New Zealand

"One of the things Adnan Khashoggi was famous for in those days was his fabulous parties. Peter Munk suggested to his new partner that, in the interests of SPP, Khashoggi might consider holding parties in Australia and New Zealand. Agreement was enthusiastic and immediate. The first party was in Auckland, New Zealand, on the evening of Thursday, November 18, 1976. Adnan arrived in Auckland in his Boeing 727 with his companion, Laura Biancalini, while Essam Khashoggi flew in in his smaller DC9. Travelling with Adnan were Peter and Melanie Munk as well as David Gilmour and his London model friend, Jill Sweeny, all of whom were central to the Khashoggi bash at the Shoreline Cabaret, ‘Takapuna. Two hundred guests drank Australian bubbly, ate splendidly, were entertained by a Maori concert party and danced to one of the best bands on the island."

"On the day of Rainbow’s debut Heatley was managing director of the most recently listed company in New Zealand, his shares on paper were worth more than a million dollars and he was just short of his twenty-eighth birthday."

"It was a time of absurdly easy credit, particularly for companies that had a track record and strong personal relationships with bankers. ‘The Bank of New Zealand would lend us anything,’ George wryly observes. ‘The bankers almost became personal friends.’ Businessman Alan Gibbs, who would become an investor in Heatley’s next project, Sky Television, describes the mid-eighties as a crazy, speculative period. ‘Between the drop in the exchange rate [after the 1984 election] and the sharemarket crash in October ’87, New Zealand had the biggest boom in its history and one of the biggest booms anywhere,’ Gibbs says. ‘Everybody’s share price went through the roof. You could make dough out of anything.’ Some companies that had depended on import licensing for their monopolies proved to be unprofitable once genuine competition appeared. As they faltered they were picked up cheaply by the new corporates. The behemoth Brierley Investments Ltd (BIL) was expert in that field. Atlas Majestic, the first stock that Heatley had purchased as a boy, was one of the companies that Gibbs took over."

"‘So now it gets heated. They send us a note back saying, “The deal’s done and you’re too late and we’re not interested.” Now I ⁠*know* there is something strange going on because if you were going to sell your house for $300,000 and I come along and offer you $350,000, you would take the $350,000 but they just said no. They didn’t even say, “Let’s have a meeting, let’s discuss it.” If they’d been smart they would have engaged with us but it felt to me that Bob Matthew had just taken this adversarial attitude, which seemed personal about me though I don’t know why.’ Again Heatley picked up the phone to Rainbow’s lawyers, who agreed to seek an injunction in the High Court against Rothmans’ sale of its New Zealand business to its Australian counterpart.⁠"

"Rainbow sat tight until March 1986, when Heatley picked up *The New Zealand Herald* and saw that Rothmans had announced the sale of its New Zealand tobacco business to Rothmans Holdings Ltd of Australia for $80 million. Heatley knew that Rothmans’ New Zealand tobacco business was making $24 million a year so it did not make sense to him that the company was proposing to sell it for only $80 million."

". Eventually, hit harder than most of the world’s sharemarkets, the New Zealand market would lose 68 per cent of its value before finally bottoming out in late 1990. By then, more than 200 companies that had been listed on the stock exchange on the day of the crash were gone, and with them went investor confidence in the New Zealand sharemarket for a generation."

"Heatley was inside but had felt on the outer from day one. The power lay with Ron Brierley—now Sir Ron after his knighthood was announced in the 1988 New Year Honours List—Paul Collins and Bruce Hancox. Heatley was not in that inner circle so had no control. ‘Heatley and Lane were also re-rated along with their former assets, and the judgement was harsh,’ van Dongen writes. ‘They weren’t and aren’t talented’ was Sir Ron’s own brutal analysis.[1](private://read/01jectdbce729daxqkxt7cbe8r/#mn17) Something was going to have to give."

