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.
The following is an updated version of the final chapter of Don's autobiography Incredible Luck, published in 2014
A couple of months back I wrote a column on New Zealand’s high and, at that time, accelerating rate of inflation. I concluded that column with the following comment:
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.
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.For many homeowners, especially those who have bought within the last year or two, this news will be terrifying, and for them I have a great...
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. We produce enough food to feed ourselves many times over.
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.
I suspect that most New Zealanders don’t give a lot of thought to the size of the government debt. But every now and then the media reports that the Government is spending vastly more than it takes in in revenue, with the result that the amount the Government has to...
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.According to many opinion polls, the ludicrous level to which house prices have risen in New Zealand is...
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. And to look at the opinion polls, they are doing a fine job – or at least...
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. There would still be social problems if house prices were half their present level, but they would be vastly...
Copyright © 2025 Don Brash.