Hon Dr Michael Cullen
Deputy Prime Minister, Attorney-General, Minister of Finance, Minister for Tertiary Education, Leader of the House

13 July 2007 Speech Notes

Embargoed until: 9.15am

Fifty years on, how far have we come?

Opening Address, Archives and Records Association of New Zealand
Annual Conference 2007, School of Engineering Faculty, University of Auckland.

It's my pleasure to be here to open this conference.

This week marks exactly fifty years since the old Archives Bill was introduced by the then Minister of Internal Affairs in 1957. So your theme, fittingly is how far have we come in the intervening decades?

There are several ways of judging the answer.

The most mundane measure of how far we have come might be linear. I understand someone has carefully calculated that if all the government records stored in the Archive were stacked against each other, they would cover some eighty kilometres.

As a measure of how far we have come since the Archives Act was passed in 1957, we could look at the Archway website. It is a portal unimaginable to archivists back then. It is capable of allowing anyone, anywhere in the world, to scour all eighty kilometres in fractions of a second.

And if one enters as a search, for example, “Rt Hon Helen Clark”, we discover records that occupy fully 176.41 linear metres of the archives.

Another way of measuring how far we have come is to look at the history of attempts to meddle with the archive.

In particular, we can look at attempts to change the legislation that constitutes the archive.

Although I can reflect with some satisfaction that I wasn't in parliament for the first reading of the original bill, I have been around for quite a few of the subsequent attempts to amend Archives legislation.

I managed to speak on the Archives Bill in 1984, which was something of a triumph because the only other speaker on that bill was the minister, Alan Highet. After we had made our contributions, the Bill lapsed completely when the snap election was held. No carrying over motion was passed and the new government never advanced a fresh version of the bill. I actually did manage a rewrite myself but the Internal Affairs minister at the time, Michael Bassett, did not run with it.

In 1992 a government bill did appear, and was then abandoned apparently for want of select committee time.

And then we came to the late nineties. Indeed, I was asked to speak at an archives conference in Dunedin in 1998 at a time of great upheaval for the archives.

The attempt then to change archives legislation tells us something about why the law was not updated over all those years. It was politically contentious because it illustrated how the fundamental role of archives could not be compatible with the then prevailing fashion in state sector architecture.

When I spoke to archivists in the nineties I observed that 1985 UNESCO guidelines told us something about the fundamental role of an archive: It requires institutional autonomy. It cannot be submissive to another agency's interests. There can be no blurring of its functions. The archive alone should exclusively determine its internal policies and professional needs.

This kind of status and role cannot sit at all with the funder-provider split that was being sought in all state agencies at the time. It is essential to the idea of a split that policy-making functions would rest with the funder; and the archive itself would be a mechanical provider of services thus commissioned. The provider would obviously not be able to comply with the UNESCO guideline that it should have sole domain over its policies and needs. It couldn't do the fundamental job of an archive.

In fact, the chief executive of the Internal Affairs Department at the time commented that, '"There is no particular reason why the National Archives should be the only keeper of the national archives."

So when I look back over fifty years of history of the archives and ask how far have we come, it is hard to go back beyond about that point, and ask 'how far have we come in only the last ten years?'

Thankfully, we have come a long way from the fashion of that time. The new Labour-led government established Archives New Zealand as a stand-alone Government department in 2000. The Government strengthened its role and gave it a leadership status in its archive function.

One fundamental reason is that the New Zealand Archivist needs to be able to direct other departments over how they dispose of and transfer their records. A subordinate can't do that.

The point is illustrated in a recent American novel by Travis Holland, called 'The Archivist's Story.'

It's about a literature professor who is sent, in the bleakness of Moscow in 1939, to work in Lubyanka prison as an archivist. There his job is to sort through the collected manuscripts of writers who are not approved by the government. He has to burn books if they are not approved by the party.

Without giving away the plot of a new release, the story makes a hero out of the courage of an archivist. (I can imagine most of you now wondering whether you will be played in the movie by Daniel Craig or Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie.) The novel finds its central character's courage in his refusal to abandon his humanity to brutality, bureaucracy and book-burning. In short, the author sees a petty almost mundane form of tyranny arising from the subordination of archivists to the needs of other forms of government and sees it overcome by the strength of an archivist.

