Michael Duffy: Our next guest has written one of the more unusual books I've read in a long time. David Hackett Fischer teaches history at Brandeis University in America, he is a very highly regarded historian whose books include Albion's Seed, and Liberty and Freedom. The latter book is about the two guiding ideals of American democracy, and that's a subject to which he returns in his latest book, but in a very unexpected manner. This book's called Fairness and Freedom and it's nothing less than a comparison of the United States with our own neighbour and New Zealand.

David, welcome to the program.

David Hackett Fischer: Thanks, glad to be with you.

Michael Duffy: I don't think all that many Americans would be able to locate New Zealand on a map. How did you become interested and familiar with the country?

David Hackett Fischer: I was invited to talk at Auckland University about my book Albion's Seed. Many New Zealanders think they're Albion's seed, and I got started that way. And then my wife and I began to travel around the country. The invitation led to others at I think all but one of the universities. So we saw a good deal of both islands. And we happened to be passing through Canterbury while a by-election was underway, and it looked like an American election but it didn't sound like an American election. We couldn't quite sort that out, and then suddenly it dawned on us that none of the New Zealand candidates were very actively interested in talking about liberty and freedom. But they were passionately engaged in talking about fairness, and not fairness in detail but as the organising principle of an open society. And that got us started.

Michael Duffy: Yes, this idea of fairness, it's not something that many of us here would have thought about much before, but Americans don't talk about it all that much, do they?

David Hackett Fischer: Not so much. I think in daily discourse we use 'fairness' as much as any other English speaker, but we don't think about organising our politics or our Constitution around an idea of fairness. In New Zealand it's in the Bill of Rights, fairness and something that is called natural justice. And Geoffrey Palmer, who drafted the New Zealand Bill of Rights, said that natural justice can be understood as fairness. We don't have that word in our Constitution, though much is said about freedom and liberty.

Michael Duffy: And obviously this piqued your curiosity and we'll talk about that at some length in a moment. But I'm just interested, on a personal level how did New Zealand and the New Zealanders strike you? Did you like the place?

David Hackett Fischer: We loved it. I can't imagine many people would feel otherwise. I actually began by looking at the books that travellers had written about New Zealand from the beginning of European settlement. And people are almost unanimous in celebrating first of all the beauty of the country, and then something about the people and the way they respond to others in their midst. We found that, as many others have done as well.

Michael Duffy: Indeed, it's a great place. Getting back to fairness, not many books, if any, have been written about that subject before, have they.

David Hackett Fischer: Not so many. There is one great work of philosophy by John Rawls, it's called Justice Is Fairness, and he was I think the first philosopher to write a treatise about fairness. He understood fairness as justice to individuals rather than justice to groups of people. He was arguing against ideas like the greatest good for the greatest number, which seemed to him to be in some ways unfair to individuals.

And then I think my book may be the first history of fairness. Only a fragment of the subject, but historians haven't been very much interested in it for some reason, I don't quite understand why. One thing that's happening is I think interest is growing today, we can measure it, we have a new tool for looking at these vernacular ideas, ideas in our ordinary speech, and it's called Google Ngrams. These are ways of dipping into the corpus of all the books that Google have digitised, and they've done millions of books.

One group of them is called A Million English Books, and we looked about to find out how the frequency of fairness has changed through time, first of all in British usage, and also how liberty and freedom changed. And we discovered that liberty and freedom was very common at its peak, liberty in particular, in the 17th and 18th centuries, which was the period when British colonies in North America were founded. And fairness began to grow very rapidly in the early 19th century and reached very high levels around 1840 when British colonisation of New Zealand began to develop rapidly.

Michael Duffy: David, both New Zealand and the US were settler societies, and yet, as you've explained in your book, they had some different values. It could be argued that other settler societies such as Brazil or Australia have a different primary values again. Speaking generally for the moment, what is it that determines the values that take root in such a society?

David Hackett Fischer: Well, I think one part of it, but only one part, would be the cultural baggage that settlers would bring in. Another would be the values of the indigenous people. Another factor might be the question of scale on which…the size of the country, and New Zealand and the US being very different that way. It meant that New Zealanders began to run out of arable land in about two generations. In the US the supply of arable land held up through 16 generations.

Michael Duffy: There's a number of very interesting things there, can we just go through them one by one? I mean, cultural baggage for a start. I suspect you alluded to this when you were describing the language search before. Does the period in which these countries were settled by England, that made a big difference, did it?

David Hackett Fischer: I think that's right, and it's a question of timing.

