"Today [now yesterday] 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."~ Matua Kahurangi from his post 'The last Tuesday of January and the speech New Zealand still refuses to confront'* To be fair, his political career didn't end immediately; but it had been put on notice. Even a near-reversal in National's worst-ever election loss under Bill English wasn't enough to save it.
I remember this point quiet clearly as the last time I can remember to politician actually standing for something other then re-election. I seem to remember he wasn't very good at political rough and tumble and/or thinking on his feet. But where has that ever got us? By the time we'd got to the next election we'd really had a lesson in how entrenched, self serving and cynical a professional politician could be. Watching Key get the best of Clarke in the TV debates was glorious. But it seems like it has been a slow decline from that point on.
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