Leaders of the National Party
1936-1942: Charles Wilkinson
1942-1945: Harry Atmore
Leaders of the New Liberal Party
1943-1952: William Bodkin
1952-1956: Edgar Neale
1956-1969: Rolland O’Regan
Leaders of the Social Liberal Party
1969-1973: Rolland O’Regan
1973-1975: John O’Brien
1975-1988: Rolland O’Regan
1988-1998: Cliff Skeggs
1998-2002: Judy Keall
2002-2008: John Wright
2008-2016: Tipene O’Regan
2016-: Raf Manji
With the advent of the First Labour Government of New Zealand, the anti-Socialist parties resolved to get their act together and merge into the 'National' Party. However, it was to be a short-lived merger. Gordon Coates of the Reform Party threatened to secede from the joint party if ex-Reform Independent Charles Wilkinson won the inaugural leadership, and followed through on his threat when Wilkinson beat Coates' candidate by a single vote. Only a minority of Reformers followed Coates out of the door, but the rest followed - as did a steady stream of United Party members - when Wilkinson embarked on a policy of growing the centre ground of NZ politics by compromising with the Country Party and the monetary reformer Independent Harry Atmore to convince them to join National.
Atmore's sympathies were very much with the Labour Government, and when he succeeded Wilkinson as Leader after the latter had spent far too long in the doldrums and the old guard of the party had all announced their retirements and imminent deaths, he jumped at the chance to join their wartime coalition government - along with Coates, who was expelled from Reform for his troubles. In National, by contrast, the anti-coalitionists didn't quite have the majority in caucus and therefore had to split off into a new political formation: the New Liberal Party, whose branding was an exercise in nostalgia for the 1890s. Meanwhile, the Atmore loyalists dissolved the National Party in 1945. Some went to Labour or Reform, while others remained Independents until defeated at the polls.
The New Liberal Party just about subsisted in the immediate post-war period as New Zealand's default third party, holding only the seats of long-serving incumbents or exceedingly hard campaigners. In terms of policy, they opposed the Socialism of the Labour Party, but also laid claim to a radical heritage and presented a single Land Tax as the solution to structural inequality. Meanwhile, Atmore's heterodox monetary ideas fell by the wayside until Social Credit was founded in the mid-1950s. Socred posed a problem for the New Liberals, as it tempted the same protest voters who provided a lot of their electoral ballast. Under Edgar Neale and Rolland O'Regan, then, the NLP embarked on a permanent campaign, bringing partisan fights down to the Council level (an innovation in most of NZ) to win mayoralties and referendums and thereby change each Council's rating system to be based on the unimproved value of the property in question.
It wasn't enough, and in the 1960s, close contests were lost by both Social Credit and the New Liberals for want of co-operation. In 1969, the two parties got together and hammered out a merger agreement (the Liberals, of course, had had a lot of practice at this) which was mainly drawn up by Cecil Elvidge and Vernon Cracknell of Social Credit and Betty Noble and Bob Keall of the New Liberals. The agreement took the 'Social' element from the Social Credit name and the 'Liberal' element from that of the older party, and created the new 'Social Liberal Party' - a rebuff to Elvidge, who had favoured an alternative name, the 'New Credit Party'.
More importantly, the ideologies of the two parties were welded into one - an ideology which, conveniently, already existed. The Argentinean economist Silvio Gesell had come up with 'Freiwirtschaft' earlier in the century, which called for the abolition of fractional reserve banking, the creation of new money which would be 'perishable' (i.e. it would lose its value over time, just like most of the goods it was used to buy), and, in the non-monetary sphere, free trade and a single Land Value Tax. It was a perfect compromise, and most of the Social Crediters managed to transfer their idolatrous affections from C. H. Douglas to Silvio Gesell without too much in the way of cognitive dissonance.
Rolland O'Regan, who came from a political dynasty, was elected Leader, but the electoral dividends of the merger were disappointing to the hyped-up members, and satisfaction with his leadership fell vertiginously outside of his inner circle. After the 1972 election, in which O'Regan lost his seat, he was successfully challenged by the firebrand Social Crediter John O'Brien, who briefly united a majority of the SLP behind him but watched it break further and further apart every time he opened his mouth. He resigned in 1975, when the Social Liberals lost all their seats in the Reform landslide, and was replaced by the affable O'Regan once more.
