The 'Continuous Ministry' Revisited
The 'Continuous Ministry' Revisited IN HIS ARTICLE on the 'Scarecrow Ministry', published in a festschrift for Willis Airey in 1963, Keith Sinclair began by commenting on the lack of detailed study of the structure of New Zealand politics in the 1870s and 1880s.1 That article was part of the structural basis for the analysis of politics in Sinclair's subsequent biography of William Pember Reeves. The biography, the article, and a number of university theses written around the same time filled in many of the gaps in our political historiography.2 Most of the thesis writers studied a particular election or the politics of a par- ticular region. Nearly all began with Reeves's own description of politics, written in the 1890s, and then refined, expanded or refuted his views.3 These works focussed on the relationship between politics and economic policy, on the 'Continuous Ministry', on the so-called 'liberal' challenges to this ministry, and on the emergence of a proto-party system from 1887. In this article I want to return to the 'Continuous Ministry', a feature of 1 'The Significance of the "The Scarecrow Ministry", 1887-1891', in Robert Chapman and Keith Sinclair, eds, Studies of a Small Democracy. Essays in Honour of Willis Airey, Auckland, 1963, p. 102. 2 R. W. Armstrong, 'The Politics of Development: A Study of the Structure of Politics from 1870 to 1890', M.A. thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1960; J. Bassett, 'Sir Harry Atkinson: A Political Biography, 1872-1892', M.A. thesis, University of Auckland, 1966, (subsequently published); E.
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