Right of reply, please!

3 December 2006

The last edition of The Independent Financial Review contained not one but two highly distorted views of my time as leader of the National Party.

The editorial in that edition argued that the National Party needed to change its leader because I wanted to return New Zealand to some out-of-date vision of “a homogenous population that loved rugby, racing, beer and pavlova”, ignoring the rapid increase in the proportion of our population whose ancestry is Maori, Polynesian, and Asian, and the growing importance to New Zealand of China as a trading partner.

I readily accept that my use of the word “mainstream” in the final weeks of the campaign was not my smartest move, though I am bound to observe that use of the word was recommended by those with much longer experience of the political game than I had.

But nobody who knows me even slightly could imagine for one moment that I am unaware of the wide variety of ethnic backgrounds making up the New Zealand population.

For the 14 years before I entered Parliament, I was in frequent contact with the central banks of the Asian region, and traveled to Asia at least once a year.  My wife of 17 years is Chinese from Singapore.  I have often stressed the huge importance of our trade with China.  For some years, I have been a regular attendee at cultural events celebrating Chinese, Korean, and Indian festivals.

In May this year, I addressed the Auckland Rotary Club about being a New Zealander, and noted that New Zealand is a great country where “I can watch my 13-year-old Eurasian son playing happily with a dozen of his friends, and count two Chinese, one Korean, one Sri Lankan, one Eurasian, six Pakeha, and the grand-son of a Maori activist”.

I’m sure most of your readers would know that I voted for the Prostitution Reform Act, and made it clear that, while I felt that changing the law to allow civil unions should finally be determined by referendum, I would vote in favour of civil unions in that referendum.

So it is simply wrong to suggest that Don Brash hankers after some “homogenous population that loves rugby, racing, beer and pavlova”.

The editorial also refers to my “right-wing views on economic and social policy”.  I’m never very sure what “right-wing” means in this context, but I can assure your readers that nothing I would advocate would come close to being as draconian as what the editorial recommends in arguing that a “good start (for the new leadership of the National Party) would be to promise to simply stop the growth in government spending.”  Under my leadership, the National Party did promise to slow the growth in government spending – stopping the growth altogether, or even cutting spending absolutely as the editorial appeared to favour, was not on the agenda.

And what are “right-wing social policies”?   There is nothing very right wing about a commitment to treat all New Zealanders on the basis of their need, not on the basis of their race; nor in insisting that able-bodied working-age adults without responsibility for looking after young children should be expected to undertake some form of community service in return for ongoing taxpayer support.   And if the writer of the editorial believes that such policies are electorally unpopular, he should look at the longevity of John Howard’s Government in Australia.

In an article on the page opposite the editorial, Chris Trotter argued that I had sought an injunction against the publication of a “book of my emails” because I wanted to hide my true objectives, which he assumed were to introduce further “Friedmanite” economic policies.   Quite frankly, that is utter nonsense.  I sought the injunction because it seems to me fundamental that people who communicate with the Leader of the Opposition – indeed with any Member of Parliament – have a right to expect that their correspondence will be treated in confidence.  And I understood that many hundreds, perhaps many thousands, of emails between me and members of the public were about to be published.

As it turned out, there appears to be no “book of emails”, but simply a scurrilous tract written by somebody who finds it astonishing that the National Party wants to improve New Zealand’s economic performance and has frequent contact with the investors whose businesses drive that growth.  So I asked the court to lift the injunction as soon as possible.

The National Party went into last year’s election with a set of very clearly stated objectives around economic policy, education, welfare, law and order, the Treaty, and many other issues.  There were no “secret agendas”.

Yes, I did have the privilege of knowing Milton Friedman, and he was by common consent one of the greatest economists of the 20th century.

But the policies which the National Party took into last year’s election were ones which had widespread popular support.  We were pipped at the post by outrageous bribes (particularly the interest-free student loan policy) and by the Labour Party’s willingness to misappropriate $800,000 of taxpayers’ money to fund their campaign, and to exceed the legal spending limit by many hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Had the Labour Party complied with the law, there is a very good chance that the policies that National took into last year’s election would have seen the election of a National Government.

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