Photo: Michael Andrew

BusinessMay 3, 2021

Hold on! Did the NBR just kill the Rich List?

Michael Andrew

Guest writer

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Photo: Michael Andrew

The National Business Review’s yearly Rich List has celebrated financial wealth for a generation. So what does it mean for good old-fashioned New Zealand capitalism now the NBR is dropping the ‘Rich’ in favour of ‘the List’?

Despite the sickening wealth inequality on planet earth, people love reading about the rich and powerful. And we love to rank other people: best to worst, hottest to nottest, yummiest to yuckiest. Combine those two fascinations and you have the Rich List: a crude yet irresistible assessment of a person’s inherent value, classifying people from the outrageously super rich to the slightly less outrageously super rich.

But it’s when you start to include more complex and subjective variables – which actually better capture a person’s value – that the ranking machine starts to break down. Try ranking the top 10 most honest members of the Labour Party. It’s just not as easy, or as exciting, as measuring their net worth – or how much each of them earns from rental properties.

Which is probably why the NBR’s Rich List has such an enduring legacy. First published under the NBR’s masthead in May 1990, the definitive annual ranking of New Zealand’s wealthiest, and therefore most admired, citizens has been produced by number-crunching business journalists for 30 years. Steven Tindall, Bob Jones, Graeme Hart: such elite fellows have graced the upper echelons of the Rich List over the past three decades, instilling faith in the pursuit of wealth, giving the rest of us a glimmer of hope that the relentless rat race does, with the right kind of luck and acumen, eventually yield the cheddar.

New Zealand’s richest man Graeme Hart on his super yacht Odyssey (Photo: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)

So what kind of world is it when the Rich List, the last bastion of capitalistic celebration, strikes its proud banners, dropping the “Rich” to become simply “The List”?

I’ll tell you what world – a topsy-turvy world! But that’s exactly what the NBR is doing. Henceforth, “The List” is no longer obsessed with the idle rich and their idle fortunes. Instead, it will ostensibly aim to shine a light on those with purpose, who add social value, create employment and do more altruistic things than sprawl on their yachts or do backflips into their vaults of gold and jewels.

This, of course, raises a lot of questions. Why is the NBR doing this? How is the NBR doing this? Is it a genuine shift? What will the gods of capitalism think of this heresy?

To get answers, I contacted The NBR’s senior journalist (and The Spinoff’s former business editor) Maria Slade, and asked her to lay bare the hard-hitting truth.

Maria Slade, senior journalist at the NBR

Hi Maria. What exactly is the meaning of this?

Well, with last year’s list delayed because of Covid, we had an opportunity to sit down and have a good think about it, and it became pretty obvious that it wasn’t the right tone for a post-Covid environment.

Indeed, this whole idea of celebrating wealth for wealth’s sake has passed its use-by date. So we thought, “why are we ranking people and what are hoping to say to the New Zealand business community?”

Also, the list was getting really long because our only criteria was a net worth of $50 million, and if you scratch around it’s not actually hard to find people with that kind of wealth, so we needed to cut the list back anyway.

OK, so what exactly is the difference between “the Rich List” and “the List?”

So with the new list, the decision was to get 100 people or families and put them in a few categories, because what was happening was if you just list them purely on their net worth, like in the old list, the property guys really dominate. A lot of people hold property, and there are lots of families with inherited properties who are just kind of sitting on wealth and not really doing much with it.

We thought that’s not really telling the story we want to tell about the people who’re building New Zealand, really, so that’s why they are in a few categories.

What are the categories?

We broke the List up into Property, Make and Sell – which is manufacturing and retailing – Investment, Agribusiness, and Tech and Services. We have 20 in each of those categories, and the idea was to try and shine a light on some of these other industry sectors that didn’t get much of a look in under the old system.

Is there a risk you might anger the gods of capitalism?

Haha. Well, yes, I suppose there is. The thing is we are still ranking people by wealth… we’ve done much more in-depth research on people and had a look not only at what they own, but what they’re doing with it, what kind business they’re building and also how they’re giving back. That comes in all sorts of forms: whether they’ve invested in other businesses or whether they’ve been involved in a climate change initiative, for example.

There are a lot of people in New Zealand who are giving back in that way, and putting funds back into the business ecosystem. We’ve created a new benchmark for ourselves and its turned into a database we can draw from.

And what about your subscribers – do you think they will approve?

It’s too early to say. It only gets published on Monday [today] so we don’t know. We started to publish a few things around it and we started publishing a new colour profile each day, and those have been very well read, so we’re anticipating that there’ll be a lot of interest in it. We’ve just tried to give the profiles a much better picture of what they’ve been up to in the last 18 months and other activities they might have going on.

It’s going to be interesting going forward to see how people refer to it because of course, it was always the Rich List.

The Rich List does have a nice ring to it.

It does, yeah. It will be interesting to see if people still refer to the people on the list as Rich Listers, and obviously we can’t stop them doing this. So that kind of lexicon; I don’t know whether it will persist. I suppose it’ll take a few years for it to fade away.

Does it take much longer to research and curate the list now?

