Formed in 1953 to promulgate the teachings of Scottish engineer and free-thinker C. H. Douglas, the Social Credit Political League was the most outré of fringe political movements until it was taken up by the student radicals of the 1960s. Social Credit's cogent criticism of the banking and finance system provided the ideological framework the student protest movement needed.
- The radicals, with their chants of "Major, Major, Major C. H. Douglas" and their sectarianism - one group following the original Douglas line, another swearing fealty to the Canadian splitter Aberhart - frightened the original Social Crediters as much as delighted them, but it was student votes that swept leader Wayne Bergstrom into Parliament in 1969. The Dunedin North electorate now spoke with a Social Credit voice.
- Bergstrom, a cautious man, did not find it easy to communicate with his new supporters. It was LSD - lysergic acid diethylamide - that made the difference. "Turned on" at a student party to which he had rashly accepted an invitation, Bergstrom grew his hair long, replaced Mantovani with Moby Grape on the office record player, and took to delivering windy, oracular speeches that veered between cosmic platitudes and bitter attacks on all sources of credit. Banks, finance companies, even the blameless credit unions - none were spared his wrath, nor the vengeance of his supporters. On a diet of Bellamy's beef and magic mush-rooms, Bergstrom grew increasingly Unparl-iamentary.
- Yet not all of us can be the Lizard King. Implicated, perhaps unfairly, in a dawn raid on an Auckland accountancy firm, Bergstrom sped away from the police in his customised, purple-painted Skoda, and led the massed forces of the law on a car chase south: the first great car chase of the television era. Trapped in the Beehive car park, he fooled the police with a life-size cardboard cutout from his latest campaign launch, shaved off
his hair, and caught the ferry to Picton, where local hippies had parked another purple Skoda for his use. He eluded police waiting on State Highway 1 by taking the road to Nelson, then made a break down the West Coast.
- Spotted near Wanaka, Bergstrom got as far as the Clyde Dam, then a brand-new blot on the landscape, before he was hemmed in by the police to the north, and a posse of vigilante bankers to the south. TVNZ were there too, and what happened next was a triumph for the fledgling Outside Broadcast Unit. Who among us can forget the Skoda's brave, lonely drive across the top of the dam, the overwhelming forces advancing from both sides, the helicopters closing in, and then his final, futile gesture: the sudden wrench of the wheel, and the Skoda falling slowly, so slowly, down the high face of the dam? We all live on credit, and must all pay the bearer in the end.
