Michael Joseph Savage
Michael Joseph Savage was New Zealand's first Labour prime minister, from the election of November 1935 to his death in office in March 1940, an Australian-born brewery worker and union organiser who led the party out of the depression into government and gave the country the Social Security Act of 1938, the first comprehensive welfare state in the world, with free hospital treatment, universal superannuation and benefits for the sick, the unemployed and the widowed paid from a social security tax, which he described as applied Christianity. His photograph hung in the kitchens of the working class for a generation, and when Britain declared war in 1939 he said from his sickbed that where she goes, we go, where she stands, we stand. He was born in Benalla in Victoria in 1872, the son of Irish immigrants, worked as a labourer, a miner and a cellarman, and came to Auckland in 1907, where he worked at Hancock's brewery, organised the brewery workers, and was elected to parliament in 1919 for Auckland West. He was a gentle, careful, unmarried man, a Catholic who read Henry George, and the party chose him as leader in 1933 on the death of Harry Holland because he frightened nobody. The depression had cut wages by a tenth and put a hundred thousand men on relief work, and Labour won fifty-three of eighty seats in 1935 on the promise to guarantee a living. The first acts restored the wage cuts, nationalised the Reserve Bank, guaranteed dairy prices, gave state houses to families at rents they could pay, and put the unemployed on public works at full wages. The Social Security Act followed the landslide of 1938 and came into force in April 1939. He was already ill with cancer, operated on in 1938 and kept in office by a cabinet that hid the diagnosis, and the last year was spent fighting John A. Lee, the Labour rebel who wrote that the party was being led by a dying man. The conference expelled Lee two days before Savage died. The body lay in state in Wellington and Auckland and the crowds that filed past were the largest the country had seen. He was buried at Bastion Point above the Waitemata in a memorial the government built, and the Savage of the kitchen photographs is still the party's saint.
- Lived: 1872 CE – 1940 CE
- Nationality: New Zealander
- Roles: prime minister, politician
