Election 2020: Social Credit candidate Heather Marion Smith back to stand in Whanganui
9 Sep, 2020 05:00 PM 3 minutes to read
Whanganui Socal Credit candidate Heather Marion Smith says her party's policies are right for the times. Photo / Supplied
By: Liz Wylie
Liz Wylie is a reporter for the Whanganui Chronicle
liz.wylie@whanganuichronicle.co.nzWhangaChron
Social Credit candidate for Whanganui Heather Marion Smith has come home to stand in the electorate that is "dear to her heart".
Smith last stood for the electorate in 2014.
"I married and moved to Gisborne but there was work for me to do here so I moved back after my husband died," she said.
Social Credit was formed in 1953 and for a time was the country's third-biggest party, securing 21 per cent of the vote at the 1981 election.
The party renamed itself the New Zealand Democratic Party in 1985 to (a name it kept until 2018) and became part of the Alliance from 1991 until 2002.
Smith said Social Credit's ideology was to ensure a property-owning democracy, in which the ownership of assets is spread as widely as possible among individuals.
"We have always maintained that the Reserve Bank should fund the government and rejected the neo-liberal debt-funding model," Smith said.
She has a BA degree in economics and a post-graduate diploma in development economics.
"Nowadays I specialise in local government and district health board funding and if the Whanganui DHB did not have to fork out so much money for capital charges there would be so much more available to provide essential treatments like cataract operations for instance."
The government's Covid-19 recovery package is a vindication of her party's economic policies, Smith said.
"Some economists have been critical of our policies in the past because they believed they would lead to inflation.
"Now we have economic experts urging the government to direct fund the economic rescue package from the Reserve Bank."
Social Credit's economic policies did not begin with her party in New Zealand Smith says.
"The social credit economic reform movement was founded by British engineer Clifford Hugh Douglas after World War I.
"He believed that individual and co-operative enterprise should be the basis of economic organisation."
Smith said Social Credit's social policies were inextricably linked to its economic policies.
Social Credit would progressively replace all current benefits with an adequate living income regardless of employment, marital, or gender status.
Her party would retain existing benefits and supplementary allowances until the proposed changes were established, Smith says.
"People need sufficient income to provide themselves with good nutrition which affects their physical and mental health.
"We aim to implement a publicly-funded, accessible, comprehensive health care system as well as community-based care."
Born in Taranaki, Smith said her mother was from Whanganui East and her Whanganui great grandfather John Ford was one of the early movers in New Zealand's labour movement.
Smith taught for many years in Taranaki and Whanganui secondary schools and has been involved with Ecology Action and the NZ National Council of Women where she was their economics convenor for two terms.
She hopes to be speaking at a rescheduled Grey Power meeting in Whanganui soon and will also be addressing a youth meeting.
"It is important for young people to learn about our party's policies as they are the generation who will be burdened with debts incurred through neo-liberal government policies."
She happily admits to becoming an octogenarian – "but only in chronological years," she says.