Don Brash

On 27 January 2004 Brash delivered his first Orewa speech on "Nationhood" at the Orewa Rotary Club, north of Auckland, expressing opposition to perceived "Māori racial separatism" in New Zealand:

The topic I will focus on today is the dangerous drift towards racial separatism in New Zealand, and the development of the now entrenched Treaty grievance industry. We are one country with many peoples, not simply a society of Pākehā and Māori where the minority has a birthright to the upper hand, as the Labour Government seems to believe".[...][12]

Though the sentiments expressed in the Orewa speech differed little from established National Party views (as voiced previously by Bill English, for example), these comments resulted in National receiving an unprecedented boost in a public opinion poll. National gained 17 percentage points in the February 2004 Colmar Brunton poll for Television New Zealand, taken shortly after the speech. The surge in National support marked the biggest single gain by a political party in a single poll in Colmar Brunton's polling history at that point. In the months that followed, changes of emphasis in Labour's policy agenda became apparent as Labour attempted to recoup the ground lost to National in the February poll.

Shortly after the delivery of the Orewa speech, Brash fired his Māori Affairs spokesperson Georgina te Heuheu because she would not publicly support his speech.

After the February peak, National suffered a steady decline in public opinion polls, leaving it 11 points behind Labour at the end of 2004.

In 2004, following a political speech given by the Prime Minister Helen Clark inside the Christchurch Cathedral, Brash wrote to the Dean of the Cathedral, Peter Beck. In his letter he criticised Clark's use of a church-venue for delivering a political speech, and he raised questions over her views on religion and on the institution of marriage. After Clark retaliated, Brash apologised for any offence that his comments had caused to her, and revealed that his chief of staff, Richard Long, had written the letter, not Brash himself.

On 25 January 2005 Brash made his third speech to the Orewa Rotary Club (his first had come in the final week of January 2003, while still National's finance spokesman). This time Brash focussed on "Welfare Dependency: Whatever Happened to Personal Responsibility?" Brash pledged to reduce the number of working-age beneficiaries from the current figure of 300,000 to 200,000 over ten years, and he dedicated a significant part of his speech to the Domestic Purposes Benefit. At the time approximately 109,000 single parents received the DPB, costing taxpayers about $1.5 billion a year. Brash noted that since the inception of the DPB in 1974, the population of New Zealand had increased by 30% while the numbers receiving the DPB had increased almost ninefold. Brash used the speech to highlight his views on both the fiscal and social costs of entrenched welfare-dependency:

How can we tolerate a welfare system which allows children to grow up in a household where the parents are permanently dependent on a welfare benefit? Our welfare system is contributing to the creation of a generation of children condemned to a lifetime of deprivation, with limited education, without life skills, and without the most precious inheritance from their parents, a sense of ambition or aspiration. Nothing can be more destructive of self esteem.

Brash proposed a number of ways to reduce welfare dependency and to refocus the DPB back to its original intent of giving aid to single-parent families in need or in danger. These proposals included enforcing child-support payments from absent fathers, requiring single parents to work or perform community services once their children reached school age, and introducing penalties for women seeking the DPB who refused to name the father of their child. He also acknowledged adoption as an acceptable option, particularly for teenage girls, and drew attention to the growth in numbers of single mothers giving birth to additional children while already receiving the single-parent DPB benefit.

Some elements of the speech put his Social Welfare spokesperson, Katherine Rich, at odds with Brash, and he fired her from the portfolio, promoting the MP for Clevedon, Judith Collins, in her place.

After the Orewa speech of 2004, Brash's public statements on race relations received significant attention, both in the traditional media and online. During the 2005 election campaign, he criticised the use of powhiri in welcoming international visitors:

I mean, I think there is a place for Maori culture but why is it that we always use a semi-naked male, sometimes quite pale-skinned Maori, leaping around in, you know, mock battle?[13]

In September 2006 Brash stated that:

There are clearly many New Zealanders who do see themselves as distinctly and distinctively Maori – but it is also clear there are few, if any, fully Maori left here. There has been a lot of intermarriage and that has been welcome.[14]

These comments received a negative response from other political leaders, who portrayed focussing on blood quantum as divisive and as harking back to racist laws, and who suggested the appropriateness for Maori themselves to determine how to define themselves.[15]

Brash questioned whether Māori remained a distinct indigenous group because few "full-blooded" individuals survive. This drew criticism from a range of his adversaries, including Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia, who cancelled a dinner with him in protest. In a statement to explain his position on 30 September 2006, Brash said that the Government had no responsibility to address the over-representation of Māori in negative social statistics. "If Māori New Zealanders die more frequently from lung cancer than non-Māori do, for example, it is almost certainly because Māori New Zealanders choose to smoke more heavily than other New Zealanders do".[16]

Brash stressed the significance of New Zealand's British heritage. When asked "who are the ideal immigrants?", Brash made the following statement;

British immigrants fit in here very well. My own ancestry is all British. New Zealand values are British values, derived from centuries of struggle since Magna Carta. Those things make New Zealand the society it is.[17]

On 19 August 2005, National unveiled a $3.9 billion tax-cut policy.[19] The first polling conducted after the announcement suggested that it had boosted National support. On 22 August, Brash engaged in a televised debate with the Labour Party leader Helen Clark. According to The New Zealand Herald, Clark appeared 'confident and aggressive' and Brash appeared 'defensive'. In response to questions over his assertiveness, Brash indicated that he had not attacked Clark during the debate because she was a woman. Clark described Brash's explanation as patronising.[20]

On 27 August a weekend newspaper published a series of leaked documents, including private emails, showing that members of the ACT party and of the Business Round Table had advised Brash during his bid for the leadership of the parliamentary National Party. Continuing leaks over following weeks appeared designed to cause the National leader embarrassment. Furthermore, confusion bedevilled National's potential coalition options: New Zealand First showed reluctance to reveal whether it would support National or Labour post-election, whilst ACT (often seen as National's natural coalition partner due to the similarities in some of their policies) criticised National for not openly supporting ACT leader Rodney Hide's bid to win the electorate seat of Epsom.