Michael Duffy: Can you talk about that a bit? With America maybe to start with?

David Hackett Fischer: Well, in America the British colonies were settled in a period when in the mother country there were bitter struggles under way in the politics of Britain, and there were questions more about tyranny, about power in that regard. But then in the 19th century when New Zealand was settled, I think many people who came from Britain did not feel that their liberty was problematic to them. They did feel that England was bitterly unfair in its social conditions, social structure. And I think they came to New Zealand with a determination of building a society that could in some way correct or speak to that sort of problem. Both of these groups of settlers were interested in creating the good society, a society that would be a kind of model to the old world. But they had different purposes in mind that way. They came from their experience.

Michael Duffy: That's very interesting, and Australia was founded somewhat in between, which I suppose helps explain why we are different yet again.

David Hackett Fischer: I think so. I've never been to Australia. I have been reading about it but I've avoided talking about Australia, but I do think that it is a third way when we come to it from New Zealand and the US, it is not to be aligned with one of them against another. It has its own history.

Michael Duffy: It's funny you should say that because, yes, as I read your book I kept thinking that we were somewhere in the middle, I kept being drawn to the different poles that you've got in the book. Can you tell us a little bit about the way that the two countries, New Zealand and America, were settled? Maybe that's the role of government and how government involved in each of them also contributed to their values.

David Hackett Fischer: In the States there were different migrations from England which had very different ideas about the role of government. The people who settled in New England were comfortable with a very active presence of government in their lives because they thought of government as belonging to them, they ran their own communities through their town meetings and that sort of thing.

But in the back country, many people who came to the American appellations came from the borderlands of north Britain, came from the lowlands of Scotland, the six northern counties of England, and they grew up in that area which had two governments who both claimed to own and control it. And for the people who lived there for 1,000 years, those two governments brought them nothing but violence, misery, exploitation. And they grew up with a great hostility to government in general, and they came to the back country, and they're still in the southern highlands, they're in Texas. They had an idea of liberty which they represented as a rattlesnake, and underneath was that expression 'Don't tread on me'. It was first-person singular. And I think people in that part of the world still think that way. They have the lowest level of taxation in America, they hate taxes, they don't like government. New England has for going on four centuries been much more comfortable with an active government.

Michael Duffy: There is a rhetoric of hostility to government and that obsession with liberty that we in Australia find very hard to understand, and I suppose New Zealanders feel the same. And of course New Zealand itself, it was settled in some cases by fairly idealistic and philanthropic projects, wasn't it, run by people in England.

David Hackett Fischer: Yes, I think that's right. There were different colonies there. People spoke of the six colonies of New Zealand, and without going through them all, the settlement of Otago was not English, it was Scottish, and very strong Calvinist leaders, very much like New England in some ways. And they were the first to found the colleges, they were very active in creating institutions in that part of New Zealand. Auckland was founded more by entrepreneurs who were in pursuit of profit, and they created a very different kind of society there.

Michael Duffy: David, what about the issue of geography, which you did raise before? Do you think the fact that America is not only a bigger place but in terms of natural abundance far richer, do you think that had something to do too with the fact that these notions, this emphasis on freedom and liberty was able to persist for so long there?

David Hackett Fischer: Absolutely, I think that was something that made a fundamental difference. In America it was possible for people, because of the abundance of the land and other things, to think that a kind of social justice could be achieved in a very open system because there was more to go around. But in New Zealand when they began to run up against the limits, by the 1890s, which was about 50 years after the major settlements were planted, they were running short. And so what they began to do was to redistribute the land. This was in the so-called Lib-Lab governments that ran New Zealand for about 20 years. They were very successful in trying to do that in what people would take to be a fair way. They didn't confiscate any land, it was always with a willing seller. And they were looking for a way of doing it by justice and fairness that everybody could accept as legitimate, and they redistributed a good deal of land in New Zealand. There is a map in my book about the lands that were redivided that way, and I think in that process we can see the scale and the resource riches of these two countries being a major factor. I think here again Australia would be a third way, and I would think very complex too in its abundance, but also in the quality of the land.

Michael Duffy: Can we move now and talk a bit about how government developed in response to some of the forces that you've just described to us. You nominate critical periods in each country's history that helped shape the national institutions. Would you mind describing them for us, perhaps starting with the American events of 1783 to '89, with which probably most of our listeners aren't terribly familiar.