"⁠News and movies were important but for pay TV, sport was, and remains, king. With the advent of VCRs, video stores were appearing in neighbourhood shopping centres so movies could be accessed without waiting for TV channels to schedule them. For news, consumers could always buy a newspaper or turn on the radio. But the way sports rights are managed means that usually, other than attending an event itself, live sport can be seen exclusively on only one TV channel. For fans who love the immediacy of the action and who crave the sense of being present at the wins and the losses, the next best thing to being there is to watch live on TV. Particularly in New Zealand, where much of the prestigious action in international sport was likely to be happening in the northern hemisphere and in a different time zone, Heatley was sure that fans would be prepared to pay to have the live experience from the comfort and convenience of their own homes. The model was working for pay TV companies overseas and, once again, he thought there was no reason to believe it would not work in New Zealand too.⁠"

"It was not the only critical problem. The first crude business plan that Jarvis and Heatley had drawn up estimated that Sky would need $5 million in capital before it became profitable. That figure proved to be hopelessly optimistic and catastrophically wrong. By midway through 1989, when Sky had originally hoped to launch, more than $20 million had been spent or committed on rights, engineering and set-up costs and wages, and still the UHF frequencies would need to be paid for. The money was coming from Jarvis and Heatley’s personal financial resources. The urgency to begin earning subscriber income was pressing. But even if the frequencies became available and Sky’s new channels were launched, not everyone shared Heatley’s confidence that New Zealanders would be rushing to sign up. Many people, including Heatley’s own mother, were openly doubtful that the concept would work. The idea of paying for television—other than the annual licence fee which many New Zealanders already resented—was novel and not immediately appealing."

"In 1972, on Haden’s first overseas trip as an All Black, the squad had toured the British Isles, France and North America and played 32 matches over four and a half months. The players had received a per diem allowance of 75p. ‘It was about NZ$1.50 a day and if you want a comparison of the value at the time, each day you could afford to buy two of three things—a pint of beer, a ticket to go one stop on the Tube, or post a letter back home,’ Haden says. Naturally, the players’ accommodation, transport and meals were provided, but there was no pay for playing and no compensation for their months away from home. They were amateur players in a strictly amateur code and the fact that most of them had taken leave from their jobs was the sacrifice expected of them as All Blacks. If they had wives and children, well, they just had to make a sacrifice too. The reward for representing New Zealand was the honour of wearing the black jersey, and that was considered by many rugby officials to be sufficient."

"For Hart, who was on Sky’s board for 17 years, the price was simultaneously too much yet also what had to be paid. ‘I can understand that Sky has always paid a lot more for rugby than it thought was real value but in the end, it was a business case that said we’ve got to prop the rest of Sky up around rugby. We can’t not have it. So, rugby is Sky and Sky is rugby. Sky would like to say otherwise, but the fact is that rugby is a big component of Sky and the changes occurring in technology and the emergence of all the alternative ways of watching sport on mobile devices mean that holding on to the rugby rights is still fundamental to Sky’s long-term survival, because rugby is so important in New Zealand.’"

"Because he stepped down from board roles, and has had a lower public profile since leaving Sky, Heatley says people think he now plays golf every day, which is not true. But these days his investments are more private than public and, in particular, he has been significantly involved in trading foreign exchange. The field gives him the opportunity to use his keen and long-standing interest in politics and current affairs to anticipate currency movements. He trades almost exclusively in New Zealand dollars, Australian dollars, British pounds, American dollars and Euros, turning over billions of dollars ‘with a fair modicum of success’. He was, for some years, New Zealand’s biggest individual foreign-exchange trader outside institutions like banks or companies like Fonterra. He is much better at trading currencies than equities, he says. ‘If I’m honest, my public-equity investment performance over about 20 years has been average at best.’ But in the notoriously fickle world of foreign-exchange dealing, Heatley would give himself an A minus. He also dabbles in private equity, which he says is not for the faint-hearted. While many people consider currency trading to be highly speculative and akin to gambling, he does not, though he cautions it is not an investment for the inexperienced."

"A few years after his Augusta debut, Heatley saw in the news that American hedge-fund billionaire Julian Robertson had bought an expensive piece of land in Northland not far from where Heatley himself had a beach house. Heatley wrote to him, welcoming him to New Zealand and offering local knowledge if that might ever be helpful. Robertson sent a charming response and Heatley says he considers it ironic that having initially written to offer to be helpful, he has learned far more from Robertson than Robertson has ever learned from him. The tables were turned, Heatley says, because Robertson, who was knighted by the New Zealand government in 2010, ‘is charming, a conversationalist, a philanthropist, and a genius investor to boot’. The pair and their wives became friends and in time the Heatleys were guests at Kauri Cliffs, the private golf course that Robertson built at Matauri Bay, Northland, in 2001."