During the late 60s and 70s, a younger generation of radicals had joined up with the NLP and SLP, who were against the Vietnam War and nuclear power, and in favour of living according to liberal, Freiwirtschaft values in communes up and down the - well, up and down the Waitakere Ranges and the Coromandel. This tendency was much aided by Labour's legislation in the 1979s which made it easier to set up kibbutz-style communes called 'ohu'. Not that the SLP has expressed much gratitude.
The SLP bounced back in the late 1970s, encouraged by Bruce Beetham winning the Hamilton mayoralty and introducing a perishable local currency - the first time the SLP's local campaigning had been used to implement parts of Freiwirtschaft other than Land Value rating - and reformist Labour MPs such as Gerald O'Brien defecting when it became obvious that they would never sit on the Treasury benches. In the 80s, however, the new Labour Government launched a major attack on the SLP's core concept. By hook or by crook, local Councils would be encouraged to return to Capital Value rating, and the whole process was over by the time Rolland O'Regan finally gave up the leadership in 1988 - his life's work seemingly crushed. The only exception was in Dunedin, where SLP Mayor Cliff Skeggs took his own Council to court over matters related to the rating change. He was launched into the leadership, much to the chagrin of last decade's mayoral darling, Bruce Beetham.
The SLP caught another updraft in the 1990s, with both parties - Labour and Reform - doing their best to discredit themselves in Government. The SLP rode high in the polls, and Skeggs imagined that he might become Prime Minister, but First Past the Post (and the electorate's new-found fear of easy promises of tax cuts combined with increases in social spending) gave the lie to these dreams, and the Party merely re-entered Parliament and held the balance of power in 1996-9, their main achievement in this period being the reintroduction of a small Land Tax and an equivalent cut in Income Tax. Skeggs retired in 1998, both personally and energetically bankrupt from his long campaigns.
He was succeeded by Judy Keall, another Liberal dynast and New Zealand's first woman party leader. Her ascendancy was short-lived, however, as a disappointed electorate threw out the Reform-SLP coalition and most of their MPs. Hindsight has been kind to the coalition, though, as Kiwis have watched Sydney's housing bubble expand and expand in recent years with no equivalent to their Land Tax.
Keall faced concerted opposition from the male, mayoralty-focused wing of the party, and principally Selwyn MP John Wright, who seized the leadership from her in 2002. A counter-challenge from Tim Shadbolt of what is often misnamed the 'hippy' wing (even though Shadbolt as Mayor of Invercargill has introduced that district's local currency, the World's Fastest Depreciator (₩)), was seen off in short order. Nevertheless, the boorish Wright couldn't hold the different factions of the party together - the local power-seekers, the free-trade liberals, the monetary reformers, the hippies and the Land Tax leaseholders. Every single tendency seemed to be an embarrassment to all the others, and only the election of Rolland O'Regan's son as Leader smoothed over this divide.
Tipene O'Regan was the first Maori leader of a political party in New Zealand, and aided the SLP in gaining a couple of Maori electorates for the first time. This quickly revealed itself to be an electoral dead-end. The single tax depends on the idea that all land is the common heritage of mankind, and ought therefore to be vested in the state and leased out to those who wish to use it. Although Maori have a communalist idea of land ownership, they see the title as being vested in the tribe as opposed to the state, and have been conditioned through experience to be suspicious of a white-dominated state edging them out of their land. As the relevance of the SLP increased in Maori communities, the less they liked the party, and Tipene O'Regan received some staunch opposition from Maori aligned with the Labour Party.
As the new move into the Maori seats had been stymied, and as the Reformers were making new hay with their appeal to NZ's traditional fondness of freehold tenure, O'Regan became increasingly isolated and the monetary reform wing grew stronger, with Raf Manji winning a suburban Christchurch seat and being propelled into the leadership. However, the growth of a challenge around the personality of Gareth Morgan is growing day by day, and it seems that the SLP is not yet out of the woods. A century since the Liberals last exited Government, they look no closer to regaining their former primacy, and it is perhaps the adoption of the confusing ideology of Freiwirtschaft which has contributed more than any other factor to this continued ignominy.