List of Leaders of the Social Credit Party of New Zealand
1982-1985: Bruce Beetham [1]
1985-1988: Les Hunter [2]
1988-1992: Terry Heffernan [3]
1992-1993: Chris Leitch (Acting)
1993-1993: John Wright [4]
1993-1997: Heather-Ann McConachy [5]
[1] - Bruce Beetham had been the Leader of the Social Credit Political League for a decade when, at the 1981 Victory Conference, he proposed that the name of the organisation be changed to the 'Social Credit Party', firstly to recognise that it was now a political party of the ordinary sort, and secondly to avoid having to explain to voters on the doorsteps what a Political League was. This motion drew some opposition from the hardcore Douglasites, who took Major Douglas' 1934 injunction to Social Creditors not to organise themselves into political parties as Holy Writ. But Beetham had the mana of a participant in Government, and his proposal won out.
The Muldoon's National Government had won one seat fewer than they needed for a majority in 1981, and therefore needed the two Social Credit MPs (Beetham and Garry Knapp) to support them on a case-by-case basis. Among the victories of the Socred team in that Parliament were the change of the royal inheritance system to Equal (as opposed to Male-preference) Primogeniture and the change of the NZ electoral system to STV - which was designed to ensure that a centrist party like Social Credit would always have a number of seats in Parliament. Unfortunately, just as this historic achievement was passed through, Beetham and Knapp voted for Muldoon's high dam on the Clyde River, thus alienating their environmentalist support basis and those who had voted for them to keep Muldoon tame or out of office entirely. The first STV election saw Knapp out, Beetham in by the skin of his teeth in the Wanganui-Manawatu five-seater, and Social Credit outclassed by the new free-market liberals in the New Zealand Party, who took 7 seats. Ashamed and weakened by increasingly frequent heart troubles, Beetham resigned as Leader at the next Conference.
[2] - There was only one possible successor. Socred Finance spokesman for over a decade, Les Hunter had been key in the transformation of Social Credit into a plausible party of responsibility. Now, in 1984, he had been elected by the people of Northland to join Beetham in Parliament. As the author of the book 'And Now Social Democracy' he was well-placed to lead Social Credit to the left of the New Right-influenced Lange Government. The theory was that with the New Zealand Party agreeing with Roger Douglas in every particular, the only space for a third party would be on the Old Left. So it proved: the NZP suffered catastrophe after catastrophe in the 84-87 Parliament, starting with Bob Jones' resignation from Parliament after four months because he'd rather go fishing, and only getting worse from there under the inexperienced leadership of Josephine Grierson. As such, in 1987, the only minor parties to be elected to the second STV Parliament were Social Credit and the Maori rights party Mana Motuhake. Both had only one MP, and Les Hunter wasn't one of them.
[3] - Hunter did the honourable thing and retired from politics at the next Conference. He had been a major figure in the Beetham era, but the feeling was that a new generation was needed to restore Social Credit's fortunes. Unfortunately, Garry Knapp - the central figure of the first stage of the 1980s reformers - had lost his seat and the rest of them (Alasdair Thompson, Stuart Perry, Neil Morrison, etc.) had slandered each other rigid during the selection battle to replace Bruce Beetham as Socred candidate for Wanganui-Manawatu. In the event, it went to the Wanganui native Terry Heffernan, who was elected to Parliament as the only Social Creditor in 1987 and re-elected narrowly against a falling national vote in 1990. At the same election, three Greens came in, becoming the new default third party.
Heffernan was a solid local MP and pleasantly anodyne political figure, able to attract the sensible bourgeoisie of New Zealand to centre-left critiques of Rogernomics, but he was not a natural leader. He was forced by his party after the defeat of 1990 to join the Alliance with the Greens, NewLabour, Mana Motuhake and some centrist rebels from the National Party. But he wasn't happy. First, the Alliance parties resolved to stand only one or two candidates in each electorate, rather than simply continuing to stand individually and calling on their voters to transfer to the other parties. Second, and more decisively, Heffernan was passed over as Leader in favour of Jim Anderton of NewLabour. As soon as Winston Peters was thrust out of National and started his own populist party, Heffernan and his supporters flocked to his banner - although it didn't do them any good, as their influence was curtailed before any of them won any seats.
