Articles by Dr Don Brash

Unfortunately, welfare spending is addictive. And addictive in two ways. First, once government has committed to a particular level of benefit, it is exceedingly difficult to reduce that level. And second, the benefit itself changes behaviour: many people who might otherwise have tried harder to find employment choose to go on, or stay on, a benefit, something strongly encouraged by the very high effective marginal tax rate faced by those…

PART ONE Over the last couple of decades, the world has watched the Middle East as country after country has tried to establish a democratic regime and country after country has failed. The United States and its allies toppled Saddam Hussein and announced that they wanted to see a democratic regime take root in Iraq. The western powers helped to topple Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, and welcomed moves towards democracy in Tunisia, Egypt and the…

A couple of months back I wrote a column on New Zealand’s high and, at that time, accelerating rate of inflation. I concluded that column with the following comment: There has to be some risk that, faced with growing public concern about inflation and the impact of the rising interest rates which the Reserve Bank is using to get on top of inflation, the Government will reach for a dopey policy like reducing GST to produce a one-off reduction…

As we look into the New Year, there are a lot of crucial issues facing the country – how do we deal with the ongoing unaffordability of housing (notwithstanding the recent fall in house prices); how do we increase our rate of productivity growth so that we can afford the good things of life that wealthier countries take for granted; how do we improve the serious problems in our education and health sectors; how do we deal with the longer-term…

The last time inflation was over 7% was more than 30 years ago, and I was responsible for doing what Adrian Orr, the current Governor of the Reserve Bank, is trying to do now: get inflation back to the target mandated by the Minister of Finance, in my case within a 0 to 2% range, and Mr Orr’s case within a range of 1 to 3%. A few weeks ago, there was at least some cheering when the inflation figure for the year to September was announced: it…

Not since the Cuban missile crisis exactly 60 years ago has the world been in such danger. And that’s not just my own view: early in October, US President Joe Biden said that the risk of nuclear Armageddon is at the highest level since the Cuban missile crisis. He was right. As I write, Russia’s conventional military forces are being forced to retreat on many fronts and Ukrainian forces have destroyed a key bridge linking Russia to Crimea. …

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth has passed away, and the overwhelming majority of people in New Zealand mourn her passing. Not, of course, because her death was unexpected, or a tragedy in the ordinary sense of that word: at the age of 96 and increasingly suffering “mobility issues”, she had outlived the great majority of her subjects by at least a decade and was able to perform her royal duties right up to the end. Not for her, prolonged…

Rarely has a political party promised so much in an election campaign and achieved so little during its time in office. Labour made extravagant promises to end child poverty, to build 100,000 houses over 10 years and make housing more affordable, to make a major contribution to reducing greenhouse gases, and to improve our education system. Instead child poverty has increased on most measures; the number of new houses built has been trivial…

On the night before the 2002 election, when I was a list candidate for the National Party, I was attending a black-tie event in Napier. Before we sat down to eat, the host asked the local vicar to give thanks. The vicar gave thanks for the food and the drink which we were about to consume, and then said that we should give thanks also for the fact that, in just 24 hours’ time, we would have elected the members of the next Parliament “and…

The Prime Minister’s recent visit to Washington, during which she seemed to have signed New Zealand up as a strongly pro-US outpost in the South Pacific – and her forthcoming (at time of writing) attendance at a major NATO meeting in Europe in the next few weeks – should prompt some serious thought about our long-term interests. After all, it was the US which unceremoniously withdrew from the Trans Pacific Partnership shortly after Trump…

In recent weeks, more and more commentators are suggesting that house prices in New Zealand have started to fall, and are expected to fall further. For many homeowners, especially those who have bought within the last year or two, this news will be terrifying, and for them I have a great deal of sympathy. They were sold the lie that house prices would always and everywhere rise much faster than incomes, and that therefore the best way to…

Many people seem to think that New Zealand doesn’t have a constitution. And certainly we are one of a very small number of countries which does not have a written constitution, a single document laying out how the governance of the country should be conducted. But we certainly have a constitution, albeit not one written down in a single document. Rather, our constitution consists of a number of laws and a number of conventions, many of them…

Not many months after the 2020 election freed the Labour Party from the constraints which New Zealand First had placed on them between 2017 and 2020, the Government admitted to commissioning the most radical plan for over-turning New Zealand’s constitution since the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840. It was called He Puapua, and I have written about its quite extraordinary implications previously. In short, it envisages New Zealand’s…

In a great many ways, New Zealand is an enormously attractive country to live in. We have a temperate climate, largely free of extremes of either heat or cold. We have magnificent mountains, and beautiful and uncrowded beaches. We produce enough food to feed ourselves many times over. In a water-short world, we have more fresh water, per person, than all but two countries in the world. We have abundant open spaces, with just five million…

Over the last year or so, I’ve read a lot of books (or more accurately, listened to a lot of books on Audible) on the US political situation – some by partisan authors like Adam Schiff, the Democratic congressman who chairs the House Intelligence Committee and who led those who argued for the impeachment of Donald Trump over his attempt to blackmail Ukraine into helping him win the 2020 election; some by authors who might be expected to support…

There are lots of ways of measuring how New Zealand is doing, and none of them is perfect. We stack up very well on measures like life expectancy, unemployment, infant mortality, and car ownership. Not so well on the quality of our education system – an area where we have been going backwards in recent years, at least in comparison to other developed countries and many of the East Asian countries. And we stack up particularly poorly in…

I suspect that most New Zealanders don’t give a lot of thought to the size of the government debt. But every now and then the media reports that the Government is spending vastly more than it takes in in revenue, with the result that the amount the Government has to borrow goes up by billions more. Surely this is mortgaging our future, and the future of our children and grandchildren? Actually, thanks to a piece of legislation passed at…

In the middle of October, something astonishing happened: the Government and the National Party held a joint news conference to announce that they had agreed on the way to make housing more affordable. According to many opinion polls, the ludicrous level to which house prices have risen in New Zealand is the issue which is of greatest concern to the New Zealand public. And that’s hardly surprising. Relative to incomes, New Zealand house prices…

By the time this column sees the light of day, the Labour Government – now freed of the constraint of New Zealand First – will have been in office almost exactly a year. And to look at the opinion polls, they are doing a fine job – or at least the Prime Minister is. But the reality is very different. The Government has made absolutely no progress in key areas like replacing the RMA with workable rules to protect the environment while…

Once again, I feel compelled to write about house prices. Why? Because it is the most important cause of social distress in New Zealand today, and that by a large margin. There would still be social problems if house prices were half their present level, but they would be vastly more manageable – child poverty would be much reduced, mental health would be better, there would be less homelessness, there would be fewer suicides, and…