It has increased the workload greatly. We’ve had a team of reporters that has done an awful lot of work. The profiles are like little mini features on each of these people or families. But we think it’s worth it, we’ve uncovered all sorts of things.

Some of the philanthropic endeavours, for example, have been really interesting: Jeff Douglas, who’s managing director of Douglas Pharmaceuticals, and Sir Christopher Mace have been involved in an initiative to raise funds to buy an iconic farm in Northland, which adjoins quite a bit of DOC land, and they want to return it to public ownership and to develop a great walk track. Douglas has given half-a-million dollars to the project, because he feels that it’s important. So it was quite intriguing turning up some of those things.

So who’s in and who’s out of the List?

We’ve decided anyone who was overseas based who wasn’t doing very much here in New Zealand weren’t worthy of inclusion. So we’ve dropped people like the Spencer family and Ric Kayne, because yes, it’s OK to have wealth, but they’re not really doing anything with it.

Peter Beck from Rocket Lab – he’s a newcomer. He probably should have always been on the list, but it was very hard to judge his wealth. But now with the upcoming IPO, we’ve got a better idea of what his net worth might be.

We interviewed him and he was saying, ‘look, I have two interests in life, building rockets and entrepreneurship’. He will back anyone who’s worked with him who goes off and does their own tech startups, because he just believes that is what you do need to do in New Zealand – build more tech businesses.

So, in the past year we’ve had the NBR’s owner Todd Scott move into a motorhome, and now we’ve had the “Rich” dropped from the Rich List. What other bombshells does the National Business Review plan to hurl into our lives?

Well, nothing that I know of just at the moment. We probably need to pause and take a breath after all of this. But we are going to be quite interested to watch what some of our listers do in the next year or so.

There’s people like Push Pay founder Chris Heaslip. Then you’ve got surprising people like former cricketer and Sky TV co-founder Terry Jarvis. His latest focus is on premium mānuka honey and he now owns New Zealand’s fourth-largest honey business.

Is there still a minimum net worth criteria?

No.

So could I be on the list if I was doing really good things?

Haha. Um… well, you’d still have to be reasonably wealthy. It varies from industry to industry. For the property guys, the minimum is around the $300m mark. And in tech and services it’s a bit lower – more around the $140m to $150m mark, because those tech companies haven’t been around as long and they don’t amass as much wealth.

That’s why we did it this way, to have more of a holistic look at what these sectors are doing.

You’re still ranking them by wealth though?

Yes we are still ranking people by wealth. And we are going to have a top 10. So we’re just taking the top 10 out of those five lists of 20. But within the lists of 20, they are also ranked by wealth.

I mean, you know, it is about the money as well. We couldn’t really get away from that. The people want to know.

The Central Otago Rail Trail (Photo: Tourism Central Otago/James Jubb)

BusinessMay 2, 2021

Clyde survived: How domestic tourism saved my hometown

George Driver

Contributing writer

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The Central Otago Rail Trail (Photo: Tourism Central Otago/James Jubb)

This time last year, Central Otago correspondent George Driver was wondering how his tiny, tourism-dependent town would survive the pandemic. Thanks to New Zealand tourists, it didn’t just survive, it boomed.

A year ago, Dylan Rushbrook, the head of Tourism Central Otago, made a difficult presentation to the council. The industry was in a state of collapse.

“We were forecasting a 40 to 60% drop in visitors and operators were saying they weren’t getting any bookings at all,” Rushbrook says. “It was looking grim.”

As the country emerged from lockdown, I too wondered how my hometown of Clyde could survive. No international tourists, rising unemployment, a record government deficit. You could almost hear the belts tightening around the country.

Businesses in Clyde, who had lost the busiest time of year to lockdown, were stoic in the face of excruciating uncertainty. “We’ll open our doors and see what happens,” one said. It was looking like a long winter.

What followed was remarkable.

The country came to Clyde.

“When people were told to keep their distance from others, coming to Central Otago in winter seemed like a good option,” Rushbrook says.

The town’s main street soon became reduced to one lane as it was almost permanently lined with cars of visiting New Zealanders. The housing market ploughed on – a relocated villa on a 600m2 section on the main street sold for $1.3m (for weeks there was a persistent and erroneous rumour that Mike Hosking had bought it and was moving to town). A film crew intermittently closed the town centre to film a new TV mini-series. A developer announced plans for a $200m retirement village on the outskirts of town. Thousands of boozed young people flooded in (where did they come from?) for the Wine and Food Festival which, despite gale force winds, was the busiest in years.

Clyde had survived.

A year on from his bleak speech, Rushbrook says the visitor spend in Central Otago is looking completely unaffected by Covid-19.

“Considering international travellers were 25% of our visitors, it’s remarkable,” Rushbrook says.

Much of this success was driven by the Otago Central Rail Trail. DOC figures show the numbers on the trail were up 67% on last summer, the second highest growth rate of any monitored track in the country and by far the highest for a multi-day trip. This in a year when numbers on the country’s rockstar walks plummeted – the Tongariro Alpine Crossing and Franz Josef were both down 72%.