"He thinks New Zealanders’ aversion to the sharemarket goes back to the 1987 crash, which was for New Zealand like the global financial crisis of 2008–09 was for the US and Europe. ‘The GFC brought America and Europe to their knees whereas in New Zealand, partly because of good economic management by the government at the time and partly because we had already made structural changes to our economy after the ’87 crash, we fared better than most.’ For New Zealanders, he thinks the psychological effect of the crash was so severe that it reminded him of people in the post-war era who were so traumatised by what they had been through that they vowed to never buy a Japanese-made camera or car. ‘I think there are people who were so badly affected by the crash that they vowed never again to invest in shares. Thirty years later the psychological effects are still there, though a new generation who did not personally suffer might now be more open to the idea.’"

"He is approached regularly by people seeking donations and while he has given generously to some, it has been on a case-by-case basis. He is a supporter of Auckland City Mission because his family are Aucklanders and he likes the mission’s work with the city’s most disadvantaged. But he accepts that his children may prefer different causes when they inherit. Heatley’s name is not associated with philanthropy and his most notable attempt at it, establishing the First Tee programme in New Zealand in 2005 to use the teaching of golf to help underprivileged children, never generated sufficient impetus to become self-sustaining. Its demise disappoints him because he says the programme, which originated in the US and is supported by the golf establishment there, uses the best attributes of golf, including honesty and perseverance, to teach life skills."

"The 1960s were a period of consolidation as well as expansion of Rupert’s tobacco and cigarette interests. The takeover of Carreras and Rothmans led to expansion in other parts of the world. Using Rothmans as his flagship, he created a stir with his philosophy of industrial partnership in various countries where he embarked on new initiatives. Partnership companies were established on a bilateral basis in Australia and New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Canada, Jamaica, Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) and Nyassaland (now Malawi) − eventually even beyond the Iron Curtain in Russia and China."

"Gibbs has had a long and highly productive business career. By adopting a low-risk style of deal making, keeping his affairs simple and choosing good partners, he amassed one of New Zealand’s largest personal fortunes during the 1980s and 1990s. His early career was an exemplar of capitalism’s creative destruction as he carried out the necessary restructuring of many inefficient companies and organisations so that either they could survive and add value in a world of open competition, or the resources invested in them could be put to better use elsewhere."

"G Hunt, *The Rich List: Wealth and enterprise in New Zealand, 1820–2000*"

"TN Gibbs had taken a piece of wisdom from the biblical King Solomon as one of his guiding principles in business: ‘Take shares in several ventures; you never know what will go wrong in this world.’[12](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477268-974936905-12) Alan Gibbs took it to heart. While the car project ground its way through the system and while he set about expanding Holmes Manufacturing’s business, he cast about for other entrepreneurial schemes. He spied an opportunity to import advanced breeding stock for chicken meat. Stiff controls over importing birds were in place and the best birds in New Zealand were bred to produce eggs rather than meat."

"Strange things came across his desk at the High Commission. In November 1963 Congo rebels attacked several church mission stations. Gibbs had to pass on a cable sent by one New Zealand missionary to her parents. It stated simply: ‘All well, Cyril with Jesus.’ In reality, Cyril had been mown down by machine-gun fire at Stanleyville; his wife, who sent the cable, had an arm hacked off and both their daughters had legs amputated.[2](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477210-626309542-2) The travails and stoicism of several missionary families that he encountered during his work profoundly affected Gibbs."

"Alan arranged to bring Sir Lawrence Hartnett, the father of the Australian car industry, to New Zealand to lend weight to their press conferences and ministerial visits. Hartnett had overseen the birth and development of the Holden since the 1930s and was a respected figure internationally. With Hartnett flying in on Sunday, 17 September for the announcement, they planned maximum publicity. ‘Top secret plans for New Zealand’s own car’ were leaked to the *Sunday News* to build up excitement, then coverage of the Sunday afternoon press conference generated front-page or page-three news all around the country the following day. Initially, they talked simply of a ‘90 mph family car’. Ian Gibbs fronted, while Lawrence Hartnett said he was at a loss to explain the proposal’s cool reception from Norm Shelton, the Customs Minister.[15](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477268-974936905-15)"

"Not taking the hint, the Gibbs kept pushing. Ian explained he was going to the UK to visit the Reliant plant and they really needed their prototype to make progress. Marshall finally yielded at the end of November, allowing them to spend £750 on their prototype, but stressing that this munificence did not imply that approval had been given for the broader project.[11](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477268-974936905-11) Such was the extent of the state’s powers in New Zealand that the young entrepreneur had had to crawl on hand and knee to get this far."

