DON BRASH: My Oxford Union Speech

The House believes that the Sun should never have set on the British Empire

Mr/Madame President, I speak in opposition to the motion.

But I also want to acknowledge at the outset that the British Empire did more good things for more people than any other empire in human history.

• The British Empire introduced the rule of law and the benefits of Magna Carta to millions of people all over the globe;

• Because the industrial revolution began in this country, the British Empire spread the benefit of industrial technology and railways across vast parts of the world;

• The British Empire made English the only truly international language – English is the language of science, of diplomacy, of the internet and of finance; I attended meetings of central bankers from all over the world during my 14 years as Governor of New Zealand’s central bank, no interpreters were needed because all deliberations were in English, largely thanks to the legacy of the British Empire; and

• The British Empire was the first empire in the world to abolish slavery, long before it was abolished in many other parts of the world – not only abolish slavery within the empire but use the Royal Navy to actively hunt down slave ships.

So let me acknowledge that the British Empire conferred many benefits on the world.

But it also did some truly horrific things.

Though typical of a great many empires before, it is hard to excuse some of the appalling atrocities which occurred in the Indian sub-continent, or in parts of Africa, when both were part of the British Empire.

The foisting of opium onto China, and the subsequent humiliation of that great civilization, must go down as one of the worst acts of any empire in the last millennium.

And of course all empires involve the suppression of the political freedoms of a great many people. In the case of the British Empire, the number of people whose political freedom was suppressed was without precedent.

What of my own country, New Zealand? By any objective measure, we gained more by being part of the British Empire than we lost.

Prior to 1840, the date from which Britain gradually asserted some real authority in New Zealand, New Zealand was populated by a Polynesian people, now called the Maori. They were not indigenous in the sense that the Australian Aborigines were indigenous, having arrived in New Zealand barely seven centuries prior to 1840. But they were a primitive people in the dictionary meaning of that word – they had no written language, had not invented the wheel, and practised both slavery and cannibalism.

The arrival of British authority and the settlers who followed – overwhelmingly from the United Kingdom – changed all that. The rule of law was gradually established over all New Zealanders, slavery and cannibalism ceased, and inter-tribal warfare, which had killed more Maori in the three or four decades before 1840 than all the New Zealanders killed in the First World War, was brought to an end.

Yes, there were wars between government forces and some Maori tribes even after 1840, but compared with the appalling carnage in the years prior to 1840, the loss of life in these wars was relatively minor.

British settlers brought new forms of protein – sheep and cattle, and the horses and dogs with which to farm them. Settlers brought metal tools with which to build houses and other buildings which, though primitive by modern standards, were a vast improvement on what had been known before. The settlers brought the tools and the technology to build roads and ports, some of the most important building blocks of a modern society.

Some Maori New Zealanders today look back on the nineteenth century arrival of British authority and British settlers with resentment, and point to the loss of land – most of it to sale but some of it to confiscation – which followed 1840.

They point to the fact that Maori life expectancy is still a little short of the life expectancy of other New Zealanders, and claim racial discrimination in the health system. They fail to note that life expectancy for Maori New Zealanders has increased hugely over the last 185 years, with the gap to other New Zealanders steadily closing.

They fail to note that Maori are now well represented in all walks of New Zealand life.

A Maori who writes under the pseudonym of Matua Kahurangi recently posted an article satirically calling for a “Thank a Coloniser Day”. “Colonisation in New Zealand”, he wrote, “was not oppression. It was liberation. It ended tribal warfare, brought medicine, built homes, and safeguarded species from extinction. It provided education, law, order, and health systems. It gave Maori the tools to thrive in a modern world.”

In early years, New Zealand was clearly part of the British Empire – dependent on British armed forces to suppress occasional tribal rebellion, with explicit acknowledgement that our Head of State was Queen Victoria, and with a Parliament modelled on the House of Commons.

When the forces of the Empire were engaged in the Boer War, we automatically sent troops in support. And there was not the slightest doubt on which side we would fight in the First World War or the Second.

Indeed, there is some suggestion that New Zealand declared war on Germany in 1939 slightly ahead of the United Kingdom’s doing so. And just a day or so later, in a radio address to the New Zealand public explaining the decision to go to war, the Prime Minister stated that “Where she goes, we go. Where she stands, we stand.” Nobody was in any doubt what “she” meant!

When New Zealand’s central bank was established in 1936, it was closely modelled on the Bank of England.

For generations – indeed until relatively recently – New Zealanders referred to “going home” when they meant travelling to the United Kingdom, which they typically did by ship via the Panama Canal, by-passing most of the world.

Our highest court remained the Privy Council until 2003.

A portrait of Queen Elizabeth was on all our bank notes until the early 1990s, and the monarch remains on one of our five bank notes to this day.

But the Sun has been setting on the British Empire for years, and that’s a good thing for many countries, including New Zealand.

It’s been a gradual process. Perhaps it began when Britain was unable to prevent the Japanese Army taking Singapore, in February 1942 – what Winston Churchill described as the “worst disaster” in British military history.

And that was followed just five years later by independence for the entire South Asian continent – India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Gradually, most of the rest of what had been the largest empire in human history shrank until now almost nothing remains.

That has clearly enabled a vast number of people to be responsible for their own destiny, surely an overwhelmingly important net benefit.

New Zealand retains many of the benefits of having been a part of that Empire.

We are a democratic society, where every person, regardless of ancestry, has an equal vote. Maori New Zealanders are now present in every one of the six parties in Parliament, with 35% of the current Cabinet having some Maori ancestry.

Common law remains fundamental. English is the unofficial official language, the language in which virtually all social interaction occurs.

But ever since Britain entered the European Common Market in the early seventies, our ties to the United Kingdom have necessarily become more distant.

In 1950, two-thirds of our exports went to the UK. By 1970, with the European Common Market looming, only about 35% of our exports went there. Now? About 2.6%. China takes 26% - almost precisely 10 times as much. Even Singapore takes more of our exports than Britain does.

This reflects an increasing focus on Asia. Where once virtually all post-1840 immigrants came from the United Kingdom, with a few coming from other parts of Europe, now the great majority of immigrants come from Asia, mainly from India and China.

While we retain the monarchy, with King Charles as our Head of State, for an increasing number of New Zealanders, even those with British ancestors, the monarchy has no relevance to their daily lives.

The Bank of England now operates within a framework copied from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand rather than visa versa.

When we travel abroad, we travel to Australia, to the US, to Singapore, Japan and China – and yes, to the United Kingdom.

We retain much of what being part of the British Empire gave us, but we are surely better to now stand independently on our own two feet.

Don Brash

6 November 2025