In this presentation, Malcolm McKinnon considers the significance of the year 1932 in New Zealand’s history. Keith Sinclair famously described the disturbances of that year and the government’s harsh response as marking New Zealand’s nadir. But the disturbances also prompted the government to abandon its austerity policy, although this was hard to pick at the time, and a political impasse about the way forward stymied recovery

Malcolm is a Wellington historian. His study The Broken Decade: Prosperity, depression and recovery in New Zealand, 1928-39, was published by Otago University Press in 2016.

These public history talks are a collaboration between the National Library of New Zealand and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and are recorded monthly, live at the National Library of New Zealand.