It’s also been a boon for businesses on the rail trail, who are reporting a record season.

“The last two months have been phenomenal,” says Colleen Hurd, owner of Ophir’s Pitches Store, a short bike ride off the rail trail.

“It’s just been extraordinary. Thank you New Zealand!”

Despite the borders being closed, Pitches Store, in Ophir, has had its busiest season ever (Photo: Tourism Central Otago/James Jubb)

Set in a 140-year-old general store and butchery, Ophir’s Pitches Store is run by Hurd and her husband David. The couple moved to Ophir from Auckland in 2006 and restored the schist buildings, turning them into accommodation and a restaurant which opened in 2012.

A year ago, the business had just lost six weeks of the busiest time of year to lockdown and was braced for what might come next.

“We just didn’t know what was going to happen. Are people going to come out? How long will this last?”

But within weeks things had turned around – it had so many inquiries it opened during winter for the first time.

“People wanted to come for the weekend. They wanted to get away,” Hurd says.

“Then it went gangbusters. By mid-October we were getting far more bookings than normal and it just continued. It’s been our busiest season ever – it’s 50% up on last year and last year was one of our busiest years.”

When the frosts begin tourists usually desert the trail, but this year the bookings continue.

“We’re looking like we’ll be booked out for all of May.”

Forty-two kilometres down the trail at Wedderburn, Lorraine Duncan sounds exhausted. She has run a farm in Wedderburn with her husband for 27 years. When the trail opened 20 years ago, they decided to let out a few historic cottages on the farm as accommodation. Wedderburn Cottages became an unexpectedly successful sideline business, growing to accommodate over 50 people a night with a staff of five – what sounds like a sometimes overwhelming prospect for Duncan.

“It’s been unbelievable,” she says. “Everyone’s looking forward to winter for a break. It’s just a little busy every night, which is a great thing, but man. It’s a lot of washing.”

Wedderburn Cottages is also booking out through May – but Duncan already has her mind on the annual bull sale, coming up on May 21.

“Farming is our main thing and we built this accommodation as a sideliner for the start but it’s turned into a bit of a booming business.”

Seemingly the busiest place on the trail is a settlement I’d never heard of. Last month my parents returned from a midweek campervan trip raving about Waipiata. Where? Seven kilometres off the Pigroot (State Highway 85), between Gimmerburn and Kokonga, Waipiata is literally in the middle of nowhere – a handful of houses, two churches, a bowling club, a rodeo ground. The main street is called “Main Street” and ends when it hits the rail trail. And it is also home to what is surely the busiest pub in the Maniototo.

Waipiata Country Hotel owner Mark Button (Photo: Tourism Central Otago/James Jubb)

Mark Button and his partner Nikki moved to Waipiata from Taranaki 10 years ago after biking the rail trail and seeing an opportunity for trail accommodation. The couple built a bed and breakfast, Tussock Lodge, in 2012 and bought the Waipiata Country Hotel six years ago.

But when the Covid-19 alert system was announced last year, the business was hit hard. Button had 150 booking cancellations in a single day. When the lockdown was announced a couple of days later they had to give away piles of perishable food to the community.

“That was when reality hit,” he says.

But the boom times began straight after lockdown, when it introduced a click and collect service, Waipiata Eats, under level three.

“We were doing between 500-700 meals in a five day week, with people picking up meals from the carpark between 5pm and 7.30pm. We did 140 meals in one night.

“From there it’s been fantastic. What we lost in lockdown we made back and a wee bit more, which has been great.”

Now business is up 60% and the pub is doing up to 400 meals a day – an extraordinary number considering the Maniototo region only has about 1600 residents. It was a number so extraordinary, in fact, that I couldn’t help being sceptical. Four hundred meals a day, in a place in the middle of nowhere that I had never even heard of? I had to investigate further.

My partner and I arrived at the pub at 5pm on a Saturday evening, just as the sun began to set. Inside, the bar was already full, groups drinking jugs among the decor of antique weaponry, sports trophies and Speights posters. After queuing for five minutes for a beer, my partner and I found the only seats left, two stools wedged over a wood pile beside the fire. We perched and watched as the people kept coming and the queue grew out the door.

The Waipiata Country Hotel is surely the busiest pub in the Maniototo
(Photo: George Driver)

My eagle-eyed partner snaked a seat at a table just as a couple left and we ate excellent homemade pies – there are over 14 varieties on the menu – sharing a table with two Christchurch couples enjoying their third night on the trail. We were soon joined by a couple from Alexandra who had parked their campervan at the nearby domain and had come for a night out at their favourite country pub.

My partner yelled back and forth with the couples to be heard over the din of drinkers and I sat back and soaked in the crowd which filled every space in the room: Gumboot clad farmers in woolen jerseys coarser than steel wool; young families entertaining restless children on the floor; outside a group of bogans piling out of a bright green wagon on a country crawl; a steady flow of boomers from bikes and campervans. A dog was circling beneath the tables, waiting for someone to drop a chip. It was like a microcosm of New Zealand.

The country had come to Central Otago.