LilBaP
Joel Maxwell’s Stuff opinion tells readers they should fear billionaires more than Māori gangsters.
He starts: “Let me make the argument that our queasy fascination with a bunch of creepy, destructive, probably criminal idiots in the final weeks of the election is focused on the wrong group of creepy, destructive idiots.” The fascination is media click-baiting. There is no fascination for the rest of us.
Maxwell points at Donald Trump, Musk and Zuckerberg. He writes that “Aotearoa is in the grip of a fuel crisis largely created by a billionaire, Donald Trump, who was supported financially into power by at least one billionaire, Elon Musk, and is preying on the fears of vast swathes of humanity, underwritten by the technology of other billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg.”
You can blame Trump if you’re inclined and Musk’s financial support was real but small relative to a presidential campaign. Zuckerberg and other major technology figures did not fund Trump’s rise; indeed several of them opposed him but, notably, other left-aligned billionaire donors, such as Soros, are not mentioned.
Maxwell need not concern himself with the billionaires he named. They will not know where Aotearoa is.
The Stuff trick is familiar. Foreign names are invoked so the reader is primed to accept a local comparison that has no supporting evidence.
The list is not there for accuracy. It is there to establish “billionaire” as a threat before the piece turns to New Zealand’s Rich List and equates those people with gangs. This is an activist journalist promoting fear without a single shred of evidence.
I’m not going to preach that all billionaires are angels but there is no public evidence that any of the 26 people on the 2026 NBR Rich List built their wealth through crime, violence, drug dealing or extortion.
Maxwell’s piece treats that absence as irrelevant. He tries to wave the gangs away by saying they are only a tiny proportion of the Māori population – about 10,500 patched and prospective members in a country of more than five million (about 0.21 per cent).
Apply the same standard to the 26 people on the 2026 NBR Rich List. That is roughly 0.0005 per cent of New Zealanders. If size alone decides whether a group is worth worrying about, the billionaires do not even register.
Most people will never meet either group but I know which one I would prefer to meet.
One group is repeatedly in court for violence, intimidation and extortion. The other is not. Maxwell ignores that distinction so he can keep the comparison. This is an activist journalist pointing readers in a different direction to soften the focus on gangs in the final weeks of the election.
Those 26 built or control businesses that employ people and generate taxable activity. Zuru, started in a Cambridge garage and now employs thousands worldwide across toys, consumer goods and construction. Rocket Lab, founded in New Zealand, has created high-skill jobs and, on its Nasdaq listing, generated significant wealth for staff and its founder. Packaging, software, film production and property businesses on the list produce exports, create jobs, pay tax and support suppliers.
They also give money away. Graeme and Robyn Hart donated $6.5 million to Starship Children’s Hospital in 2023 to support the expansion of its Paediatric Intensive Care Unit, one of the larger single private gifts the hospital has received, and earlier they gave $10 million to the University of Otago toward a dental teaching facility in South Auckland.
The Mowbrays, whose Zuru business tops the list, have been described by the NBR as big charity givers, with support going to Starship, Unicef, the Salvation Army, KidsCan and food banks.
Rocket Lab and Sir Peter Beck have funded scholarships for students from the Mahia and Wairoa region (including for Māori students in health), provided community support and cyclone relief supplies to the East Coast, and backed other New Zealand technology startups.
These are documented, public contributions to hospitals, education, community organisations and local regions. They sit alongside the ordinary tax paid by the companies themselves.
None of this requires treating their wealth as being beyond scrutiny – but it does require noticing that the activity is legal, recorded and subject to tax and company law.
No equivalent public record shows these people intimidating neighbours, blackmailing victims for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, or using standover tactics that appear in police charging documents and court judgments.
I am not aware of any gang organisation matching the documented scale of private gifts to hospitals or education seen from people on the Rich List.
What is documented is the flow of taxpayers’ money in the other direction – through government contracts, Whānau Ora providers and various ‘engagement’ and social programmes involving gangs.
The contrast with documented gang activity is not subtle. Police and courts have repeatedly recorded cases of intimidation and extortion. A senior Dunedin gang member was jailed for blackmailing a retail worker out of sums estimated up to $250,000 through sustained threats of violence.
In Christchurch, a patched Mongol member and an associate faced blackmail charges after threats of violence toward a victim’s partner and children led to tens of thousands of dollars being transferred.
Other cases have involved demands for cash or property under threat, kidnappings over small debts and violence used to extract money or enforce control.
These are not abstract concerns – the people involved use the threat of harm. The people on the NBR list do not.
Maxwell is allowed to dislike extreme wealth. He is not entitled to the implication that the people who built the likes of Zuru, Rocket Lab, packaging firms, software companies and film production operations pose a greater threat than the organisations that supply meth and appear in violence and extortion cases.
When an opinion writer asserts relative danger without showing the harm, the claim stops being an argument about tax or inequality and becomes a moral ranking that places legal enterprise below organised crime. Publishing that ranking without the evidence is not protected by the word ‘opinion’.
Stuff can run critical pieces about wealth concentration, political access or tax policy. It should not run a headline and argument that treats billionaires as more dangerous than gangsters of any type and then hide behind the opinion label when the criminal side of the comparison is documented and the billionaire side is not - readers should understand the difference.
The absence of crime linked to the 26 New Zealand billionaires is not a detail that can be waved away: it is the fact that makes Maxwell’s comparison stupid.
The economic effects of large private companies can be measured in jobs, exports, tax paid and, in documented cases, private gifts to hospitals and community facilities.
The effects of organised gang activity appear in police statistics, hospital presentations, court lists and the documented use of intimidation and extortion.
Maxwell’s piece does not demonstrate that the first category produces greater harm than the second. That is the point at which the piece stops functioning as journalism and starts functioning as incitement against a group for which no criminal evidence is offered.
