Monthly Archive: April 2011

Winners and losers in the Act Party leadership coup

This blog post was originally published at Liberation The New Zealand political landscape changed in some major ways with the extraordinary coup by Don Brash for the leadership of the Act Party. Who wins from this unusual changing of the guard? Long-time Act-watcher, Geoffrey Miller, argues in this guest blog post that the ‘winners’ to come out of the coup are Don Brash, John Key, John Banks, Aaron Bhatnagar, Phil Goff, Hilary Calvert, and the Coastal Coalition. And the ‘losers’ are Rodney Hide, John Key, John Boscawen, Brian Nicolle, and Reform New Zealand. Blogger Whaleoil has already come up with...

National, Act, Brash and Orewa

This blog post was originally published at Liberation On 27 January 2004, Don Brash, then leader of the National Party for just a few months, gave a speech to the Orewa Rotary Club on what he called ‘the dangerous drift towards racial separatism’ in New Zealand. In his speech, Brash advocated the abolition of the Maori seats, an accelerated Treaty of Waitangi settlements process and the removal of ‘divisive race-based features from legislation’. The word Orewa is of course still strongly associated with Brash today. In his interview with John Campbell on Wednesday (27 April 2011), Brash was asked whether...

Don Brash’s move from National to Act

This blog post was originally published at Liberation Don Brash’s current bid for the leadership of the Act Party is viewed as a National Party takeover of the minor party – because Don Brash is an ex-leader of National.  However, in reality Brash has always been seen as more aligned with the ideologies of Act – after all, when he was a National MP he was dubbed ‘Act’s tenth MP’. So, is Don Brash naturally more of an Act Party politician than a National Party one? And if so, why didn’t he join Act in the first place, and not...

Don Brash – a new hope or an old headache for the Act Party?

This blog post was originally published at Liberation ‘Don Brash clearly believes he can do Mr Hide’s job.  Equally clearly, many of his colleagues do not – as yet.  If they were really confident Dr Brash was up to it, he would have been installed as leader by the end of this week, so wretched has been Mr Hide’s performance.  But Dr Brash is not of a mind to get the message.  For the party’s sake, he should have done one of two things. Either organised his putsch with absolute secrecy until the deed had been done. Or issued a...

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