DON BRASH: EXPLAINING MY VOTE

About a year ago, when the Government had been in office about two years, I wrote a short assessment of how they were doing. At that point, I marked them on five criteria and gave them a 2.5 out of 5.

With just over two months to go before the next election, how are they doing? This time I want to assess them on six criteria.

First, what has the Government done to accelerate our economic growth? For many years, indeed for decades, growth in productivity in New Zealand - and at the end of the day that is the only thing which matters in terms of raising living standards - has been depressingly poor. As a result, living standards in New Zealand have grown almost imperceptibly in recent years, and certainly much more slowly than in many countries which we used to regard as distinctly poorer.

There has certainly been no spectacular acceleration in productivity growth in the last three years. But on this measure I would nevertheless give the Government good marks. For the first time in more than three decades, the Government has made a serious attempt to reform the Resource Management Act, replacing that Act with two new bills (almost Acts) which should remove many of the roadblocks to investment which have held us back in the past. The fast-track procedure is also enabling many new and important investments to get underway much more quickly than otherwise. The rules around foreign investment have also been simplified.

Part of my reason for being optimistic about our future growth in productivity is that the Government has also taken major steps to reform our education system - moving away from the NCEA to a more robust assessment system, moving away from the idea that mixing age groups in enormous barn-like classes was a good idea, moving back towards well-tried ways of teaching children to read, and offering charter schools for children who do not fit well into traditional schools. The benefits of this reform will take years and perhaps decades to show up in the productivity numbers, but they are vitally important reforms nonetheless.

Also contributing to our prospective growth in productivity, and of enormous value in its own right, the Government has made major progress in making housing more affordable. When it came to office, the median house price in Auckland was some 11 times the median household income. Now that so-called median multiple is about eight - still far too high (the consensus is that housing is affordable where the median multiple is around three to four) but a great improvement over three years.

Perhaps ironically, this is undoubtedly one factor in the Government's unpopularity. Most people seem to want more affordable houses for the sake of their children but want that to be achieved without any reduction in their own house price. When house prices are rising the government tends to be popular. When house prices are soggy the government tends to be unpopular. That no doubt explains why Jacinda Ardern, when asked whether she wanted house prices to fall, said that on the contrary she wanted them to rise but more slowly. Christopher Luxon is on record as saying something similar. If Chris Bishop were to lose his Hutt South electorate in the forthcoming election - which I hope he does not - he would at very least know that he had made a major contribution to housing affordability in New Zealand by putting pressure on local councils to make more land available for housing and, by making house ownership no longer a guaranteed and relatively riskless way to wealth, would have done much for future economic growth by directing New Zealand's entrepreneurial talent away from passive property ownership.

So on those three criteria - making serious efforts to increase our productivity growth, improving our education system, and making housing more affordable - I would give the current Government good marks.

On three other measures, however, their performance has been less than stellar.

One of the issues on which those who voted for the three Coalition parties thought they were getting by voting for those parties was a movement away from the idea that the Treaty of Waitangi had somehow created a partnership between the Crown and Māori tribes, that in signing the Treaty of Waitangi the Māori chiefs had not surrendered sovereignty, and that therefore those with any Māori ancestry today have some kind of special constitutional preference.

In this policy area I would have to give the Government a pass mark but not a very good one. On the one hand they have amended the Marine and Coastal Area Act to reflect Parliament's original intention in 2011 (to make successful claims for customary marine title dependent on claimants establishing that they have had continuous and exclusive use of the relevant piece of coastline since 1840); they have removed section 127 from the Education and Training Act, which had required schools to "give priority to" the Treaty, te ao Māori, matauranga Māori, and so on; they have refused to resolve Treaty grievances with tribes which refuse to acknowledge that the Treaty made the Crown sovereign; they required all local councils which had introduced Māori wards without a mandate from their ratepayers to have a referendum as to whether those Māori wards should continue; and they replaced Mana Whakahona a Rohe agreements (which tended to constrain the behaviour of local governments) with substantially less prescriptive iwi participation agreements.

On the other hand, they refused to pass ACT's legislative attempt to define what the Treaty means in 2025, the Treaty Principles Bill (with the Prime Minister saying that there was nothing at all in the bill that he liked, even though the first principle in the Bill was that the government has the right to govern and the third was that all New Zealanders are equal before the law); they failed to prevent professional bodies with statutory authority from obliging members of professions to take courses on the Treaty with no direct relevance to their occupations (the Janet Dixon case); they made no attempt to campaign against Māori wards in the referenda, with the result that in 18 cities and districts Māori wards remain in existence; and they certainly made no attempt to scrap separate Māori electorates, despite commitments made by Bill English, John Key and me when we were National Party leaders and the total absurdity of having such racially based representation when 30% of the current Cabinet are Māori, none of whom were elected in Māori electorates. (It is now 40 years since the Royal Commission on the Electoral System recommended that Māori electorates be scrapped if MMP were adopted as our electoral system, as it was almost 30 years ago.)

