Biography
Dr Don Brash is best known in New Zealand for his 14 years as Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, from 1988 to 2002. Those were years in which the New Zealand central bank became the first in the world to undertake formal inflation targeting - an approach to monetary policy which has since become the norm in almost all developed country central banks - and pioneered a new relationship between central bank and government, since copied by Australia, Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
After leaving the Reserve Bank, he entered Parliament and immediately became the Shadow Finance Minister. Not much more than a year later, he became Leader of the Opposition and in 2005 came close to winning the general election of that year - when final votes were counted, 57 MPs wanted Don to be Prime Minister, 57 wanted Helen Clark to continue as Prime Minister, with Winston Peters making the final decision that Helen would stay on as Prime Minister.
Prior to becoming Governor of the Reserve Bank, Don had a career with the World Bank in Washington (where he worked closely with the former Prime Minister of Canada, Lester Pearson and, later, for two years with the President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara), then as CEO of an investment bank in Auckland, the CEO of the New Zealand Kiwifruit Authority near the beginning of the extraordinary growth of the kiwifruit industry, and the CEO of Trust Bank.
Since leaving Parliament in 2007, he has held a number of directorships, and his currently engaged in consulting (mainly on GST) and as chairman of the New Zealand subsidiary of ICBC (the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China).
