Henry Edmund Holland

Henry Edmund Holland (born June 10, 1868, Ginninderra, New South Wales—died Oct. 8, 1933, Waihi, N.Z.) was an Australian-born labour leader who helped found the New Zealand Labour Party (1916), which he led in Parliament from 1919 to 1933.

After an apprenticeship in the printing trade, Holland worked from 1892 to 1912 in Sydney as a union organizer and an editor of left-wing journals. He was imprisoned in 1896 for libel, led a successful strike of women tailors in 1901, and was imprisoned again in 1909 for sedition.

Ill health led him to emigrate to New Zealand in 1912, and he became prominent in the New Zealand labour movement at a unity conference in 1913, called after repression of the miners’ strike at Waihi in 1912. From 1913 to 1918 he edited the Federation of Labour’s Maoriland Worker, the organ of the trade union movement’s left wing. He was imprisoned for sedition in 1913–14 and was a fervent opponent of conscription for World War I. In 1918 he was elected to Parliament as a member of the newly founded Labour Party and became party leader the following year.

Holland’s objectives were to establish an obvious contrast between the interests of the labour movement and the existing political parties by forcing the Reform and Liberal (later United) parties together in opposition to Labour, which occurred in 1931, and to gain for Labour the support of the entire trade union movement. The dissident Alliance of Labour stymied the latter goal. Holland’s firm leadership of the Labour contingent in Parliament prepared the party to assume power two years after his death.