Because it’s time to get real. This country is not performing as it should, and I'm not prepared to see it slide further behind. I owe it to my children and grandchildren to ensure New Zealand performs better.
I joined the National Party because these are the things I believe it stands for:
I'm a fourth generation New Zealander who has worked internationally and within both the private and the public sectors.
My vision has always been that everyone's creative energies need to be unlocked to enable them to reach their full potential. Today that isn't happening.
Fifty years ago, New Zealanders enjoyed the same opportunities, the same experiences, and the same goods and services as Americans and Australians growing up at the same time. Today our living standard is only 75% of Australia's and little more than 50% of Americans'. The current Government is smugly tolerating a situation in which for every opportunity that a New Zealand family enjoys, the average American family has twice as many.
For fourteen years I did my best for the New Zealand economy at the Reserve Bank. But during that time I watched the country's social policy destroy the fabric of our society. We locked hundreds of thousands into dependency, we hurt the poor, and our failure can be seen every night on TV: violence, child abuse, drug addiction and a failing education system that leaves substantial numbers of people – both children and adults – almost totally illiterate and innumerate. So I joined the National Caucus because I believed I had a set of policies that could deliver to ordinary New Zealanders real sustainable gains in living standards and opportunities, particularly for the disadvantaged. I passionately believe that delivering real gains to them is crucial because they automatically deliver something of value to everyone else.
Almost everything this Government does creates barriers to opportunity and higher living standards. New Zealand has shortened its gaze, and the Labour Government has returned to the interest group politics of the 1970s. Under the Helen Clark Government, a few are favoured while the productive and self-reliant are overlooked. In the final analysis, all the principles and the framework of policy are not about economic and social theories, they are about people.
My immediate priorities as National's leader will be to energise our performance in Opposition, to communicate more clearly what we stand for, and to put real political choices before the voters at the next election. Over the next few months, I will be spelling out the major problems, many of them inter-linked, that face us as a nation and I'll be outlining National's solutions.
Copyright © 2024 Don Brash.