"*Carters was run by a tough old sawmiller, Alwyn Carter, and his two sons. I remember going to their offices and persuading the old man to convert to the Chase Prime Rate, but the boys stepped in. They’d had a long-running fight with my brother Ian over pulp and paper equipment and were keen to take out their frustrations on me. I remember them laughing at me: ‘You’ve got your balls in a knot, Gibbsie, you’ll lose some money; what a joke, ha ha ha.’ ‘All right, you bastards,’ I thought. I went back and told my staff to look at the loan contract and if there is any infraction, the slightest irregularity, we’ll call in the loan. And sure enough, not long after they were one day late with an interest payment. I called in the loan. They went berserk. No one else would lend them money, since no one could make any profit lending money under the conditions Muldoon had created. The Carters got on to Chase Manhattan in the US: here they were with the top credit rating in New Zealand, and this little bugger in Auckland* *was calling in their loan! I got reverberations from Australia but nobody stopped me. It was one of those satisfying victories, going back to the Carter brothers and saying, ‘Tough titties, boys: pay up.’ And they did.*"

"*We’d go to Japan and say to JVC, ‘We want to buy your TVs in pieces.’ They’d say, ‘Why? No one else does.’ We’d reply that we are required to assemble them in New Zealand. ‘Oh,’ they’d say, ‘do you have lots of cheap labour? Why would you do this? No other small countries do.’ We’d agree, but that’s the rules in New Zealand. ‘Our government requires us to make them here if we want to sell them.’ ‘But,’ they’d say, ‘this costs a lot of money; we make thousands of televisions a day, pieces come from all over the place; to send you the pieces we’ll have to disassemble the sets, it will cost a premium.’ We said, ‘It doesn’t matter what it costs; it’s the only way to bring them in. This nonsense will no doubt be dropped one day, and you’ll have your brand in place.’* *So they’d sell us the pieces, minus the few components made in New Zealand, put them in a box with instructions on how to put them together; they’d charge 10 per cent more than they would for a ready-to-go TV, then we’d have to build a factory, hire people, make an assembling line, find finance for the stock. There was no real New Zealand content, no added value, as all the extra unnecessary labour was being paid for by New Zealand customers, who paid twice the price for their electronic goods. It was a total dead los*"

"I wasn’t interested in currying anyone’s favour or in going along and asking formulaic questions, which is what I felt the other directors tended to do; I was interested in doing a good job for Mayne Nickless and so naturally I asked executives to explain themselves and account for things. I stood up to them and formulated an alternative view. None of this they enjoyed. I remember having discussions with them early on over the pricing of our loans. Having run a merchant bank for three years and helped pioneer the bill market in New Zealand, I knew a bit about it. But I felt Pettigrew was insulting: ‘What do you know about bill rates and finance?’ he sneered. None of the others said a word; they just sat back and let Pettigrew beat up on me. Initially, I thought these guys were unpleasant, but eventually I realised they were positively out to beat me up."

"Under pressure from Douglas to come up with something quickly, Gibbs wrote a simple draft report over a weekend in late March 1986. This proposed a Forest Corporation that operated under the Companies Act with staff who weren’t civil servants and that delivered a return on the capital invested.[38](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-38) The official report, delivered in mid-May, fleshed out these ideas further and, more radically, suggested that the company should be listed on the stock exchange with every New Zealander given shares.[39](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-39)   Nothing happened for a while, however, until the report was finally released to the public on the Friday before Queen’s Birthday weekend without any significant ministerial comment.[40](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-40) Since no one from the government had spoken to him, Gibbs feared they’d chosen to bury it. A month later, in July 1986, he came across Roger Douglas at the airport and grumbled that he hadn’t heard anything. The Minister of Finance simply replied, ‘Oh, just get cracking.’ Gibbs had no real authority, nothing had been announced, no legislation had been passed, but he resolved on Douglas’ nod to forge ahead and put his ideas into practice. He’d keep going until someone stopped him."

"It was massively difficult. All the restructuring was destroying the basics of New Zealand’s historically protected economy. Most businesses I owned were wiped out: Ceramco and Atlas ultimately disappeared. It’s a wonder we didn’t go broke. But I’d dealt with import licensing for years; I knew how sick it was. No bloody way was I going to keep my sad business alive at the expense of getting New Zealand sorted out. We didn’t lose money because we didn’t fight deregulation; we saw where it was going and worked our arses off to liquidate those businesses that were losing their whole economic rationale before they were valueless. Those that waited, like Winstones, were the ones that really struggled."

