Articles by Don Brash

Throughout my almost 14 years as Governor of the Reserve Bank, Michael Reddell was one of my most insightful advisers. And one of the many issues he warned about was the danger to social and economic stability of a continuing escalation in house prices. As a result of that warning, I commissioned a study on the issue by Owen McShane, who in turn pointed out the potentially…

So much has happened since I wrote my last column for the February edition that it’s hard to know what on Earth to focus on both internationally and here in New Zealand. In the February edition, I expressed the view that Donald Trump was the worst US President in my lifetime. And since then we have seen Trump’s impeachment, for the second time, this time for inciting the…

Days after Donald Trump was elected as US President in November 2016, I wrote one of my very first columns for Elocal. This was my opening paragraph: It’s a very long time since I’ve felt so depressed about the future of the United States and of the world. In President-elect Trump we have a man who, at least to judge from his pre-election rhetoric, seems to have not a single…

Earlier this year, I wrote a column headed “The country is going mad”. I was wrong: we have already gone mad. I produce three pieces of evidence. The first relates to the very widespread push in recent months to create Maori wards in local government: New Plymouth, Tauranga, Kaipara, Whangarei, Northland, Taupo, Gisborne, Ruapehu, Nelson and South Taranaki. In several of those…

My column this month argues that we’ve gone mad, with the widespread push to create local government wards based on race; with the increasing use of the Maori language in situations where almost nobody understands it; and with the rather ridiculous assertion that in 1840 Maori chiefs didn’t really surrender sovereignty to the British Crown – despite the clear wording of the…

In the middle of November, the Real Institute reported that the median house price across New Zealand had risen by 19.8 percent over the year to the end of October. Across the country as a whole, the median price had risen to an astonishing $725,000, while in the Auckland region the median price had reached $1 million. In Auckland city the median reached $1.2 million, on the…

This year’s election is one for the history books: it was the first since MMP was introduced in 1996 which resulted in a single party being able to govern without the aid of allies. What on Earth happened? In early 2020, the first Colmar Brunton poll of the year had National on 46% support, Labour on 41%, the Greens on 5%, New Zealand First on 3%, and ACT on 2%. Had those poll…

It was suggested that I do an additional short article 10 days out from the election with an appraisal of the economic policies being proposed by Labour and National. I’ve found this extraordinarily hard to do! That’s partly because of the difficulty of defining “economic policies”. Does the term include policy on reforming the Resource Management Act, or policy on oil and gas…

As I write, there’s one month to go. Everybody will have their own views about what problems the next Government should try to solve, but for me six issues should be priorities. First, and most obviously, is the need to guide New Zealand back to a path of low unemployment and low government debt after the disastrous consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic – the inevitable effects…

As I write this month, Auckland is again in a Level 3 lockdown, with all the frustrations and irritations of that situation. I myself got caught up in a huge traffic jam, which had four lanes of traffic (including the bus lane) at a total stand-still for more than an hour, because of a mad rush of people wanting to get tested for the virus – and I doubt if anybody in that traffic…

Not 48 hours after I sent what I thought was the final version of this column to the editor, events proved just how true the headline was: Todd Muller resigned as Leader of the National Party just eight weeks after he assumed the role. Twelve hours later, the National Party caucus elected Judith Collins as Leader and Gerry Brownlee as Deputy Leader. The political landscape…

Unless you were living under a stone, you will know that towards the end of May a black American by the name of George Floyd was killed when a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, while three other police officers looked on. And you will also know that this event has triggered huge protests against racism, not only in the US but throughout the world. So…

In the middle of May, the Government announced its Budget for the next financial year. New Zealand has never seen anything remotely like it. It made clear the Government’s intention to spend vast sums of money in an attempt to protect New Zealanders from the economic shock caused by the coronavirus and the Government’s draconian measures to deal with it. Last month, I suggested…

Perhaps it is dangerous to write about such a fast-moving situation as the Covid-19 pandemic when what I write may not be published for 10 days or more, but at time of writing my strong impression is that the public believe that the Government has done a remarkably good job of suppressing, perhaps even eliminating, the spread of Covid-19 in New Zealand, and that they deserve warm…

It’s hard to believe that when I signed off my article for the March edition of Elocal, on 11 February, I didn’t mention the words ‘pandemic’, ‘coronavirus’, or ‘Covid-19’. In the four or five weeks since, the media – and I mean all the media – have talked about almost nothing else. What I write now, for publication at the beginning of April, could also be totally blind-sided by…

It seems no time at all since we were celebrating (or lamenting) the election of the Labour–New Zealand First–Green Government in 2017. And now, in little more than six months’ time, we’re going to the polls again. As I write in the middle of February, the outcome of the election is still very uncertain. If the latest poll results were replicated in the election, we would have…

There are two pieces of legislation wending their way through Parliament at the moment designed to further entrench the crazy notion that the Treaty of Waitangi created an obligation on governments nearly 200 years later to treat anybody with a Maori ancestor in some kind of preferential way. One is the Public Service Bill, introduced to Parliament last month and now being…

A few years ago, when I wrote my autobiography, I included a chapter called “The challenge of making economic policy in a democracy”. In that chapter, I tried to debunk a lot of commonly held myths about economic policy. There are lots of them: “Government should control what private landlords charge for rental accommodation to protect low income people”. “Import controls and…

Regular readers of “elocal” will think I have a fixation about house prices. I’ve written on the subject twice already this year, most recently just two months ago. But several things have prompted me to write on the subject again. First, despite all the hand-wringing about the unaffordability of housing, and the political commitments to make housing more affordable, house…

A few weeks ago, the Government announced that as from 2022 teaching New Zealand history would be a mandatory part of the school curriculum, at both primary and secondary level. As somebody who was an historian before he was an economist, I was delighted. It is important that all New Zealanders, whether born here or born overseas, have an understanding of where we have come from…