David Hackett Fischer: Yes, it was interesting for me to see the ways in which both countries, I think many countries, developed through a series of generations in which the really remarkable leaders emerged. And I find this to be the case wherever I look, whatever country I've studied, and I've been studying others in addition to these two. But in the US, broadly speaking the generation of the American Revolution, and these were our so-called founding fathers, they would be people like Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and they were really very interesting people in the diversity of their thought and also their creativity. They really responded to a very difficult moment after we achieved our independence, the question was; what's next? And we could have gone the way that other countries went, other countries often had great difficulty creating stable institutions after a major revolution, but they worked together in creating a very complex federalist system that worked on a large scale.

Then there were a series of other generations that followed in America, and I'm just always amazed at the creativity of these groups. And the same thing happened in New Zealand. There was a critical periods there. They had begun by in some ways following the American system, and they created something like a federal structure in New Zealand in 1840, and it didn't work very well. It got too cumbersome, it was too costly, it created levels of government that were difficult to sustain in the small system.

And so they had another critical period and they centralised their institutions. They did it very quickly around 1870. And it gave New Zealand I think one of the most centralised, open societies amongst all the English-speaking people. A large part of it was about scale, but it was also about other things. When they discussed this very complex system of government, the founders in that generation almost invariably said the major problem with their federal system is it's not fair, it's not just. And so they responded to that. Whereas the American founders said the problem with the system, it's not free, it is not sufficiently free. And so they were guided by these different basic principles that turned them in different directions.

I was really very interested to see generations of New Zealanders responding again and again to very difficult moments in New Zealand history. New Zealand had a rough time in the 1880s, they call it the Black '80s. And another group came in in the early 1890s and transformed New Zealand's institutions. It happened several times in New Zealand in the 20th century. I think if I were to work over Australia's history I'd find exactly the same thing, and we have a lot to learn from these groups because they usually were able to make their systems work in better ways or even just to work at all. And we're having a lot of trouble with that in the States right now, as you probably know, and one thing that frustrates me is the people who are running our system have forgotten its history, they've forgotten how people did it, and that's my job, to try to jog their memory.

Michael Duffy: For sure, well, maybe we can all learn something from each other.

David Hackett Fischer: Absolutely.

Michael Duffy: Let's just look at one or two specific examples now of the sort of fairness that may have emerged from some of the processes you've described. You make an interesting point about women's suffrage, that in New Zealand it came in for national elections in 1893, which of course was the first in the world, but in the US it didn't happen until 1920, although it had happened a lot earlier in state elections. Why the difference between the two countries?

David Hackett Fischer: We had feminist movements from the 18th century, and they pick up the language of the American Revolution. One of the first feminist movements wrote a Declaration of Sentiments which compared all men to George III, as tyrants over all women. And then the feminists who did that then asked these men for their vote in introducing women's suffrage and they didn't get it. And in New Zealand something very interesting happened, the New Zealand women's leaders were as radical and determined in what they were trying to do as were the Americans, but they went about it in a different way. They appealed to the men who were controlling the political system not on grounds of the liberty and freedom of women, but on the grounds of justice and fairness to all. And they argued that the way forward was in a kind of harmony, and men responded to that, they responded I think more easily than when they were being bashed by every generation of feminists.

We've had a series of problems in the US, the Equal Rights Amendment almost passed in the 20th century, it would have guaranteed equal pay for equal work for women, but it missed just by one state in the ratification of it as a Constitutional Amendment. And I think it was these tactics, once again it was in-your-face feminism, it was declaring men to be the enemy. And New Zealanders did that differently and they got better results.

Michael Duffy: Yes, they framed it differently, to use a modern term. David, in conclusion, what lessons do you think New Zealand might be able to provide America?

David Hackett Fischer: New Zealand I think can provide lessons to the world on what fairness can mean, how it can work. They can also help us in some ways with ideas of fairness that don't work. And I think we can see New Zealand as a kind of laboratory of ideas of fairness. In the same way I think we can see the history of the United States as a laboratory of liberty and freedom, and there we can see some of its strengths. We can also see that all of these great virtues (I think of these ideas as virtues), they also can generate their own vices, and we can see that working. The history of the US can be instructive that way, and New Zealand for the vices of fairness in the same way. So for me this is not a story only about the US and New Zealand, this is a world historical story, this is about ideas that everybody in the world can learn from.

Michael Duffy: It's an absolutely fascinating story. David, thanks very much for joining us today.

David Hackett Fischer: Pleasure.

Michael Duffy: David Hackett Fischer teaches history at Brandeis University. He is the author of Albion's Seed, Champlain's Dream, and Washington's Crossing, among other titles. And we've been talking about Fairness and Freedom, that is published by Oxford University Press.