Don Brash
Donald Thomas Brash is a New Zealand former politician who was Leader of the Opposition and leader of the New Zealand National Party from October 2003 to November 2006, and leader of the ACT New Zealand party for seven months from April to November 2011.
Brash was Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand for fourteen years from 1988 to April 2002. He resigned to stand as a list MP for the National Party in the 2002 general election. Brash was ranked high on the party list and so was elected, despite the Bill English-led National Party being heavily defeated. Brash challenged English's leadership position the next year, and was elected head of the party on 28 October 2003. He delivered a speech at Orewa on 27 January 2004 that proved controversial, expressing opposition to perceived Māori separatism, through New Zealand's measures designed to benefit them.
In the 2005 general election, the National Party made major gains under Brash's leadership and achieved its best result since the introduction of the mixed-member proportional electoral system in 1996 – recovering from its worst ever result in 2002. However, National won two seats fewer than the incumbent New Zealand Labour Party, and was unable to secure a majority from the minor parties to form a government. Brash resigned as party leader on 27 November 2006, and retired from Parliament in February 2007.
In October 2008, he was appointed as an adjunct professor of Banking in the Business School at the Auckland University of Technology, and an adjunct professor in the School of Economics and Finance at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
On 28 April 2011, Brash joined the ACT party as its leader, replacing Rodney Hide. He resigned as leader on the night of the 2011 general election in November due to ACT's poor showing in the election, and its failure to gain any seats apart from its electorate strong-hold of. In 2016, he founded the lobby group Hobson's Pledge.
Childhood, education and marriage
Don Brash was born to Alan Brash, a Presbyterian minister and son of prominent lay leader Thomas Brash, and Eljean Brash, in Whanganui on 24 September 1940.His family moved to Christchurch when he was six. He attended Cashmere Primary School and Christchurch Boys' High School before going to the University of Canterbury where he graduated in economics, history and political science. He continued his studies in economics, receiving his master's degree in 1962 for a thesis arguing that foreign investment damaged a country's economic development. The following year he began working towards a PhD, at the Australian National University.
In 1964 Brash married Erica, with whom he had two children. In the 1980s he and his Singaporean secretary, Je Lan Lee, who was also married, began a relationship. He separated from Erica in 1985 and four months after they were later divorced, he married Lee. In 2007, his marriage to Lee also broke up, following an affair with Diane Foreman, then Deputy Chair of the Business Round Table. Brash and Lee had one child together.
Early career
Brash went to Washington, D.C. in the United States in 1966 to work as an economist for the World Bank. However, he returned to New Zealand in 1971 to become general manager of Broadbank Corporation, a merchant bank.Brash's first entry into politics came in 1980 when the National Party selected him to stand as its candidate in the by-election in the East Coast Bays electorate. Brash's attempt at the seat, however, failed – some believe that this resulted from the decision by Robert Muldoon, National Party Prime Minister, to raise tolls on the Auckland Harbour Bridge, an important route for East Coast Bays residents. The seat went to Gary Knapp of the Social Credit Party. Brash again failed to win the seat at the 1981 general election.
In 1982 Brash became managing director at the New Zealand Kiwifruit Authority, which oversaw the export of kiwifruit. From 1986 to 1988, he served as the general manager of Trust Bank, a merger of nine trustee savings banks.
Reserve Bank governor
In 1988 Brash became governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, a position which he held for the next 14 years. Brash consistently met Government-set targets to keep inflation within initially 0 to 2%, later 1 to 3% during his time as governor.There is a range of opinion on Brash's performance as Reserve Bank governor. The New Zealand Association of Economists describe Brash's success in establishing an independent central bank with an inflation target and in reducing inflation as a highlight of his career. Documentary maker Alister Barry described Brash as "an extremist, an idealist" whose "ideal world is where the free market reigns supreme". Barry considered that Brash manipulated public opinion towards neo-liberal economics and gave as examples Brash's advocacy for abolishing the minimum wage and his Hayek Memorial Lecture to the Institute of Economic Affairs in London in 1996.
