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Ex-Shortland Street actor turned property mogul Paul Reid, in his TV days, and Whammy Bar (Photos: Supplied; additional design by Archi Banal)
Ex-Shortland Street actor turned property mogul Paul Reid, in his TV days, and Whammy Bar (Photos: Supplied; additional design by Archi Banal)

BusinessApril 12, 2022

Ex-Shortland Street star landlord gives tenant bad review over vaccine passes

Ex-Shortland Street actor turned property mogul Paul Reid, in his TV days, and Whammy Bar (Photos: Supplied; additional design by Archi Banal)
Ex-Shortland Street actor turned property mogul Paul Reid, in his TV days, and Whammy Bar (Photos: Supplied; additional design by Archi Banal)

When Auckland music venue Whammy Bar decided to continue checking vaccine passes, they were flooded with negative reviews online – including one from their own landlord, ex-Shortland Street star turned property mogul Paul Reid.

Well-loved music venue Whammy Bar is nestled in St Kevins Arcade on Auckland’s Karangahape Road. As the number of music venues across the city have dwindled over the years, Whammy has cemented its place in Tāmaki Makaurau’s alternative music scene as a rare gem for live performance. 

Since announcing last week that it would be keeping its vaccine pass system in place, despite the government removing the mandate for hospitality businesses, Whammy has received a spate of one-star reviews and negative comments online – as have other bars that have decided to keep using vaccine passes, such as Dunedin’s Woof!

On Monday evening, things took a turn for the bizarre for the owners of the bar. “I was quite surprised to see my landlord was one of these people leaving reviews,” says Tom Anderson, who co-owns Whammy. 

Reid’s Facebook review of Whammy was met with a mostly angry response

The review came from their ex-Shortland Street actor and Rubicon frontman landlord Paul Reid, who has owned St Kevins Arcade since 2015 under his property management company The Icon Group. The review read: “This used to be a cool punk rock dive bar..you know punk anti establishment cool kinda vibe.. now there’s nothing more punk rock than ‘can I scan your vaccine pass please’ lol”.

Responses to Reid’s post were overwhelmingly negative, with commenters describing his move as “simply disgusting and unacceptable” and “a chicken shit way to shaft” his tenants. Auckland Central MP Chlöe Swarbrick also criticised Reid’s review on Twitter.

Anderson says Reid hadn’t expressed any concerns to him ahead of posting the review, and added, “he has my number so it was an interesting way to get his point across”.

Reid was quoted earlier today in a Stuff article saying that he thought it was ironic that Whammy, a venue that he believes has made a name for itself as being “anti-establishment and anti-government”, was “clinging so religiously to an outdated government mode of social exclusion”.

“I also thought it a poor business decision to exclude a certain percentage of the population who may be unvaccinated for a host of ethical, religious or moral reasons,” he said in the same Stuff piece.

Paul Reid as Marshall on Shortland Street, and today in his property mogul guise

On his landlord’s commentary about what is considered punk or anti-establishment, Anderson says, “I think that’s a strange take to come from somebody who’s literally a landlord.” From Whammy’s perspective, punk and anti-establishment ideology “means looking after your community and taking care of each other”.

“The establishment has also said that [vaccine passes] are not necessary any more and we’re choosing to use them anyway to keep our communities, staff and punters safe,” he adds.

Whammy Bar (Photo: Supplied)

Reid played troubled teen Marshall Heywood on Shortland Street from 2001 to 2004, and enjoyed some success with pop-punk band Rubicon around the same time. Alongside his property business, he still dabbles in music, and last July, Reid’s pop-rock band Capital Theatre received $10,000 in NZ On Air funding to make a music video.

His transformation from Shortland Street star to property mogul has been a colourful one.

In 2019 a Herald investigation found he was the country’s most prolific house flipper during the six years to 2018 – closing at least 130 trades and 70 homes in short-term sales in a single year. 

The Spinoff reported in September 2020 that struggling businesses in Elliot Stables, another central Auckland property owned by Reid, had been threatened with eviction after two lockdowns. Five eateries and one backpackers were served Property Law Act notices from their landlord, demanding that they pay the shortfall in their rent to avoid further legal action. 

Elliot Stables (Photo: Michael Andrew)

In 2016, Metro reported that on the night Reid secured the ownership of the St Kevins Arcade building from previous owner Murray Rose, he declared he was buying the building and would “get rid of you left-wing creeps” after being asked to leave The Wine Cellar, the bar that neighbours Whammy in St Kevins Arcade.

