and Phar Lap—Melbourne Cup winners in 1890 and 1930—remain among
the most famous of many Australian horses from New Zealand.
When practically necessary, New Zealand teamed up with Australia, in
tennis and athletics before the First World War, and in Albany and
Cairo during that war. There has always been a suspicion, though, that
Australia gives little recognition to the‘NZ’in‘Anzac’. Indeed, in Ausflag’s
pictorial essay on the Australian red ensign‘people'sflag’,^34 pairings with
New Zealand’sblueflag are remarkable by their absence, even where
Australia’sredflag was shown alongside alliedflags. When Robert Menzies
disavowed Australia’sredflag in 1953, there appears to have been little
awareness or concern that the full adoption of the blueflag might under-
mine the separate identity of Australia’s Anzac partner.
In policy-making, politicians and public servants (including those in Aus-
tralian states) naturally turned to their Tasman partners for inspiration about
how or how not to meet a particular challenge (Mein Smith 2012). The two
economies grew in parallel with similar living standards—give or take cyclical
variations—until the 1980s. However, the strong similarities in the formation
of welfare states from 1890 diverged in the 1930s. Labour and National/Liberal
administrations prevailed in each country at different times. With regard to
Michael Joseph Savage, the Labour prime minister of New Zealand from 1935
to 1940, who represented the face of New Zealand social security, theNew
Zealand Heraldstated it‘greatly admired the man himself as the epitome of the
New Zealand character, even though he had been born in a foreign land’,to
the extent of making him their person of the year in both 1937 and 1938:
An Australian by birth, but a New Zealander by 28 years’adoption, Mr Savage has
none of the easy optimism and irresponsibility with which popular belief endows
the typical‘Aussie’....In temperament he so far conforms to the accepted New
Zealand pattern that he has been able to win the almost instinctive respect and
liking even of those to whom his political creed is anathema.
(‘Mr Savage’s Career’1935, p. 14)Castles (1985, p. 8) wrote of Australasian exceptionalism in the context of
workers‘welfare state’. In both countries‘working class’assuredly would not
mean‘lower class’. Thus the early welfare states that emerged from the state
experiments of the 1890s and 1900s would take on a form in Australia that
would remain exceptional, albeit on account of its limitations compared to
many post-Second World War welfare societies.^35 Here Australia is the exem-
plar of a‘selective’welfare state. New Zealand state experiments in social
(^34) See: http://www.ausflag.com.au/red_ensign.asp (accessed 20 November 2015).
(^35) Castles does not address the early welfare structures in Argentina and Uruguay, which shared
some commonalities with the Australasian model (Easton 2001).
Keith Rankin