Articles by Dr Don Brash

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 considered by the Governance and Administration select committee. It…

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 tariffs protect jobs and create employment”. “The government has…

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 prices continue to go up at a much faster rate than incomes. Just…

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 as a nation – including the things we can be proud of and the…

Several months ago, it was abundantly clear that KiwiBuild was a complete failure. In the 2017 election campaign, the Labour Party’s biggest promise was to “deliver 100,000 quality, affordable houses for first home buyers over the next decade”. It was recognised that it would take some time to crank up the programme to achieve this, but the initial aim was to build 16,000 homes during the Government’s first term in office. · It was also…

One of the issues almost guaranteed to provoke a strong reaction at many a social gathering in New Zealand is any suggestion that New Zealand should be exporting more bottled water. There have been noisy demonstrations in public, well covered by television news channels, strongly opposed to such exports. One of the commitments made by the incoming Labour-New Zealand First-Green Government when announcing its policy priorities in the Speech…

A few weeks ago, the New Zealand Herald carried an article by Dr Douglas Fairgray which seemed to argue that, when it comes to determining the price of houses, supply doesn’t matter. He didn’t put it quite like that, but that was what he appeared to be saying. He noted that the Minister for Urban Development, Phil Twyford, was seeking to reduce urban land prices by “flooding the market with development opportunities”. He said that Mr Twyford…

Driving around Auckland the other day, I saw that one of the candidates for the Auckland mayoralty is promising to sack the board of Auckland Transport. He’s got my vote was my immediate reaction! Of course, I know that the performance of Auckland Transport is not the only important issue in this local body election, but for me it is arguably the most important single issue. Why? Because it is an enormously large organisation, wielding a…

Like many of you I suspect, I was distressed reading the account of the attempt by Oranga Tamariki, the fashionable name for the Ministry for Children, to remove a new-born baby from its 19-year-old mother in Hawke’s Bay a few weeks ago. Then I read that three Maori babies are taken into state custody every week around the country, and that in the particular Hawke’s Bay case, the baby was the second to be taken from the teenage mother. · This…

Last year, there was a lively debate in New Zealand about what should, and on the other hand what should not, be banned. This was triggered initially by Phil Goff’s attempt to prevent two Canadian speakers from speaking in Auckland. It turned out that, on being challenged by the hastily constituted Free Speech Coalition (of which I am proud to be one of the initial members), Mr Goff did not have the legal authority to ban the Canadians, so…