Articles by Dr Don Brash

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

One of the most amazing aspects of politics in New Zealand in recent decades is the enduring popularity of a Prime Minister who leads a Government which has failed in almost every major policy area. It is indeed a sad reflection on democracy itself that voters seem more impressed by a pretty smile than by the Government’s ability to deliver on its important policy objectives. Too…

In January 2004, I addressed the Orewa Rotary Club by asking: What sort of nation do we want to build? > Is it to be a modern democratic society, embodying the essential notion of one rule for all in a single nation state? Or is it the racially divided nation, with two sets of laws, and two standards of citizenship, that the present Labour Government is moving us steadily…

Last month, I wrote about the way in which radicals are working to reinterpret the meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi, often arguing that the Treaty of Waitangi (in English) and Te Tiriti o Waitangi (in te reo) are two quite different documents, and that there is no way that Maori chiefs would have surrendered sovereignty in 1840. Given the speeches made by Maori chiefs on 5…

A couple of issues back, I wrote about the way in which the Government had passed legislation under urgency to prevent ratepayers having any right to demand a referendum before local authorities establish Maori wards, as a previous Labour Government had explicitly legislated for. I want to discuss this issue a bit further because I’ve had some people say to me that the Treaty…

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…