"Gibbs found himself attending meetings of the chairmen of the nine organisations that would become New Zealand’s first state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Roderick Deane hosted these sessions and quickly realised that, handled correctly, Gibbs was a fantastic advocate for ideas. ‘Sometimes,’ Deane says, ‘I’d call him before the meeting of the chairmen and say, “Alan, I know where you stand, but before the end of the meeting you have to help me get to a conclusion,” and he was so powerful that he could bring the others into line.’ Deane also found Gibbs a useful ally to wheel out at critical sessions with his minister, Geoffrey Palmer."

"Gibbs became chairman of the new state-owned enterprise, with Kirkland as his CEO. The transition went smoothly, with neither strikes nor industrial turmoil, helped by the very generous redundancy on offer. Meantime, Gibbs and Kirkland had engineered a remarkable turnaround in the performance of the organisation by applying basic private sector principles of reducing costs and increasing returns. Overall staff numbers were reduced by 60 per cent, from 7070 to 2770, including contractors working full-time for the corporation. At the same time the battle was enjoined with the large private sector customers to increase prices for wood. The financial result for the taxpayer was dramatic. An operating deficit of $71 million in the 1986/87 year was transformed into a $61 million surplus in 1987/88.[48](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-48) Gibbs was rightly proud of the effort as ‘one of the most successful corporate reorganisations in New Zealand’s history’.[49](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-49) The resultant change in productivity was phenomenal."

"Out of the Woods: The restructuring and sale of New Zealand’s state forests,"

"The combination of Roger Douglas and the Treasury at that moment was brilliant. He wouldn’t have been purist if left to his own devices, and they wouldn’t have had much influence on their own. Then he reached out to serious businessmen to help sort out the problems like the state-owned enterprises; the sorts of roles that had traditionally been given to party hacks. It was a very exciting time for people interested in New Zealand and Roger executed many far-reaching and important reforms. The man deserves a bloody great statue; aside from Ruth Richardson, no other figure in recent New Zealand politics comes within a bull’s roar of him. Margaret Thatcher dragged England out of its socialist impasse and is now voted the most important British leader since the war. It is very slack that Roger and Ruth are not given the same regard in New Zealand."

"The place was demoralised. You had outstanding doctors and dedicated nurses, but they were frustrated by the process. If you do not know that your way of doing a leg operation, for example, is more or less costly than another equally successful way, then you have no basis on which to take rational decisions. You are just doing whatever happens next and that is a very depressing world to live in, and it is an incredibly wasteful one too. The hospital system had collected information about costs for 20 years, then stopped because nobody was doing anything with it. Information on costs alone was of no use for management unless they also had market prices, which show the value of what they were doing. At Freightways we knew exactly what each service cost and the value to the customer, represented by what they would pay, but these poor people simply got an amount of money and when they’d spent it, they stopped or requested more. Meantime, because money was limited, there were huge waiting lists in every area of medicine. Without prices, there can be no real management. We know how badly the Russian economy worked without prices. Here the government in New Zealand insisted that we run a huge and important system exactly the way the communists ran Russia. It was insane and still is."

"*My whole business experience has driven me to free markets … Over the years in running businesses in a highly regulated New Zealand society we found the great majority of one’s energy was spent either running up and down to Wellington to get permits or licences, or alternatively it was spent with one’s lawyers trying to find ways and means around the regulations. The net effect of that was probably over half of the most creative energies in New Zealand were frustrated.*[29](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-29)"

"*It was supposed to be a clean auction — the highest bidder wins, simple. This was really important, because so many of the other privatisations had proved dirty, with the government negotiating afterwards. Treasury had assured us it would be clean this time. Richard Prebble, the SOE minister, was not supposed to get involved personally. But Preb being Preb, he set out to tweak our noses for some more. We were called down to the SOE offices to find the Treasury guys with Prebble, who told us that despite the fact we were the highest bidder with no conditions they wanted more. In the circumstances it was my job to do the beating up. I abused him for half an hour — telling him he was a unconscionable crook trying to change the deal, New Zealand’s reputation would be damaged by this double dealing approach, it was entirely unprofessional. The Treasury* *guys sat there squirming. After this I said we’ll talk to America and see.* *We rang up the two companies to tell them about this outrageous turn of events, that the government was cheating on what was supposed to be a clean auction. Everyone was bloody angry. The chairman of one of the companies had a former US Secretary of Defence with him, who immediately said that he would bomb the bastards for less than that. It was immoral conduct. We quoted all this back to Prebble, with some embellishment. So it went back and forth along these lines late into the night. In the end we worked out a deal: we’d give him $4.25 billion but defer the payment. The interest saved equalled the increase in price. It was a clean wash, but Prebble could show off a better price to his cabinet.*[18](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477273-050103421-18)"

