1895: Mount Cook Hermitage Nationalised
June 8, 2020
By AHNZ
Today in the Anarchist History of New Zealand, 7 June, 1895, it was announced over the media wire that the Mount Cook Hermitage had been nationalised by the Liberals.
Richard Seddon’s Government was now in the hotel business, having decided not only that the private owners were not up to running this alpine attraction but that no others could be either.
This photo comes from February 1894, before the Kelptocracy seized it. It is true that the private owners were having a hard time and that the hotel had been closed since at least December 1894. In the same year the Liberal autocracy seized a sheep station, a railway, and margarine.
Taking the Hermitage heralded the start of yet more hands-on Government in NZ tourism.
On 7 June, 1895, Seddon’s Liberal Government took over The Hermitage hotel on Mt Cook. It was the first time our State had seen fit to set itself up as a hotel proprietor. They got away with it; More of the same would follow. 1895 Was the same year the Liberals nationalised a railway and a sheep station too. New Zealanders during that Moral Culture period were prone to obeying their Big Brother. It is true that when The Hermitage was first nationalised it had been shut down since the previous December. This doesn’t prove that a Government is the only one fit to run an alpine hotel. It is also true that The State did an even worse job of running the place and failed to make any money. But you don’t need to add value when you can simply dip into the taxpayer’s treasury for decade after decade of revenue loss do you? The State finally sold The Hermitage into private hands again in about 1990 as a last act of the Labour 4.0 privatisation sell-offs. It has probably been in the hands of the ‘New Right’ faction ever since but due to COVID-19 may be about to change hands again? Or, it’ll just go into mothball hibernation the way it did in 1895 in the hopes of not being confiscated. This process is current affairs in our newspapers this week. — Ref Making New Zealand; Prime TV (2019)
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Image ref. New Zealand Graphic, 17 February, 1894; Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections
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