Unsettling Recolonization: Labourism, Keynesianism and Australasia From the 1890s to tHe 1950S

Abstract

This paper addresses the now entrenched historiography of the Australian Settlement and New Zealand variations thereof. Against the central premise of this historiography, that a particular regime of domestic insulation and external orientation to the British market constrained development and persisted unchanged until the neo-liberal restructuring of the 1980s, it is argued here that the political economy of the beginning of the 20th century was profoundly destabilized by the Depression. As a result, a new, Keynesian regime was established in New Zealand from the late 1930s and in Australia a few years later. The entrenchment of this regime depended upon adoption by remade conservative parties by the end of the 1940s.