In 2015, Don began writing articles for elocal, a monthly magazine focused on the Franklin county/Karaka area of South Auckland. In recent years, it has been available both in print and digital editions (the latter at www.elocal.co.nz). In reverse chronological order, these are those articles.
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.
The following is an updated version of the final chapter of Don's autobiography Incredible Luck, published in 2014
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.
A couple of months back I wrote a column on New Zealand’s high and, at that time, accelerating rate of inflation.
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…
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…
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.
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth has passed away, and the overwhelming majority of people in New Zealand mourn her passing.
Rarely has a political party promised so much in an election campaign and achieved so little during its time in office.
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 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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
I suspect that most New Zealanders don’t give a lot of thought to the size of the government debt.
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.
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.
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.
Copyright © 2026 Don Brash.