Thanks for commenting Phil. I take it you are a Kiwi?

First off, you have to realise that this is what they used to do with ‘fallen women’ in NZ before the DPB came in: https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/82793165/nzs-hidden-baby-scoop-shame---unmarried-women-had-their-babies-taken-from-them.

Plus I suspect that even with the DPB, it’s doubtful that young women consciously chose unwed motherhood on a benefit as a career: you have to take anything you read in I’ve Been Thinking with a grain of salt.

For instance Prebble claims C19 New Zealand was run on principles of laissez-faire with the politicians talking about values and not about political economy, when in fact many a colonial premier railed against the great landowners even before the coming of the Liberals in 1890/91, e.g. Stout in 1885 “I look upon the land as a monopoly — (cheers) — and a monopoly the State has the right to control. (Cheers).” https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZH18850414.2.41.

Prebble even has the gall to mention Richard John Seddon, Liberal premier from 1893 to 1906, in this connection, claiming tht Seddon once harangued the good citizens of Invercargill on their morals for three hours, when in fact Seddon was always going on about the two nations of the Rich and the Poor (he did not, of course, invent the idea). See also the memoirs of two retired C19 NZ Liberal politicians, William Pember Reeves ‘The Long White Cloud’ (1898) and Frederick J. Moss, ‘Notes on Political Economy from the Colonial Point of View’ (1897), both of which paint a rather social-democratic picture.

Also, as to the 1975 election, you have to remember Kirk had been dead for more than a year, the combative Rob Muldoon was leading the National Party and for some reason Labour’s surviving lineup failed to campaign on the memory of the (hugely popular) Norman Kirk, perhaps because he made those who took over look mediocre.

I’ve read in two books, ‘The Hunter and the Hill: New Zealand Politics in the Kirk Years’ by Tony Garnier, Bruce Kohn and Pat Booth (1978) and also Tom Scott’s more recent memoir ‘Drawn Out‘ ’https://booksellersnz.wordpress.com/2018/03/22/book-review-drawn-out-by-tom-scott/ that Kirk’s name was almost never mentioned during Labour’s campaign: that Kirk had never been more dead than he was during Labour’s 1975 election campaign as Garnier, Kohn and Booth put it.

Back in the forties, after Michael Joseph Savage, generally thought of as a saint-like figure had died in office in 1949, the Labour, led for the next ten-plus years by the bureaucrat-like Peter Fraser, made damn sure that Savage’s literally iconic portrait was everywhere, and continued to invoke his memory in ostensibly non-political government films even years later, like this highly utopian piece of Ministry of Works propaganda from 1946:

Of course a Labour Party snatching defeat from the jaws of victory thanks to a bad campaign and uninspiring leadership even when its policies are in fact reasonably popular has been nothing new in subsequent decades: not only in NZ but also the UK as we have just seen, where most Brits said they liked Labour’s policies, but that man Corbyn put them off a bit.

Whereas of course in NZ the only reason Labour won in 2017 was because Andrew Little, headed for defeat in the polls, stepped aside for the more charismatic Jacinda Ardern to become leader just before the election.

In 1975, Labour’s leader Bill Rowling was much more like Little than Ardern: or for that matter like Peter Fraser rather than Savage. And that makes it all the more bizarre that, with no one obviously more charismatic to step down in favour of, he didn’t do what Fraser did and claim that he was continuing the work of the great man.

That seems to have been the real reason Labour lost in 1975 in the view of Garnier et al, and Scott. Plus other issues like Britain joining the European Community in 1973 and thus accepting less product from NZ, and the oil shock of 1973, which led to the slogan ‘At a dollar a gallon we can’t afford Rowling.’ Not that it was Rowling’s fault of course but there you are. I suspect rising numbers on the DPB came in at about number nine on the list of the general public’s worries, if the issue was in the top ten at all. As I say you really do have to take Prebble with a grain of salt.