So a less-than-overwhelming achievement in this policy area, particularly where all three parties in the Coalition Government claim to believe in equal citizenship, but certainly a much better achievement than anything which the Labour-led bloc would have accomplished.

What about the fiscal outlook? The Labour Government left the Coalition Government with a mess. But alas the current Government has done a poor job of rectifying that mess or even of explaining adequately to the public why the mess needs to be fixed. As I said last year when reviewing the Government's performance at the end of their second year in office, "doing a Ruth Richardson" to government spending in the Government's first budget would have been politically difficult. And perhaps raising the age at which New Zealanders become eligible for New Zealand Superannuation would have been literally impossible given Mr Peters' strong opposition to any such change.

But no serious observer believes that our present fiscal track is sustainable given the fiscal consequences of our gradually ageing population. It's sobering to reflect that a National Government raised the age of eligibility for New Zealand Super from 60 to 65 over just 10 years in the ‘nineties, with scarcely any public opposition. The age of eligibility clearly needs to rise or we need to find some other policy to deal with the rapidly escalating cost of the scheme as it currently stands. In this area, the Government has failed and mandating higher contributions to KiwiSaver, as the Prime Minister proposes if National is elected for another term, won't fix the fiscal problem unless he envisages scaling back New Zealand Super for those who have enough savings of their own.

And finally foreign policy. Tragically this is another policy area where the Government is totally failing. A few years ago we could genuinely claim to have had some measure of independence in our foreign policy. Though long one of the Five Eyes countries, this was an intelligence-sharing group involving no formal obligation to go to war with anybody. We maintained a cordial relationship with both the US and China, raising issues where we disagreed with both countries when necessary.

The Ardern Labour Government began sidling up to NATO and behaving as if China might one day be an enemy. This Government has nailed its colours to the US mast, failed to make even the mildest criticism of the US attack on Iran, talked openly about the need for interoperability with US armed forces, discussed the possibility of joining AUKUS Pillar 2 (a grouping of countries which are explicitly anti-China), and on at least two occasions has sailed a naval vessel through the Taiwan Strait, even while knowing that China regards that as a hostile act and despite our having formally acknowledged more than 50 years ago that Taiwan is a part of China.

The reality is that China poses no military threat to New Zealand - or at least it doesn't as long as we don't join any other countries threatening China.

I recommend an interview on TVNZ's Q&A programme on 30 November last between Jack Tame and Sam Roggeveen of Australia's Lowy Institute. Dr Roggeveen explained that China is doing what any other Great Power would do - wanting to push another Great Power off its front veranda. He speculated how the US would react if China had 70,000 troops stationed in Canada and an aircraft carrier permanently based in Cuba. He suggested that the US wouldn't tolerate that for a moment. And of course we know that from the way the US is currently treating Cuba, even in the absence of Russian or Chinese forces there. Yet we appear intent on quite deliberately supporting America's intention to stay on China's front veranda and to hell with the consequences.

Where does that leave me? On my six key issues, the current Government

gains a 3.5 mark. Not very impressive but in my judgement clearly better than the alternative on offer.

For the first time in quite a few elections, New Zealand has the clear choice between a centre-right bloc led by the National Party and a centre-left bloc led by the Labour Party. In the past, New Zealand First was able to go either left or right, but this year Winston Peters has ruled out going with the Labour Party and Chris Hipkins has ruled out going with Winston Peters. The Opportunity Party, which might perhaps have seen itself as able to go either right or left, has been ruled out by Christopher Luxon. So the two blocks are clearly defined.

For some New Zealanders the choice between Labour and National is not a choice at all. They have been so deeply indoctrinated that they could not imagine going with any party other than the one they have always voted for. I am not in that category. Looking back over the last 40 years or so, I can reflect on a Labour Government in the ‘eighties which adopted many courageous policy positions which have served New Zealand very well. Helen Clark's Labour Government was right in the way it proposed to treat the foreshore and seabed and passed legislation reflecting that position, which, on reflection, was better than the Marine and Coastal Area Act passed by a National-led Government some years later. That Labour Government was also correct in refusing to sign New Zealand up to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People. It was Helen Clark's Labour Government which signed the free trade agreement with China, which has had many benefits for New Zealand.

