Together, these savings will cover about 0.1% of the increased defence spending, while endangering the history “real countries” need. Without history, we may as well join Australia.
Public historians’ first task, beginning in 1945, was to assemble the official histories of New Zealand in World War II, a massive project. Large public investments were also made in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, from 1983, and Te Ara, the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, from 2001.
The public historians maintain and update these, as they do New Zealand History websites, including “New Zealanders at War”. Ministry assurances that life support for these will continue ring hollow in the absence of people to do the job.
These resources are richer, more human and more durable memorials than any cenotaph.
They will be hard to revive once expertise is lost. Is this how we honour our war dead?
The ministry’s online resources have about seven million users a year, 70% of them New Zealanders, including many secondary school students. Our recent commitment to New Zealand history in schools is already in trouble.
History posts in universities have also been cut, leaving few to teach the teachers. New Zealand history posts at the University of Auckland, for example, have at least halved (to less than three FTE) over the past decade or so.
Behind this is the Government policy of funding arts students at less than half the rate of science students. History converts information into understanding, a key skill for anyone, and is essential to the social capital that glues our communities together and helps them understand each other.
The big histories funded by Marsden, including two of my own books, could never have been attempted without it. They engaged with other histories as well as New Zealand’s own. The logic was precisely that “a real country”, even a small one, should contribute its bit to the global knowledge on which it draws.
The Government might have ditched these global aspirations, restricted Marsden history and other humanities and social sciences funding to New Zealand subjects and/or introduced other reforms – to filter out “flakier” projects, for example.
But it did not reform; it just killed the whole thing off. We still have much to learn about the history of New Zealand and its interactions with the world.
Marsden projects contributed to filling these gaps, for example: “Second World War Conscription and New Zealand Society”; “Slavery in Māori society: myths and realities to c. 1860”; “Researching ourselves: social surveys in New Zealand”. It will no longer do so.
National Party governments, or National-led coalitions, have supported public historians from the first, since 1949. Decimating them goes against all 76 years of National Party practice. The Dictionary of NZ Biography project was initiated by a National Government.
The Marsden Fund, with a brief always including history, humanities and social sciences, was set up by Simon Upton in 1994, as a minister in Jim Bolger’s Government.
Reasonable National Party MPs today need to recapture their Government and join the rest of us in repelling this attack on New Zealand history and identity.
