Finance Minister Michael Cullen did hear it and confirmed that he had seen the speech notes in advance. When Dr Brash declined to answer a question on the Government's policy of partially pre-funding superannuation, Dr Cullen called out, "Okay, you can keep your job".
Dr Brash has been Reserve Bank Governor since 1988 and his third five-year term expires in August 2003. He was twice National Party candidate for East Coast Bays.
National Party leader Jenny Shipley said Dr Brash's speech was "very good". She supported lower taxes and exploring the possibility of cutting off welfare benefits after fixed periods to reduce welfare dependency.
Act MP Donna Awatere Huata said: "I thought it was very Act-like. It made sense to me."
But Mr Anderton said: "The irony is that the policies that Don Brash himself has followed in the monetary policy area, and the people who supported the monetary policy in the last 15 or 20 years, have created that welfarism."
A comment by Dr Brash that New Zealand's unemployment rate was low compared with other developed countries drew a retort from Mr Anderton that people who thought current unemployment was low "need a good bout of unemployment themselves".
He said this was "a free country" and he was "not into disciplining people". "But when Dr Brash steps outside his role as Governor of the Reserve Bank and starts commenting on life in general, then he opens himself up to being an ordinary mortal whose ideas can be as zany as anyone else's."
Dr Brash, who said his speech reflected his personal views only, said New Zealanders' desires for better housing, healthcare and education could be achieved only through economic growth. This required getting more people into paid work and increasing their productivity.
"We will not achieve a radical improvement in our economic growth rate while we have to provide income support to more than 350,000 people of working age - 60,000 more than when unemployment reached its post-Second World War peak in the early '90s," he said.
"Could we, for example, drop all benefits to the able-bodied and scrap the statutory minimum wage, so that pay rates could fall to the point where the labour market fully clears, but simultaneously introduce a form of negative income tax to sustain total incomes at a socially acceptable level?
"Could we introduce some kind of lifetime limit on the period during which an able-bodied individual could claim benefits from the state?
"Could we perhaps gradually raise the age at which people become eligible for NZ Superannuation, reflecting the gradual increase in life expectancy and improved health among the elderly?
"One of my colleagues has suggested the idea of abolishing the unemployment benefit but introducing some kind of 'employer of last resort' system, perhaps run by local authorities with support from central Government, under which every local authority would be required to offer daily employment to anybody and everybody who asked for it."
He suggested that entrepreneurs could be attracted to the country and encouraged to stay by imposing a maximum of $500,000 in income tax that any individual had to pay in a year.
He said this could attract an extra 1000 entrepreneurs, bringing in $500 million in extra tax revenue.
Dr Brash said free trade and greater economic integration with the US "would carry potentially enormous economic benefits".
"It is in this context that the time may have arrived when we need to give serious consideration to the pros and cons of alternative currency arrangements," he said.
"Far be it from me to advocate the abolition of the Reserve Bank of NZ and, as I have said on a previous occasion, any decision to abandon the NZ dollar in favour of some other currency is finally a political decision, not a decision for central bankers.
"And frankly, I do not know whether there would be net economic benefit in adopting some other currency arrangement, but if we are to have a no-holds-barred discussion on how to improve New Zealand's economic performance, one of the issues which should be looked at is this."
Dr Brash also said there was an urgent need to improve the quality of New Zealand education, with a 1998 study showing nearly half the workforce unable to read well enough to work effectively in the modern economy.
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