Conversely, I can look back on some National Governments which have been less than ideal from my perspective. It was a National Government which did sign New Zealand up to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. And it was also a National Government which adopted the policy of having children of different ages in the same classroom, a policy which the present Coalition Government is correctly, in my view, unwinding.

So in saying that I propose to vote for the Coalition Government, I am not unmindful of some of the positive things about other parties in Parliament. Frankly I would greatly prefer the foreign policy of the Labour Party as explained by Vanushi Walters to the explicitly anti-China policy of the current Government.

But in total I greatly prefer the current Coalition Government to a coalition government led by Labour, but including the Green Party, Ti Pati Māori and Opportunity. Such a government would almost certainly fail on all but one of my six criteria (foreign policy).

How best to ensure that a National Party-led coalition is returned to government? As I explained in a column last week, it seems clear that on current polling the National Party will win significantly more electorates than would be their entitlement on the basis of what their party vote is likely to be. In this situation, a party vote for the National Party would be essentially wasted because National is already likely to be entitled to more electorate MPs than any likely party vote would entitle them to.

That strongly suggests that the best way of ensuring we have a strong centre-right coalition government is for all voters who want such a government to use their electorate votes to support their National candidate and their party vote to support one or the other of ACT or New Zealand First

I make an exception for the Epsom electorate.

ACT won the Epsom electorate in 2005 and, contrary to popular opinion, this was not done because the National Party offered ACT a free ride that year. On the contrary, I know what happened because I was leader of the National Party at the time. The National Party Board asked both the party president and me to sign a joint letter to National Party members in Epsom urging them to vote for Richard Worth. Everywhere else the National Party focused on the party vote but in Epsom they wanted people to vote for the National Party MP, Richard Worth.

Prior to the election I had a very public "cup of tea" with Peter Dunne, the leader of the United Future Party. But the National Party was very keen indeed that I not be seen having a cup of tea with Rodney Hide even though Rodney and his wife had been long-standing personal friends of my wife and me. I refused to sign the letter urging party members to vote for Richard Worth because I understood that if Rodney Hide were to win Epsom, there would be an extra two or three MPs available to form a centre-right government. And in fact that is what happened. Rodney Hide did win the Epsom electorate and because of that he brought in one other Member of Parliament as well. That meant that when final votes were counted, 57 Members of Parliament backed me to be Prime Minister and 57 backed Helen Clark - we each had exactly the same number of supporters. For whatever reason - perhaps because the National Party had taken the electorate of Tauranga off him for the first time since he won it in 1984 – Winston Peters and his six colleagues chose to back Helen Clark of course.

Ever since 2005, Epsom has been an important lifeline for the ACT Party and I certainly would not want ACT to lose that electorate.

But everywhere else people who want a centre-right coalition should give their electorate vote to the National Party and their party vote to either ACT or New Zealand First, thus ensuring an overhang to the benefit of the centre-right.

I can't tell anybody else how to vote but I will certainly be using my party vote to support the ACT Party.

In saying that I am slightly conflicted. Casey Costello is high on the New Zealand First list and she was of course my co-spokesperson for Hobson's Pledge from 2016 until 2023. Also on the New Zealand First list is Elliot Ikilei, who has been my co-spokesperson for Hobson's Pledge since Casey entered Parliament. And I have a high regard for a number of others on the New Zealand First list - Michael Laws, for example.

But I have too many fundamental policy disagreements with New Zealand First to contemplate giving that party my party vote. Their refusal to contemplate any increase in the age at which people become eligible for New Zealand Superannuation is leading New Zealand to fiscal disaster. Their proposal to buy the Bank of New Zealand is nuts. Their argument that monetary policy should target both inflation and unemployment reflects their failure to understand how monetary policy works. Shane Jones' comments around the visit of the Indian Prime Minister were a disgrace. And Mr Peters’ recent comments about our largest trading partner should have had him fired as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

So I could not in good conscience give my party vote to New Zealand First, or urge anybody else to do so.

But I have no difficulty at all giving my party vote to ACT. I have known David Seymour since 2011 and know him to be a man of utmost integrity, willing occasionally to be in a minority of one in Parliament. Whatever one's personal views about euthanasia, and personally I support it being available to those who want it with appropriate safeguards, his personal crusade to get a referendum on that issue marks him out as a most unusual and courageous politician. I support most of ACT's policy positions also: I don't know what his position on foreign policy is but on all of my other six criteria - productivity, education, housing, race, and fiscal policy - he is absolutely on the right side.

So that is my conclusion. The current Government, on balance, deserves to be re-elected and they are certainly better than the alternative currently on offer. And the best way of ensuring a good outcome is to vote for National in your electorate (unless you live in Epsom) and use your party vote to support the ACT Party.

Don Brash

21 August 2026