Pamphlets distributed by members of a Christian sect, the Exclusive Brethren, in early September caused further embarrassment for Brash; although they were not anonymous, they did not refer to the Exclusive Brethren but were authorised in the names of individual church members. Brash initially denied National had anything to do with it, but later admitted that the Brethren had told him at a meeting some months earlier that they planned to run a campaign opposing the direction of the Labour Government. Brash has maintained his position that the pamphlet-campaign took place on the Exclusive Brethren's own initiative.

The General Election on 17 September produced a close result, with initial election-night figures from rural areas favouring National (in accordance with tradition and previous patterns); but by the end of the evening Labour had won 40.7% of the vote to National's 39.6%. Following the counting of the special votes the gap widened, with Labour taking 41.1% of the vote to National's 39.1%. Dr Brash conceded defeat on 1 October after weeks of electoral uncertainty while the major parties sought to secure the support of minor coalition partners. His only realistic scenario for becoming prime minister would have involved a coalition between National, ACT and United Future, with confidence and supply from New Zealand First and the Māori Party. This appeared highly unlikely on several counts. New Zealand First's involvement in such a coalition would have run counter to its pre-election promise to deal with the biggest party. Brash's promise to abolish Māori electorates alienated the Māori Party.[21]

Essentially National had failed to make up enough ground in the cities but swept the electoral votes in the provinces, clawing back a number of seats from Labour and defeating New Zealand First founder-leader Winston Peters in his electorate (Peters remained in Parliament as a list MP). Apart from in Auckland, National's support centred mainly in rural and provincial areas.

Wikinews has related news: New Zealand National Party leader, Don Brash, resigns

During a hastily called press-conference on Thursday 23 November 2006, Brash announced his resignation as the National Party leader, effective from 27 November. Speculation regarding his leadership had foreshadowed this move, and the publicity had had a negative effect on his political party. The publicity came to a head just before the scheduled publication of a book written by Nicky Hager containing leaked emails (amongst other allegedly damaging revelations).

On 16 November 2006 Brash had obtained a High Court injunction[24] prohibiting the distribution or publication of the private emails allegedly unlawfully taken from his computer, following ongoing rumours that his opponents would publish a series of his personal emails as a book, and he confirmed that the police had commenced a criminal investigation into the alleged email-theft.[25] However he claimed he had no awareness of and did not wish to stop the publication of the Hager book.[26] As part of his resignation announcement, Brash also announced he had cleared the way for the book's release by providing copies of his emails to Hager, and stated it had nothing to with his resignation.[27]

Brash also claimed that the publication of the book did not contribute to his decision to resign as National Party leader. The book, The Hollow Men: A Study in the Politics of Deception, details Brash's rise to power in the National Party as assisted by an "informal network of people from the right of New Zealand politics", including a number of ACT members. It also documents that senior National Party figures, including Brash, knew of the Exclusive Brethren's pamphlet campaigns in May 2005, although Brash denied knowledge of this until August.[28][29][30]

On Thursday 30 November 2006, just one week after resigning as leader of the party, Brash resigned from Parliament after the National Party's new parliamentary leader, John Key, declined to offer him a senior portfolio. He set no official date, but he stated he would not return in the new year.[31]

Brash then made his valedictory speech on Tuesday 12 December 2006.[32] On 7 February 2007, Katrina Shanks took his place as a National Party list MP.[33]

On 18 May 2007, Brash joined the ANZ National Bank board as Rob McLeod retired from the board to return to his accounting practice. He also chairs Huljich Wealth Management, an independent, specialist funds-management company based in Auckland, New Zealand.[34] In late 2008 he was lecturing in economics at the Auckland University of Technology In April 2009 Brash was appointed as a director of the electricity grid operator Transpower.[35]

In late April 2011, Brash, still a National Party member, announced that he would like to lead the ACT Party, which would require incumbent leader Rodney Hide to step down. Hide dismissed any talk of a leadership challenge to him but Brash was quoted as saying, "I'd like to say to the board that, under my leadership, I believe Act has a much better prospect of not only getting back into Parliament but having a significant number of MPs." John Key also would not rule out working with Brash if it came down to a tight decision.[36]

Brash chairs the New Zealand branch of the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.[37][38]

On 28 April 2011 the incumbent leader of the ACT Party, Rodney Hide, announced that he was stepping down as leader in favour of Brash who had joined the party that morning. His membership was ratified by the party board on Saturday 30 April and the ACT party parliamentary caucus confirmed him as leader the same day.[39] The party board re-convened later that day to ratify his leadership. Rodney Hide remained in Parliament until its dissolution prior to the 2011 general election. Brash was leader of the party outside Parliament and former Auckland City mayor John Banks stood in Epsom.[40] The Listener compared Brash's successful bid for the leadership of the ACT Party to a hostile takeover.[41] Brash hoped to get ACT 15% of the party vote in the 2011 election, but it only managed 1%.[42] Brash resigned on election night and was later replaced as leader by John Banks.[43]

Brash's 213 day tenure as ACT leader remained the shortest tenure of any major party leader in modern New Zealand politics until 14 July 2020, when National Party Leader Todd Muller resigned from the position just 53 days after he was elected to the position.[44]