Fewer votes for Socred?

Press, 24 February 1984, Page 4

Fewer votes for Socred?

Social Credit’s leader, Mr Beetham, predicted last evening that his party would win fewer votes but more seats in this year’s General Election than it did in 1981. He made the statement at a meeting in the Avon electorate attended by more than 100 people, most of them party members.

Mr Beetham said that the General Election was likely to produce a complicated and possibly indeterminate result which he hoped would restore to Parliament some of the power that it had lost over recent years to the executive.

Opinion polls had shown huge swings in voterallegiance in the last six months which reflected a loosening of political loyalties among the public, he said.

For this reason, Social Credit would concentrate its energies on the 20 or so seats in which it had come second in 1981, because in those areas it was perceived as the only party with any chance of toppling the sitting member. Social Credit would capture the disaffected vote where it counted, Mr Beetham said. He suggested that it would succeed largely at the expense of the National Party.

He then launched into an attack on “the Jones Party,” particularly its economic philosophy. If the New Zealand Party became the Government, it

would restore New Zealand to the “exploitative, unbridled, dog-eat-dog capitalism of the early nineteenth century.”

Because it realised that this could appeal only to “the moneyed classes,” the Jones party had clipped on a few liberal policies to “deceive the unwary and trap the naive,” Mr Beetham said.

“One of the arguments some people use is that we need successful businessmen in Parliament, and I agree. But what we do not need are businessmen who have grown rich by speculating on existing assets and relying on a high inflation rate to drive the price up. That is not creating wealth or jobs for anyone,” Mr Beetham said.

The New Zealand Party had peaked too soon and its support would begin to slip. He also predicted conflict in the Labour Party before the election. Mr Beetham said that “the B team” led by Labour’s spokesman on economics, Mr Roger Douglas, and Labour’s leader, Mr Lange, would produce an economic package and then “the A team” would come out with a different one.

The “A team,” so-called because “it was likely to win in the finish,” was led by the party president and candidate for Sydenham, Mr Jim Anderton, and the member for Lyttelton, Mrs Ann Hercus, Mr Beetham said.