Speech to Lower Marae Waitangi Political Forum
Chris Leitch, Deputy Leader, Democrats for Social Credit
5th February 2017

Tihe mauri ora!
E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e rau rangatira mā
tēnā koutou
tēnā koutou,
tēnā koutou katoa

I am Chris Leitch, Deputy Leader, Democrats for Social Credit.

My party, Democrats for Social Credit, has fielded candidates in every general election since 1954 – a year after I was born. And yes, we are still around.

I want to pay tribute to our rangatira, our MPs over those years – Vern Cracknell elected in 1963 for Tai Tokerau, Bruce Beetham in 1977 for Rangatikei, Garry Knapp in 1980 for East Coast Bays, and Neil Morrison in 1984 for Pakuranga.

Thank you for your invitation to be here.

Today I must speak briefly, but I would be very happy to come back some time and explain the few points I have time to make. And to prove conclusively any point I will raise.

Maori have been justifiably angry because much of your land was stolen and the Government's treaty settlement process at 2% of your assessed losses returns very little of the land the government holds in land banks on your behalf, so you have lost twice - no! ….. far more than twice.

The Democrats for Social Credit Party is angry because the ownership of most of New Zealand’s money, the lifeblood of the economy, and therefore most of our assets, Maori and Pakeha, has been stolen from us.

Let me tell you how this has happened.

The government issues the paper money and coins in your and my pocket and uses the profit from this for our benefit. But those notes and coins account for less than 3% of the country’s money supply. The rest – about $97 dollars out of every $100 dollars, comes from the private, foreign owned commercial banks.

This electronic money, money which the economy needs, is not someone else’s savings either here in New Zealand or overseas, but is conjured up by those banks, out of nothing, by simply pushing a couple of keys on their computers.

Industry, farmers, small businesses, hospitals, you and I, councils and government have to borrow that electronic money, which those overseas owned banks created out of thin air, as a debt, and then….pay it back with interest. Meantime, the banks take ownership of our assets until we do.

The result of this dishonest and outdated money system is that we have people without jobs, people living in shacks, cars, and unhealthy houses and rising prices for the goods we need. People can’t get the health care they deserve and our education system is not fully developing the talents of our mokopuna.

We have dusty roads, potholed main highways, disappearing railways, rivers that are not safe to swim in, and ever-increasing rates because our Councils have to borrow money and pay interest on it for community services.

The governmental sector alone pays about $6 billion in interest every year on money borrowed from overseas owned banks. That’s $16 million every single day, every day of the year, out of your taxes, paid in corporate welfare to those banks and financial institutions - money that should be spent on health, education, housing, rural development and the environment.

Government should instead be using our own central bank, owned by the people, to provide the finance needed.

Michael Joseph Savage was elected Prime Minister in 1935. His portrait hung over many a mantlepiece in our grandparents time. He was, and still is, respected as our most popular politician of the last century. His government, which many say was the best democratic government in the world in its time, understood these issues.

The Savage government used Reserve Bank money to build houses and roads, to fund some local body works and to help cooperative industry by financing the Dairy Board, the Apple and Pear Marketing Board, and other producer boards, at only one percent interest.

Unfortunately, factions in his party threw the monetary reformers out and Labour became just another traditional political party, no different from its opponents.

The Democrats for Social Credit Party is committed to taking back the power to issue all of the nation’s money, not just the notes and coins, to save that wasted interest, and to use it for the benefit of all this country’s people.

What else do the Democrats for Social Credit stand for?

Apart from major reform of the money system, our most important belief is that all systems, political and economic, should be made to serve people; that people should not be forced to fit into a straight-jacket formed by the ideologies of left or right wing political parties or the domination of commercial monopolies.

Do you ever hear about these ideas? No. Yet we regularly put out well informed comment on economic and other issues. When did you last see one printed?

Why do most of the media deliberately ignore us?

Is it because our views don’t align with those of their big-business owners? The present storm of media abuse for the new US President should leave nobody in any doubt about the power of those people.

So I want to thank you for listening …….. for the opportunity to present some of our views.

It appears fashionable these days to finish with a “Trump” comment. So perhaps I will.

Obviously he is unusual. Perhaps he really is all they say he is. But even he worked out, just like our Party did, that the Trans Pacific Partnership would be harmful to any nation adopting it, even the strong USA.

What does that say for the majority of our politicians in Aotearoa?

To me, it says we need a change, a change of earthquake like proportions, because simply re-arranging seating places in the waka, without a major reform of our money system, will not improve things for Kiwis, Maori or Pakeha.

I ask you to consider supporting the Democrats for Social Credit, because no other party understands the issues I have spoken about, so we are central to that change.

tēnā koutou

tēnā koutou katoa

ENDS

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