Rohan Evans, who owns The Wine Cellar, and established Whammy Bar over a decade ago before selling to the current owners, has also decided to maintain the vaccine pass system. Evans was with Anderson when the Facebook review “popped up” and says, “the more you think about it, the more outrageous it is”.

Considering how difficult the last year has been for venues because of the Covid-19 outbreak, “that’s throwing a bunch of your tenants under the bus for no particular reason”, Evans says.

Similarly to Whammy’s reasoning, the decision to keep the vaccine pass system operating at The Wine Cellar was made “largely on making staff and musicians that we are in day-to-day contact with feel comfortable”, says Evans, so “it seems quite outrageous to be attacked by a landlord who is also a musician”.

Despite being “mostly overwhelmed by support” they’ve had plenty of anonymous negative reviews due to keeping passes, says Evans – though none so far from Reid. 

Will this criticism influence Whammy’s continuation of the vaccine passes? While case numbers remain high, it certainly won’t, Anderson says. “We’ll continue to do what we were doing for however long we’re going to do it for. This is never a permanent solution to anything – it’s just another layer of safety.”

According to one scientific model of New Zealand’s omicron outbreak, when compared with boosted people, unvaccinated people are 3.1 times more likely to infect others and 2.4 times more likely to be infected.

“We’ll continue to keep vax passports and masks for people moving around the bar,” Anderson adds. “We’re still currently in the middle of a pandemic and if any of our staff go down, we can’t open, so that’s bad for business.”

And if Auckland bar-goers are as supportive as Dunedin’s, the negative reviews may backfire – in the wake of the backlash to its decision to keep vaccine passes, Woof! celebrated its biggest week of the year.

Keep going!
Nau Mai Rā CEO Ezra Hirawani with Huntly power station in the background. (Photo: Supplied; additional design: Tina Tiller)
Nau Mai Rā CEO Ezra Hirawani with Huntly power station in the background. (Photo: Supplied; additional design: Tina Tiller)

BusinessApril 12, 2022

Kaupapa Māori power company Nau Mai Rā is ready for the spotlight

Nau Mai Rā CEO Ezra Hirawani with Huntly power station in the background. (Photo: Supplied; additional design: Tina Tiller)
Nau Mai Rā CEO Ezra Hirawani with Huntly power station in the background. (Photo: Supplied; additional design: Tina Tiller)

For over 100,000 New Zealanders, having to choose between electricity, food or petrol is an everyday reality. Reweti Kohere speaks with Nau Mai Rā CEO Ezra Hirawani about his mission to alleviate ‘power poverty’.

In a recent Facebook video, Nau Mai Rā chief executive Ezra Hirawani extended a warm welcome to New Zealanders – and laid down a simple challenge: “Whether you’re Chinese, Tongan, from Madagascar or Wakanda, we don’t care – our invitation is the same. Come join us, and do more with your power.”

Do more with your power, he says. But what else can you do besides heat your home, boil the jug and charge your electric vehicle?

Turns out, quite a lot. By donating a portion of their power bill to local marae, community initiatives and a pooled “whānau fund” to help those struggling to keep on top of their power bill, some 2,000 Nau Mai Rā customers have given back about $45,000. It’s part of the company’s broader mission to alleviate “energy hardship”, a term describing the experience of an estimated 100,000 New Zealanders who cannot afford to heat their homes to support their wellbeing. It’s a complex problem that still doesn’t have an agreed definition (MBIE is working on it), but power poverty is pretty simple to Hirawani: “Every day, 100,000 whānau have to make the choice between hot water and heating, or doing the laundry and cooking dinner,” he says. “This isn’t a Māori problem, this is a national problem – and the situation is worsening.”

Hirawani (Waikato Tainui, Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Rangi), together with co-founder Ben Armstrong (Waikato Tainui, Ngāti Hine), believe they can make a difference through their digital electricity platform, which they founded in mid-2019. The whakataukī “Nā tō rourou, nā taku rourou, ka ora ai te iwi” – everyone prospers when they pool their resources together – explains its purpose and is reflected in an unconventional business model. Nau Mai Rā won’t turn away customers with bad credit or even run credit checks; it won’t cut a household’s power because of late or missed payments; customers are billed weekly to help keep on top of expenses; and budgeting or energy efficiency services are available in case customers need extra help. It offers customers a fixed electricity price only for what they consume, and it claims customers have saved a total of $100,000 on their power bills. It all sounds laudable, and people are paying attention – Kiwibank awarded Hirawani the 2022 Young New Zealander of the Year title for his mahi on energy hardship. But in a sector influenced by the actions of a few giants, Nau Mai Rā is just one of numerous smaller, independent players trying to make their voices heard.

