Brash defends the policies of the 90s

By AUDREY YOUNG

Don Brash yesterday firmly embraced the policies of the 1990s as a newly elected National list MP, saying people who denigrate them are talking "cattle manure".

His comments, though long-held as a former Reserve Bank Governor, are significant in that Dr Brash is expected to be made National's senior economic spokesman in a reshuffle next week.

And his tone and emphasis contrasts with that of leader Bill English, who is rarely self-congratulatory about National's nine years in Government to 1999.

Mr English said in the last week of the campaign: "I want to turn my back on the dogmatic and narrow-minded attitudes that came through in the policy and at times made New Zealanders feel threatened."

But spokeswoman Sue Foley said yesterday that Mr English had read Dr Brash's speech and approved him giving it.

"That's not quite saying it has got his stamp 100 per cent over it.

"Some people have their individual views which don't necessarily mean it is policy."

The speech was "no big deal".

Dr Brash said a myth was being perpetuated that the late-1980s and early-1990s policies were a failure.

"To talk of the 'horrors of the 1990s' is to talk cattle manure," he told an Auckland conference debating The Route to Prosperity: Time to Apply Common Sense.

"Those who talk of the 'failed policies of the past' are relying on the fact that many of us do not remember how inefficient and frustrating things were before the mid-80s."

Labour sought to portray the policies as failed, but had done very little to alter them.

Almost none of the big changes of the late 80s and early 90s had been reversed by Labour: the Reserve Bank Act; the Fiscal Responsibility Act; removal of import controls; reduction in tariffs; the corporatisation of most Government-owned trading operations; privatisations of many of those trading operations; and deregulation of the transport, retail and financial sectors.

"There has not even been any reversal of the reductions in benefit levels introduced in 1991."

Dr Brash was critical of New Zealand's economic growth projections compared with Australia's healthier ones.

Economic growth was not an abstract concept that concerned only economists, statisticians and policy-makers in Wellington.

"We are talking about our ability to afford First World healthcare, where 15-year-olds with a broken collar-bone do not have to wait in hospital for six days for an operation, in vain," he said in reference to a Herald story.

It also determined New Zealand's ability to afford good education, provide decent housing and stimulating jobs, compete effectively in international sports, survive as an independent country and "our ability to retain a reasonably equitable income distribution".

"Achieving faster economic growth is absolutely fundamental to our survival as the kind of society that our kids will want to live in and is certainly a more important issue than many of the peripheral issues which were the focus of so much attention during the recent election campaign."