BEER BARONS AND POLITICS

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33941, 6 September 1975, Page 10

BEER BARONS AND POLITICS

Fot Mine Is The Kingdom. By John A. Lee. Alister Taylor Publishing,

Ltd. 176 pp. N.Z. price $5.95. The existence of a special “trade defence" fund held by the brewery and hotel companies and used for its own inscrutable purposes has long been suspected, but it remains a closelyguarded secret — indeed even a Royal Commission on Licensing was unable to investigate it. Such evidence as there is suggests that the fund has. from time to time, been of benefit to political parties. In this book, John A. Lee confirms that the Labour Party and its leading members certainly accepted contributions from it during the party’s formative years. Billed as “a story of beer barons and bribery, politics and corruption." Mr Lee’s recollections of the period are tantalising, at times scurrilous and, tn the end. disappointing. Over his story hangs a suggestion that the party, bribed and corrupted by the breweries, turned from its true path, throwing out socialist principles, baby and bathwater, John A. Lee, Old Uncle Colin Scrimley and all; but nowhere can the charge that he who pays the piper call the tune be made to stick convincingly, although there is a strong suggestion that the party's sense of obligation did influence its selection of a candidate for the Auckland mayoralty. Part of the trouble is Mr Lee’s style. The old intense, direct and jerky

construction that gave power to much of his earlier work is still there, but the book is such a mixture of fact and fiction, supposition and conjecture, and so studded with conversations of long ago as if just spilled from an eavesdropping tape recorder, that earnest seekers of the truth will be baffled by it. Another difficulty is one that can only be described as Mr Lee’s “holier-than-thou” attitude. He takes the blinkered view of a censor to a fact of political life — fhe view that what he reads or sees or experiences will not affect him but will corrupt anyone and everyone else exposed to it. He readily admits to accepting money from the liquor trade for his election campaign expenses, to taking a job as manager of a hotel w’hen he lost an election and to distributing a Christmas gift of liquor among his campaign team.

“I didn’t intend to become a tool of The Trade, but I had no desire to lose my seat and my right to advance political and economic welfare issues.’’ he says by way of explanation. “The dilemma of politics is to choose priorities.’’ But once his erstwhile colleagues, Michael Joseph Savage, who once worked as a cellarman (Mr Lee demotes him- to barrel-washer) in a brewery Bob Semple, Bill Parry and others accepted donations for the party or for their campaigns, then the liquor trade becomes, in his words, “an immense underground power." The inference is clear.

Was Labour's policy on liquor in fact profoundly influenced by contributions from the licensed trade? The party, in spite of its early crusading socialism, could not agree on nationalisation of the trade because of the number of ardent prohibitionists among its members. In their view a “dry” New Zealand was infinitely preferable to State-owned breweries and drink-shops. The cracks were papered over and the party agreed on a policy of putting a third option into the triennial liquor poll: the addition of State purchase and control alongside Continuance and Prohibition. There was, of course, powerful support for the latter options from the licensed trade on one side and the strong prohibition movement on the other. Even when it became the Government, Labour did not crusade strongly for' the option it had adopted; and while, the vote for prohibition dropped markedly over the years, the vote fro State purchase and control w r as at times almost derisory. Was this because the Labour Party, with a sense of obligation to the trade, failed to campaign for its own own option; was the party too engrossed in its social welfare programme to be concerned much with beer; or was it simply that the New Zealand voter was reluctant to entrust a cherished part of his way of life to a beer, brewing and bar bureaucracy? Mr Lee does not provide many real answers to these key questions and one is forced to the conclusion that Labour’s apparent appathy was merely a symptom of the political timidity that has characterised the dealings of successive New Zealand Governments with liquor — after all, it took a referendum, to have 10 o’clock closing restored half a century after its “temporary” abolition. Much of the book is devoted, if that is the word, to the influence of Sir Ernest Davis — here heavily disguised as “Sir Ernest Booze” — a former Mayor of Auckland and a major shareholder in and director of New Zealand Brewries Ltd, in the. period between the last major “wet-dry” battles after the First World War to the decline and fall of the first Labour Government. Davis, genial but shrewd, foresaw in the early twenties that Labour would become a power in the land and conscientiously set. out to woo its rising politicians, including Mr Lee, in whose electorate his brewery stood. But the only real evidence Mr Lee adduces of favours given .because of favours received are more personal than political. He says Labour fielded a weak candidate for the Auckland mayoralty when Davis stood — and was elected — and backs the claim

with protests from party branches at the Labour selection. He might have added that Davis was knighted in 1937 on Labour’s recommendation. Mr Lee is no respecter of confidences. He confesses to a liking for Davis, but thought he was “a tall daisy” — and, he says, “I wanted to reduce him in size for the good of New Zealand.” It has taken him a long time, but the job is fairly comprehensive. His portrayal of a respected Auckland figure — indeed he became something of a national hero

when he presented his racehorse, Bali H’ai, to the Queen Mother — as a lecherous seducer of “the tall and slender girls” who worked for him, is achieved by repeating remarks Davis made to him from time to time. Whether they were factual or boastful or imaginative is not clear; what is clear is that they would not have been repeated while Davis was alive to answer them. They my “reduce him in size” but they add nothing to Mr Lee’s stature either.

Mr Lee says some hard things about F. G. Young, a former secretary of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers’ Union, and “another trade union gangster”, F, P. Walsh. Beside them Davis was a good New Zealander, “intelligent and at times curiously innocent, a philanthropist and yet a man capable of making harsh bargains, willing to be a crook to defend his interests and yet to his friends and associates a man of upright character.” This ambivalence, almost a love-hate relationship, shows up throughout the book — “he was a big bad man, a big good man,” Mr Lee says — and makes his claims appear extravagant. Yet the book is an important one. There is a grey area between patronage and bribery, between what is acceptable in business and political life and what Edward Heath once termed “the unacceptable face of capitalism.” New Zealand has known little corruption in high or lower places and Mr Lee’s account of what he experienced and knew of brewery patronage does little to alter the score. But, as he says, the men and the times are dead, the record should live. “Where the trade is concerned, it has lessons for us all.”