[4] - The Social Creditors remaining in the Alliance were deeply embarrassed by the flight of their Leader, but continued despite the other parties' frustration with their lack of members, openness and money. One candidate to replace Heffernan, Party President Chris Leitch, had been Alliance candidate at the Tamaki by-election, but had brought shame on Social Credit when he lost a court case over a traffic violation two days before polling day - without telling anyone that he was up for trial beforehand. As such, he was handily beaten by John Wright, recently defected from National.
Wright, a stocky businessman with a strong repertoire of distasteful jokes, was not an easy fit with the liberal-lefty side of the Alliance, which resulted in him being selected for the unwinnable three-seater of North Canterbury instead of the more amenable Christchurch North electorate. In the event, neither was won in 1993, and Wright had to resign to make space for one of the MPs elected in the Alliance surge of 1993.
[5] - Of the 18 Alliance MPs elected to hold the balance of responsibility in 1993, only three were Social Credit members. The biggest contingents were from the Greens and NewLabour, and even the microscopic Liberal Party (48 financial members) had three MPs, the same as Social Credit. Fortunately, the Alliance surge had kept NZ First down to four seats - a poke in the eye to the traitor Heffernan.
The new Social Credit Leader, the first woman to be elected as sole Leader of a political party in New Zealand (three weeks before Labour chose Helen Clark), was Heather-Ann McConachy, newly elected MP for the North Shore five-seater. She was by no means new to Social Credit, though - he father, Nevern McConachy, had been a key member of the Beetham/Hunter era of modernisation and came just 520 votes short of election in 1978. But most importantly, she was a breath of fresh air for a party that had hitherto been seen as masculine and cranky.
McConachy came to power at the most dramatic time in NZ political history, just weeks after Kiwis had voted for a hung Parliament for the first time since 1981. This time, National had one more seat than Labour (39 versus 38) with the Alliance holding the balance of responsibility. Jim Anderton committed them on election night to uphold Jim Bolger's National Government - a diktat for which he was pilloried by the Greens and the left-wing elements of NewLabour. The Alliance went along with giving Bolger supply and confidence for the first few months, but the Alliance backbench rebelled at the first opportunity on a minor matter related to health cutbacks.
The Greens and most of NewLabour formed the NewAlliance faction which handed power to Helen Clark's Labour Party in conjunction with the four NZ First MPs. Clark's first, two-year premiership, was riven with division between the NewAlliance, the still-influential Rogernomes in Labour, and the right-populist contingent in both Labour and NZ First, and is widely regarded as one of the worst Governments ever to have been inflicted on New Zealand - and undemocratically at that. McConachy, however, kept Social Credit as part of the Anderton-aligned Alliance and outside of the new Government. This attracted early criticism from the rank and file, until they realised how unpopular the Fifth Labour Government was with the general population.
Even so, the voters were heartily sick of both sides of the Alliance, and none of them were re-elected in 1996 - not even supposedly unbeatable local blokes like Anderton and the Green Leah McBey escaped the cleansing fire of NZ's turn to a straightforward Birch-Peters Government. Within Social Credit, the pain of defeat was sharp: having been in Parliament since 1978, they still thought that they had the power to become NZ's third party once more (bolstered by the fact that the last pre-Alliance poll had had them on 6%). But it was not to be. McConachy was blamed, somewhat unfairly, for the electoral defeat of the Anderton bloc, and forced to stand down as Leader at the next conference, when - like a teenager sucking on a comfort blanket - the membership cuddled its knees and changed its name back to the Social Credit Political League label under which they'd once been popular, in the hope that this would be in some way Good.
They were wrong.