Articles by Dr Don Brash

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…

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…