Obituary: Jack Scott

By ARNOLD PICKMERE

National cabinet minister and MP for Rodney. Died aged 85.

William John Scott, QSO, MP for Rodney between 1954 and 1969, was a cabinet minister during the prosperous Holyoake years of the 1960s.

As Postmaster-General, Minister of Broadcasting, Minister of Marine and Minister in Charge of the Government Printing Office from 1963 he had a hand in events affecting the New Zealand way of life which now seem almost of another world.

The most famous perhaps were his considerable efforts in 1966 to stop Radio Hauraki putting to sea in the Tiri to set up a pirate radio station outside the three-mile territorial limit.

This unwelcome challenge of the Government's tight control of broadcasting saw Scott, as Minister of Marine, ordering the ship held in port under a detention order.

This declared that the Tiri, by "reason of her defective hull and lack of means of independent propulsion ... is unfit to put to sea". The Auckland District Court later dismissed charges of defying the order against five Radio Hauraki directors.

Mr W. J. Scott, as he was always described then, was born in Waikato in 1916 and educated at Kawhia and Paterangi schools and later at Mt Albert Grammar.

Leaving school he went farming on partly-developed land at Hobsonville near Auckland, before rising through the National Party ranks to parliament in 1954.

Many things in New Zealand were heavily controlled in the 1960s. About the same time as the Tiri row the Minister of Broadcasting was pushed into a parliamentary denial that the Broadcasting Corporation was planning to commercialise radio or television programmes on Sunday.

And Scott's view of TV in 1964 was that licensing a private station should only be considered after the NZBC had been given the chance to establish a second channel in Auckland. But the Government did agree "in principle" to acceleration of work extending a primary TV service to all parts of the country.

The minister did admit that an independent authority to issue commercial radio and TV licences must come to New Zealand "in the future". In those days people were warned to try a television in their homes before purchase, in case they could not get coverage.

As Postmaster-General, Scott worked in the 1960s towards getting automatic telephone exchanges into far-flung areas of Auckland like Pakuranga, Henderson and Te Atatu, raising hopes that folk there might yet call central Auckland toll free.

But it was probably as Minister of Marine that Jack Scott made his greatest contribution, pushing an infant New Zealand fishing industry towards a better future in the days when a trial export of fish to Japan was an event, and oyster and mussel farming was being investigated.

Under his ministry New Zealand established a 12-mile fishing zone limit - in the days when Japan longliners were sneaking even within the three-mile territorial limit and Russian, Romanians and others were also aggressively fishing the coast.

In 1964 there were complaints of large foreign whaling fleets off New Zealand, and the same year the Government offered our own Tory Channel whalers a guaranteed sperm-oil price to help their faltering operation.

Scott was described by some as a serious-minded minister who never minded a battle. And his own view of bureaucracy was that, though red tape might at times seem formidable, it was all part and parcel of the democratic system of checks and balances.

Retiring from Parliament he became chairman of the Historic Places Trust and a director of several ferry companies. He was awarded a Queens Service Order in 1994.

Among his final public arguments was a testy refusal last year, on a point of legal principle, to let the Fire Service fit smoke detectors in his Devonport penthouse apartment.

He married Mary Jackson in 1945. She died in 1981.