"*TCI didn’t believe in business class. Since this was its first venture outside the United States, it had no view on 12-hour flights. So I flew to New Zealand in an economy seat and arrived early after an uncomfortable flight and went straight to a breakfast with Alan Gibbs, Trevor Farmer and two of the American directors. After exchanging pleasantries someone said, ‘John, talk a bit about your background.’ Halfway through my story Alan cuts me off. ‘You bloody Americans had the chance to do everything perfectly after World War Two, but you didn’t have the guts to take on Russia.’ Then he launched into a tirade against America’s lack of courage. I was aghast. I mean, I was born in 1953. I fought back a little bit, as best I could when I could get a word in, which wasn’t easy. I think I said, ‘Well, I’ve just met the only guy in the globe who thinks Americans aren’t sufficiently tough.’ Afterwards I said to my colleagues, ‘Jeez, that didn’t go well’, but the Americans who knew him said, ‘Oh no, I think he likes you.’ Thereafter, when things were going OK, Trevor Farmer would be there, but if Gibbs turned up we knew we were in trouble.*[30](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477273-050103421-30)"

"These insights resonated powerfully with Gibbs. He’d been struck not by how much people knew about the world and the economy, but by how little they knew. How on earth would a few bureaucrats, such as himself as a 26-year-old sitting on the interdepartmental committee deciding what imports to allow into New Zealand in 1966, know what was best? Was it more sardines they needed, or shoes? Surely the millions of voluntary decisions made every day by millions of people in a free and open marketplace were more likely to generate the necessary wisdom than a bureaucratic panel? Gibbs had travelled around Eastern Europe many times and seen many factories built under communism that were empty and abandoned. Either they had been built in the wrong place or their products did not have a market. So much of the planners’ investment was completely wasted because they had not used the market to allocate resources."

"*Alan didn’t have a high opinion of professional directors, but my sense is that he would have tackled Fletchers because he believed it was on the wrong track and it was his duty as a New Zealander to respond if asked. At the same time he was getting stuck into producer boards, calling for deregulation and reforms, so he never shied away from the big issues. It would have been a fascinating moment in New Zealand corporate history if he’d joined Fletchers, explosive even. He would have bitten hard and sought to re-orientate the company towards the interests of its shareholders. He’d thought very deeply about the nature of capitalism, about the rights of shareholders, the purpose of a company, in an intellectual way that was so unusual in New Zealand, and diametrically opposed to Hugh Fletcher’s view of the world and the pervading culture at Fletchers. Gibbs’ arrival would have been a takeover, in effect. The divisional heads would have had an entirely new experience, and it certainly would have been the end of Hugh.*[31](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477309-807254973-31)"

"*I see [New Zealand] as an extremely exciting place. I see New Zealand as able to be part of the real world. There is now nothing you can’t do in New Zealand that you could do anywhere else. The communications are rapid; you’re plugged into the world not just in terms of talking to people but in terms of exchanging services with them. People with enterprise in New Zealand can now undertake activities that would have been impossible in the old economy and … some of the most exciting business ventures that I’ve ever seen have arisen in these circumstances.*[26](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477309-807254973-26)"

"Gibbs struggled to work out the consequences for Iran of having four exchange rates operating in parallel: the official one, a favoured rate for exporters, a higher rate for tourists and the black market rate, which was something else again. The originally good rail system, meanwhile, was totally neglected since its rates were too expensive, while the roads were cluttered with lorries that paid no road charges and used subsidised fuel. Such blind spots in the logic of a national economy, though, were nothing new for someone who had lived in pre-1984 New Zealand."

"*I think global warming is the best possible thing for mankind. Its effect will be mainly in the northern hemisphere from 50 degrees north and all those countries are freezing, miserable dumps most of the year. There’s no clear evidence that cyclones are caused by global warming, the earth’s temperature is always changing. Is it good or bad, who knows? But I can’t see why anyone who lives in the cold parts of the earth wouldn’t* *see higher temperatures as better … I’ve always said that New Zealand would be best if it was dragged north halfway to Fiji. Even the most radical projections of global warming wouldn’t get New Zealand warm enough.*[5](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477353-680641757-5)"