Profile: Don Brash

Don Brash is a newcomer to national politics

As head of New Zealand's National Party, Don Brash has won support for his straight-talking policies and pledges to cut tax.

The 64-year-old former head of New Zealand's central bank does not live up to his surname, and is known for his soft voice and mild manners.

His opponents portray him as a political novice - he only entered parliament in 2002 - as well as being a hard-nosed economist bent on reducing public services.

But his promises to cut taxes and oil prices, as well as ending preferential treatment for the indigenous Maori population, won him a growing number of followers ahead of the general election.

Given little chance of winning six months ago, the National Party is now neck-and-neck in the polls with Prime Minister Helen Clark's Labour Party.

Banking background

The son of a socialist Presbyterian minister, Mr Brash initially thought about following his father into the church.

But he eventually decided to become an economist, doing a doctorate on the impact of US corporate investment in Australia and later working for the World Bank.

This experience, he says, had a profound influence on his political standpoint.

"My conversion was completed working on the problems of economic development," he said in his first speech to parliament in 2002.

"I saw with my own eyes the well-intentioned central planning of government after government lead their countries to disaster."

He made his first attempt to break into politics in 1980, unsuccessfully standing for the National Party in an Auckland by-election.

He returned to economics and took the job of governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand in 1988, a position he held for a record 14 years.

He finally became a politician in December 2002, just a month after his party's second straight election defeat, and rapidly rose up the ranks to oust Bill English as leader in October 2003.

Critics of Mr Brash have highlighted his affair with Singaporean secretary Je Lan Lee in the early 1980s.

He left his wife and eventually married Je Lan Lee in 1989.

He has also been criticised over the involvement of a shadowy Christian group called The Exclusive Brethren in his party's election campaign.

He gained enemies for lending his support to the US-led war in Iraq, which Labour opposed, and has divided public opinion with his plans to end affirmative action programmes for Maoris.

But Mr Brash's supporters have described him as hardworking and intelligent, and even his relative inexperience in politics seems to have worked in his favour.

"The public have already become cynical about politicians, and to some extent they see me as one already, but to the extent that they don't, I think that's an advantage," he said in a recent interview.