In 1990, Brash was awarded the New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal. In 2002, he was inducted into the New Zealand Business Hall of Fame, in recognition of his role as central bank governor.
Member of Parliament
On 26 April 2002, shortly before the 2002 general election, Brash resigned as Reserve Bank governor to stand for parliament as a candidate for the National party. He was placed on its party list and as such obtained a parliamentary seat. Brash immediately joined National's front bench as its spokesman on finance.In October 2003, Brash publicly challenged Bill English for the position of Parliamentary Leader of the National Party. English had gradually lost support within the party, but Brash's victory in any leadership-contest against English seemed by no means guaranteed. Brash's decision to make his challenge public caused some criticism, with some party supporters perceiving that an open leadership dispute could damage the party's image. However, by breaking with the tradition of operating secretly, Brash calculated that people would see him as an honest "anti-politician" – a notion central to his personal brand. After leading National to its worst-ever election result in 2002, English was sacked the following year in favour of Don Brash.
Leader of the Opposition
Brash won a caucus vote on 28 October 2003, making him Leader of the National Party Caucus after one year as a Member of Parliament. He remained National's finance spokesman, appointing the equally new MP John Key as his deputy finance-spokesman, and eventually appointing Key the primary finance-spokesman after a Caucus reshuffle in August 2004.Orewa speech
On 27 January 2004, Brash delivered his second Orewa speech on "Nationhood" at the Orewa Rotary Club. He said:
The topic I will focus on today is the dangerous drift towards racial separatism in New Zealand, and the development of the now entrenched Treaty grievance industry. We are one country with many peoples, not simply a society of Pākehā and Māori where the minority has a birthright to the upper hand, as the Labour Government seems to believe".
Shortly after the delivery of the Orewa speech, his Māori Affairs spokesperson Georgina te Heuheu resigned. National gained 17 percentage points in the February 2004 Colmar Brunton poll for Television New Zealand, taken shortly after the speech. After the February peak, National suffered a steady decline in public opinion polls, leaving it 11 points behind Labour at the end of 2004.
On 25 January 2005 Brash made his third speech to the Orewa Rotary Club. This time Brash focused on "Welfare Dependency: Whatever Happened to Personal Responsibility?" He said:
How can we tolerate a welfare system which allows children to grow up in a household where the parents are permanently dependent on a welfare benefit? Our welfare system is contributing to the creation of a generation of children condemned to a lifetime of deprivation, with limited education, without life skills, and without the most precious inheritance from their parents, a sense of ambition or aspiration. Nothing can be more destructive of self esteem.
Views on race-relations
Māori identity
After the Orewa speech of 2004, Brash's public statements on race relations received significant attention, both in the traditional media and online. During the 2005 election campaign, he criticised the use of pōwhiri in welcoming international visitors:
I mean, I think there is a place for Maori culture but why is it that we always use a semi-naked male, sometimes quite pale-skinned Māori, leaping around in, you know, mock battle?
In September 2006 Brash stated that:
There are clearly many New Zealanders who do see themselves as distinctly and distinctively Māori – but it is also clear there are few, if any, fully Māori left here. There has been a lot of intermarriage and that has been welcome.
These comments received a negative response from other political leaders, who portrayed focussing on blood quantum as divisive and as harking back to racist laws, and who suggested the appropriateness for Māori themselves to determine how to define themselves.
Brash questioned whether Māori remained a distinct indigenous group because few "full-blooded" individuals survive. This drew criticism from a range of his adversaries, including Māori Party co-leader Tariana Turia, who cancelled a dinner with him in protest. In a statement to explain his position on 30 September 2006, Brash said that the Government had no responsibility to address the over-representation of Māori in negative social statistics. "If Māori New Zealanders die more frequently from lung cancer than non-Māori do, for example, it is almost certainly because Māori New Zealanders choose to smoke more heavily than other New Zealanders do".