The example is from fiction, but in making this point we are reminded of the enduring importance that archives have. They are certainly not an arm of government. Archives are not merely dusty records. Archives are part of the breathing fabric of our constitutional garments.

I had the privilege a few months ago, in February, to go to the Film Archive for the release of some fascinating examples of New Zealand history. They were Fox Movietone newsreels of our first Labour Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage

What we see in those films from the 1930s are important details of the way our country was shaped.

When we look back at great New Zealand figures of the twentieth century, Savage is near the top of most lists, for his leadership out of depression and into the modern welfare state; and for his internationalism as the world went to war. Yet because he lived before TV, we know little of how he sounded and how he carried himself. The existence of film in the archive helps us to colour in our history. It helps us see his style and the way he made a connection to New Zealanders.

It's easy for us to see the cultural value for New Zealand of those movies. Yet they illustrate very strongly my point that archives are much more than merely an historian's document - and I say this as a professional historian. They are enduring records about who we are, about the way our world came to be the way it is and the way we saw things in the past.

These are things we know only through stories we hand down, and have handed down to us. And they exist not only on celluloid, but in documents and records and in all the many files that are carried through the ages in the eighty kilometres of the Archives' collection.

We've come to learn that New Zealand has a distinctive heritage of our own. Our course has been carved by many experiences and backgrounds. Some of it shaped indigenously in the bedrock of history; some of it, like me, formed overseas and brought here; and much of it carved from our own land. But wherever it was formed, we know this of our New Zealand identity: It is unique and it is up to us to sustain it, be proud of it, and foster it.

An archive helps us both to protect our cultural history and to inspire us for the future. Public archives are a tremendously rich resource of evidence about our collective past.

Through them we can piece together our stories. Among the kilometres of documents, the three quarters of a million photos, three hundred thousand maps and thirteen hundred art works, Archives New Zealand is also custodian of the Treaty of Waitangi and the women’s suffrage petition.

When we contemplate these documents, there is a sense - a very fundamental sense - in which archives have not come far at all since 1957; and it is my firm belief that archives should not seek to change in this important respect: They are a part of our constitutional arrangements.

Strip away the changes made necessary by technology, such as the emergence of the Internet as a way to access archives, and electronic storage methods for keeping and finding records better. Strip away changes in law affecting access to information, such as the Official Information Act and the Privacy Act (neither of which existed in 1957).

And what we are left with is a record of government, which should not be subject to policy changes at the whim of passing politicians or bureaucrats.

The fundamental purpose of archives, if I can quote myself on this topic, "Is about the accountability of governments to the people, now and in the future. ... The archives are not subordinate to the needs of present day historians, nor are they simply part of our 'heritage'. They are a living part of the law and the constitution."

Our National Archive are unique because they contain some of our most important and valuable documents. We cannot today define the limits - or possibly even imagine them - of how we might use and value our records today.

That is why I strongly supported the inclusion of census forms in the archive, with suitable protections regarding timing before they can be accessed. Countries like the US, England and France put their records into the archive, they release the official records and they have avoided a backlash. And when their records are released they have generated considerable interest. Anything that valuable in the mists of our future deserves to be kept. We should have a snapshot of ourselves preserved and we should trust our descendants to use the information wisely.

Archivists are guardians of history and of documents that help to hold us governments to account. Stuart Stachan was recognised last year with a QSO, honouring this important role as well as his personal contribution.

When we ask how far we have come in fifty years - we should perhaps be grateful that in some respects the answer is not very far at all.

Constitutional change should always be evolutionary, and usually its best if the pace is glacial if it must be changed at all.

The role of archives might expand around the edges, its way of working might be changed by technology and by accommodation - and there have been man of those in the organisation's history. But it's role should not be changed by bureaucratic convenience.

You have some fascinating topics at this conference expanding on where this unique role will take the archives in the future.

I wish you all the very best for your discussions and I have much pleasure in formally opening this conference.

Thank you.

ENDS

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