Today is the last Tuesday of January. It is a date that should matter more in New Zealand’s political memory than it does.
On the last Tuesday of January in 2004, Dr. Don Brash stood at the Orewa Rotary Club and delivered what remains one of the most important political speeches given in this country in modern times. It was calm, forensic, unapologetic and, most importantly, correct.
More than two decades on, the speech reads less like a product of its time and more like a warning that New Zealand chose to ignore.
Brash opened by setting out five priorities that would be familiar to anyone paying attention today. Declining relative incomes compared with Australia. An education system failing the least privileged. Welfare dependency eroding personal responsibility. A justice system more concerned with offenders than victims. And finally, the issue he focused on that night, the dangerous drift toward racial separatism and the entrenchment of what he rightly called the treaty grievance industry.
That phrase alone was enough to end his political career. Not because it was wrong, but because it was accurate.
Brash was explicit about the fork in the road New Zealand was approaching. One path led toward a modern democratic society with one rule for all and equal citizenship in a single nation state. The other led toward a racially divided country with separate standards, separate rights and separate political structures. He argued, correctly, that the Labour government of the time was steadily moving New Zealand down the latter path.
The central truth of the speech was simple and deeply unfashionable. We are one country with many peoples. Not two peoples locked in a permanent power struggle where one group holds a birthright to political leverage over the other. That idea, Brash warned, was corrosive. It undermined social cohesion, democratic legitimacy and ultimately the sense of shared nationhood that had served New Zealand remarkably well by global standards.
He grounded his argument in history rather than mythology. He rejected the sanitised, utopian retelling of pre European New Zealand and replaced it with something far more honest. Life before colonisation was not a pastoral idyll. It was often brutal, violent and short. At the same time, he refused to indulge in settler self congratulation. Greed and self interest existed on both sides. Land was taken unjustly. Injustices occurred and deserved acknowledgement.
But acknowledgement is not the same as perpetual grievance.
One of the most uncomfortable sections of the speech, and one that has aged particularly well, dealt with income and outcomes. Brash cited research showing that Māori income distribution was not fundamentally different from Pākehā income distribution. Ethnicity, he argued, explains very little about how well someone does in life. The real divide was not race, but class. The bottom quarter struggled, regardless of ethnicity, and welfare dependency was the common thread.
That observation alone dismantles the moral foundation of race based policy. If need is the problem, then need should be the criterion. Once race becomes the deciding factor, the system stops being about justice and starts being about politics.
Brash also warned about the creeping insertion of racial distinctions into law and governance. Health boards structured on ethnic lines. Education funding influenced not only by deprivation but by ancestry. Local government being reshaped to embed race as a political category. At the time, these trends were dismissed as paranoia. Today, they are openly defended as progress.
Perhaps the most profound part of the speech was Brash’s refusal to indulge in intergenerational guilt. None of us were present at the New Zealand Wars. None of us ordered land confiscations. There is a limit to how much any generation can apologise for the actions of its great grandparents. That does not deny historical wrongs. It simply recognises that a nation cannot function if its present citizens are permanently held morally liable for a past they did not create.
He also addressed head on the more radical claims that sovereignty never passed to the Crown. He called them what they were. A negotiating position. Not history. Not law. Not reality.
What Brash feared most was not the treaty itself, but what had been built around it. A political economy of grievance that incentivised looking backwards rather than forwards. Leaders encouraged to remain in grievance mode because governments rewarded it. A country still trapped in 19th century arguments well into the 21st century.
And yet, for all the controversy, the speech was not pessimistic. It celebrated Māori adaptability, resilience and entrepreneurial success. It acknowledged the Māori renaissance in business, culture and sport. It reminded New Zealanders that by international standards, our race relations were once genuinely good, not because of separatism, but because of shared citizenship.
That is what made the speech so threatening. It offered unity without denying history. Equality without erasure. Progress without grievance.
As someone who has voted National plenty of times in the past, I cannot help but look back at that last Tuesday of January in 2004 and feel a sense of loss. National once had a leader willing to say uncomfortable truths clearly and calmly, without slogans or spin. A leader not terrified of being called names. A leader who understood that political courage sometimes means standing alone.
I wish National still had a leader like Dr Brash. Someone not scared to talk the truth.
Now 85 years old, Don Brash is still working as hard as ever. Far from retreating into quiet retirement, he remains deeply involved with Hobson’s Pledge, continuing the fight he has waged for decades against racial separatism in New Zealand.
Last year alone, Hobson’s Pledge made a massive difference by helping remove Māori wards from 25 councils nationwide. That is not symbolic activism or empty rhetoric. It is practical, measurable impact on local democracy and equal citizenship.
This is a man who has made it his lifetime mission to argue for one country, one people, and one standard of citizenship. Unfashionable, uncomfortable, and relentlessly consistent.
You can also read more about his life and thinking in Incredible Luck, available on Amazon Kindle
:http://www.amazon.com/Incredible-Luck-Don-Brash-ebook/dp/B00JME6KZO/.