With a combined 1.6 million customer connections, Genesis Energy, Mercury, Meridian and Contact Energy – three of which are majority-owned by the government and all of which generate power – sell electricity into the wholesale market and retailers pay a volatile “spot price” to then supply customers (in the case of the big players, their generation arms sell to their retail teams). The spot price changes every 30 minutes to account for the delicate balance of supplying just enough electricity to match demand, so it’s prone to dramatic shifts – higher prices generally appear during peak periods of demand, like breakfast and dinner time, during winter and usually during “dry years” when hydro lakes are running low. By contrast, wholesale electricity is generally cheaper during off-peak hours and when the wind is blowing, the lakes are bursting and gas is flowing. 

A scarcity of the last two, plus market uncertainty, has characterised the past few years of the electricity sector, driving up wholesale prices and often hitting the pockets of smaller players that haven’t hedged their exposure with long-term supply deals. Some have called it quits while others have cried foul. When I first met Hirawani in 2021, as autumn gave way to winter, Nau Mai Rā was fighting to stay alive – shedding hundreds of customers, closing its doors to thousands more and launching a petition calling on the country’s generators to support it with a deal on wholesale prices. Back then, average spot prices were above $200 MWh – even hitting $450 MWh at times – when usually they’d trade around $100 MWh (they would surpass $1,000 MWh on August 9, when tens of thousands of customers lost power on one of the coldest nights of last year). 

Hirawani says Nau Mai Rā was on the verge of collapse but it persevered, thanks to landing supply deals from the wholesale market. By year’s end, it hopes to have 10,000 customers. I spoke with him about the implications of having more whānau jump onboard the waka, and the meaning behind Kiwibank’s recognition.

Nau Mai Rā founders Ben Armstrong (Ngāti Hine) and Ezra Hirawani (Waikato Tainui) (Photo: Supplied)

Bring me up to speed since we last talked. What was the outcome of your actions last year?

They worked. Right from the start, we were always at the mercy of the goodwill of the big players. You have to trust they’ll believe in the same things that you believe in, with no evidence [to show them]. All you’ve got is a kaupapa and belief system. It took us on the brink of collapsing for these industry players to think “these guys are serious, they’re not mucking around, they’re prepared to lose massively to stick to their kaupapa”. It’s heartening to know the powers that be are starting to realise the role they play in this space – no, they don’t need to look after [vulnerable customers]; no, they don’t need to change their business practices; and yes, they can continue to chase profit but they can actually work with us, in a mana-enhancing way, to fill the gaps a commercially driven business leaves behind as it blazes toward the top of the food chain.

How did you settle on the target of 10,000 customers?

We had a conversation with a rōpu we call our “power avengers”, who have been there for us right from the start to guide us through the industry. They mentioned if we could get 10,000 customers to jump onboard the Nau Mai Rā waka, then that would equate to a minimum of $20,000 a month [in extra whānau fund contributions], which we would accumulate from whānau paying their power bills. That might not seem a lot in May but that turns into $40,000 in June and then $60,000 in July. You can really get some strength behind your waka when you have that kind of financial momentum. We’ll use that in the whānau fund to pay their power bill but we’re hoping that’s the last thing we need to do because we’re giving them a great fixed price, we’re working with them daily, we’re helping educate them and providing tools and resources so they don’t run into that problem. That fund moves people from being a teina to a tuakana, where they can look after the person behind them that may need a hand up. If we can get more [customers], that’s great, but 10,000 is a great start and a great way to build impact.

How do you feel about the Young New Zealander of the Year award?

It’s overwhelming, that’s for sure, but in a positive way. We didn’t apply for it, it wasn’t something we were aiming for. But when we won, we realised how much of a cool opportunity it was to use that platform to share our kaupapa with more tuākana, and to let tēina know “we’re coming”. It’s almost like, the more exposure we got, the more exposure whānau got so it meant a lot. People dream of getting out of obscurity with their businesses and look, Nau Mai Rā has had that same problem. And, to be fair, we haven’t sought out opportunities to expose ourselves more. We’ve been head-down, bum-up and working with what we’ve got to support those we have. The timing of it is nice because we’re ready for exposure now. 

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