No Labour approach to Social Credit

Press, Issue 33846, 19 May 1975, Page 1

No Labour approach to Social Credit

The Labour Party’s senior vice-president, Mr J. G. O’Brien, has denied suggestions of co-operation between the Labour Party and the Social Credit Political League on monetary reform.

Mr O’Brien emphatically denied an assertion by the Social Credit leader (Mr B. C. ; Beetham) that either the Labour Party or himself approached Social Credit seeking its co-operation in monetary reform, according to a Press Association message from Wellington.

,Mr O’Brien had told a Social Credit spokesman that New Zealand’s financial system was “ramshackle and dangerous,” and had indicated that the late Prime Minister (Mr N. E. Kirk) had been leaning towards Social Credit reform pronnsals, said Mr Beetham yesterday. Mr Beetham told Social Credit’s annual conference in Christchurch that one of the reasons Social Credit had contested last vear’s Sydenham by-election, after Mr Kirk’s death, was that the late Prime Minister had apparently become increasingly sympathetic to the league’s policies.

These policies were clearly not supported bv the new Rowling-Tizard leadership.

Letter read

Some people had doubted this reason for entering the by-election, but its validity had been substantiated by a letter from Mr O’Brien—who is member of Parliament for Island Bay—to a Social Credit spokesman, Mr J. Woodhall.

The letter said: “There are considerable areas of common ground in the views of some of us, and it is in this field that I think we could be jointly working towards the reform of our ramshackle and dangerous financial system.

“It was in this field that Mr Kirk was, of course, working before his untimely and sad death, and it is in that

field that, as long as I can make some contribution, I will be trying to. do so.”

Mr Beetham said he congratulated Mr O’Brien on his views — although he could hold no hope for him of

achieving them through the Labour Party.

‘Astonished’

Mr O’Brien, in reply last evening, said: “There was no approach, nor any offer of co-operation. The facts are that I received a letter from Mr Woodhall proffering his views, to which I replied personally. I was astonished to find a private letter become public, and equally astonished to find its contents so warped.” In his reply to Mr Woodhall’s approach, he had expressed the' view that those who sought financial reform should continue to work for that end, Mr O’Brien said. “To twist recognition of the need for financial reform into implied acceptance of Social Credit views is ludicrous,” he said. “To elevate my personal reply' to the level of an official Labour Party reply and then to reject it is a form of verbal subterfuge unworthy of Social Credit.” ‘lmportant thing’ Mr Beetham said yesterday that the important thing was that Social Credit had correctly assumed that Mr Kirk had been returning to the philosophy of Michael Joseph Savage — “a philosophy and a policy to which the Social Credit League, not the modern Labour Party, is the natural heir.”

This alone had justified Social Credit’s participation in the by-election; and the high vote for Social Credit showed that many traditional Labour supporters were coming round to the same point of view.

Of Mr O’Brien’s “suggestion that the two parties might work together,” Mr Beetham said it was a possibility but air “unlikely possibility.” He doubted whether the league would accept such a proposal in view of Labour’s many broken promises in the past. ■