Carroll du Chateau: Brash's style slicker, belief unchanged

Don Brash stands in front of a sweating crowd at the Orewa Rotary House, hands grasping the rostrum, eyes roving over the audience, trying to bring this party-minded audience to heel.

It isn't his style to use jokes. His first applause, his first real connection with his audience of small-business owners, comes when he attacks the decision to pay "some of our most vicious criminals for their hurt feelings".

"Yeah".

Gone, though, is the jiggling enthusiasm of his stint as governor of the Reserve Bank. Then Brash was a one-man show, travelling the country explaining his economic strategy to farmers and businesspeople.

Tonight he is surrounded by a team of minders, a bunch of protesters and policemen outside, a hustling media pack at the back and an audience driven to drink by heat, lame jokes and raffles.

The slight geekiness that crept round the edges of the Reserve Bank man has been slicked over by his team. No longer are his trousers a fraction too short, his glasses way too big, but in the process something spontaneous has gone, too.

Unchanged is Brash's belief in what he's saying.

He is driven by the need to win the coming election at all costs - by the one after that he'll be 68 - and he is also convinced he has the answer to turning New Zealand into a first-class economy. This is his big chance.

Back in the '70s, when Rob Muldoon used the Orewa Rotary Club, then in the township, to jolt-start a nation just waking up after the holidays, the venue made sense.

Muldoon's unimaginably modest, fibrolite bach at Hatfields Beach was just over the hill. The Orewa Community Centre was convenient and presumably cheap. Muldoon's audience of Rotarians (30 to 40 of them at regular meetings) were unlikely to stir up trouble.

He would arrive at their first meeting of the year wearing his latest Pacific Island shirt, looking "fit and tanned" after a week in Tahiti, Hawaii, or boating along the Northland coast, and let the nation have it with both barrels.

This time Brash also sports a healthy tan after 10 days in Hawaii with his wife, Je Lan, and son, Thomas. It's not that he is tired of pruning the kiwifruit orchard, he says, but his high profile makes a New Zealand holiday near-impossible, so they went overseas.

He also thought about this speech, which is making the Rotarians sit back, eyes sometimes drooping in the heat. They have paid their $40, eaten their excellent dinner, downed the wine.

The restless media pack have sweated through 40 minutes of meat pack raffles. The protesters have gone.

Brash lacks the ability that Muldoon had of pulling his audience round in a heartbeat, but he does have staying power. He stands in a corner of this sweltering room with its pink walls and cheap blue carpet, filled with suits, nice frocks and grey heads, and slogs on for about 40 minutes, looking crisper than all of them in his blue shirt with its white collar and cuffs, pushing his message, watching for signals, which start to come, that the audience likes what he's saying.

The room is studded with a few notables, including Paul Holmes, Alan Gibbs and his neuro-scientist daughter, Emma. Gibbs arrived in a massive black Humvee assault wagon.

Brash sticks tightly to his notes, rakes the crowd with his grey eyes, waiting to hear that "mummm" of approval.

It's a good speech, the product of weeks of thought, a lifetime of effort. The message makes sense. Overall the audience applauds eight times, with three "mummms". Success.

At the very end, the table of loyal National Party boys give him a standing ovation, the Rotarians manage a last joke and then to finish, a rendition of God Defend New Zealand. Brash would have enjoyed that, but by then he'd been ushered out for interviews.