Martyn Finlay

Early life

Martyn was born in Dunedin to Baptist missionaries who had worked in India. His father died when he was two and his mother was forced by economic circumstances to take in boarders. He used to push his brother Harold, ten years older and with polio, two miles to Otago University in his wheelchair. With the oncoming depression, Martyn had to leave school to get a job at the end of fifth form - he had wanted to be a doctor. With a job as an office boy in a law firm at the age of 16, he was able to study law part time at Otago University for eight years before getting his LLM with First Class Honours. (Fairburn and friends / edited by Dinah Holman and Christine Cole Catley, Devonport, North Shore City : Cape Catley Ltd., 2004. p196)

He got a scholarship to the London School of Economics and got a PhD in 1938 before becoming a Resident Fellow at Harvard. He returned to NZ in 1939 and was employed as a private secretary to Cabinet Ministers Rex Mason and Arnold Nordmeyer. [1]

Political career

Martyn Finlay stood unsuccessfully for Remuera in 1943. He then represented the North Shore electorate from 1946 to 1949, when he was defeated. Later he represented the Waitakere electorate from 1963 to 1969, then the Henderson electorate from 1969 to 1978, when he retired.

Vietnam War

Martyn Finlay was also one of the Labour Party's most active opponents of New Zealand's military involvement in the Vietnam War and questioned the New Zealand government's support for South Vietnam. In 1964, he argued during a parliamentary speech that the Viet Cong were the only effective opposition in South Vietnam, but still accepted the general consensus within New Zealand government circles that the Viet Cong were being supported by North Vietnam and the People's Republic of China. On 6 June 1965, Finlay chaired an anti-war meeting in Auckland which was sponsored by the Auckland Trades Council, the Auckland Labour Representation Committee, and the Auckland Peace For Vietnam Committee (PFVC). A prominent speaker at that meeting was the trade unionist Jim Knox. He also participated in a teach-in at the University of Auckland on 12 September 1966, which drew about 600 people.

During a Labour Party conference in 1966, Martyn Finlay, at the instigation of the Labour Party leader and future Prime Minister Norman Kirk, proposed an amendment which advocated replacing New Zealand's artillery battery with a non-combatant force. Despite his opposition to the Vietnam War, Finlay argued that New Zealand troops should not be withdrawn from Vietnam too quickly to avoid interfering with the Paris peace talks in 1969. When the United States Vice President Spiro Agnew visited the capital Wellington in mid-January 1970, Finlay along with several other Labour Members of Parliament including Arthur Faulkner, Jonathan Hunt, and Bob Tizard boycotted the state dinner to protest American policy in Vietnam. However, other Labour MPs including the Opposition Leader Norman Kirk attended the function which dealt with the Nixon Doctrine. Later, he lost a notable 1969 election TV debate (on the NZBC's Gallery programme) against Robert Muldoon.

Cabinet Minister

Finlay was a Cabinet Minister, and was the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice from 1972 to 1975 and Minister of Civil Aviation and Meteorological Services from 1973 to 1975 in the Third Labour Government. He was President of the Labour Party from 1960 to 1964.

He was made a Queen's Counsel (QC) in 1973.

Personal views

Michael Bassett has said Finlay was "essentially a man of peace throughout his life" who "found Peter Fraser’s crusade to introduce Compulsory Military Training personally distasteful." [2]

Bassett also said: "To his dying day Finlay was an opponent of capital punishment, a cause to which he added divorce law reform (his own divorce in the 1950s was particularly fraught), homosexual, and abortion law reform. Finlay’s reputation as an advanced liberal on social issues attracted the support of younger party idealists as much as it repelled Labour’s more conservative wing, especially Catholics. Finlay’s marital complications irked the puritanical Walter Nash, who did nothing to advance his return to Parliament, and seems not to have welcomed his election as party president in 1960." [3]

Death

Martyn died at the age of 87. Christine Cole Catley says: "He wrote two most moving letters to his wife, a year apart. She read them for the first time after he died ... He wrote of what he saw as his degeneration and his fear of becoming a burden on her and others. ... Two days later he ended his life." (Fairburn and friends / edited by Dinah Holman and Christine Cole Catley, Devonport, North Shore City : Cape Catley Ltd., 2004. p.204)