Gareth Morgan is the first to say he's opinionated, whether he's calling cats serial killers or criticising climate change policies. His latest plan to fund a million-dollar sculpture on the street outside his holiday house at Mount Maunganui is no less mired in controversy, but Juliet Rowan finds the 62-year-old basking in hilarity and looking ahead to the next project.
Gareth Morgan thinks it's hilarious that people stop to ogle his holiday house on the Mount's Marine Parade.
The economist and businessman-turned-philanthropist is on the front balcony discussing the two 1.5 tonne metal kina-design sliding doors he installed, when a tourist bus stops and toots.
"Every bus does that," he says, cackling with laughter.
"Every bloody tourist stands up there," he says pointing to a rise across the street.
"They're supposed to be taking pictures of the surf. They stand and they take pictures of the house. It's unbelievable."
The sight of cruise-ship passengers and others with cameras distracts Morgan several times during our Monday morning interview and each time he expresses the same jovial disbelief.
"Sometimes when there's two ships in," he says, "you'll have queues of buses waiting to pull up and tell the story."
"They wouldn't know me from a bar of soap. I'm not sure what they say. It is hilarious though."
Gareth Morgan's Marine Parade home.
Morgan is unfazed by the attention and the fact his multi-level bach, which occupies a 1000sqm site on the corner of Pacific Ave, is something of a fishbowl. He is also unfazed by Tauranga City Council's rejection of his proposal to fund a 10m-high million-dollar sculpture on the roadside outside the house.
In fact, at 62, far from caring, Morgan seems to laugh in the face of most controversies, and the sculpture affair is no different.
Dressed in shorts, T-shirt and bare feet, Morgan is in holiday mode, leaving the gate to the $6 million pad wide open when we go upstairs.
We arrive in the vast open-plan living area, which has sweeping views over Main Beach and the pohutukawa-laden Mount Drury, and Morgan recounts how he bought the house in 2011.
Morgan hired an architect to help with changes to the building but his wife, Joanne, was appalled at the architect's idea for louvres.
"It's not a public toilet," Morgan recalls her saying.
Joanne and the property manager came up with the idea for the kina doors at the eleventh hour and Morgan loves the result.
"At night, all the light refracts and it looks like a rainbow coming out of the house."
Morgan is at the house without his wife (she is in the South Island, nearing the end of a quest to climb all of New Zealand's 24 peaks over 3000m), but several of his four children and six grandchildren are staying in the five apartments downstairs.
Morgan strides around, finding a photo of the property as it looked in the 1950s when it was mostly grass with donkey stables, and talking about how he came up with the sculpture proposal for the council.
An artist's impression of Gareth Morgan's proposed sculpture.
Standing on one of the back decks, the view dominated by a single, gigantic pohutukawa in early bloom on Mt Drury, with a chocolate labrador and long, narrow swimming pool below, he explains he wanted sculptures to break up the property's concrete backyard.
He was speaking to kinetic artist Phil Price, who has done works for him at other properties and whose sculptures feature in public and private collections throughout New Zealand and Australia, when Price showed him a piece he was planning to do for a commission in Dubai.
"I said, 'It's unbelievable'," says Morgan.
"'Can I have it?' And he said, 'Yeah'."
Morgan says the sculpture, called Rimurimu, moves subtly and he quickly realised it would be too big to sit on his side of the fence.
"Also, it's got to get out there to get the wind. So I asked my neighbour. Who's my neighbour? Oh, it's the bloody council...So, I asked the council and all hell broke loose."
It's not good enough for Tauranga. They'd rather have a million-dollar pohutukawa.
On November 17, the council voted 6-5 to reject Morgan's plan to fund and maintain the sculpture.
Supporters argued it was a free piece of public art that could become an iconic feature of the Mount waterfront, while opponents disagreed with Morgan's choice of location and the loss of two pohutukawa that would need to be felled to make way for the work.
"Basically, they were getting a million-dollar sculpture for nothing," Morgan told the Bay of Plenty Times after the vote.
"They have just saved me a million bucks. It's no skin off my nose."
This week, he remained philosophical, saying "what will be will be" but was nonetheless incredulous at the decision to turn down the offer of a work by Price.
"He's world renowned. [But] it's not good enough for Tauranga. They'd rather have a million-dollar pohutukawa."
Morgan, a passionate conservationist, disputes the loss of the trees would be significant.
"Pohutukawa are like pukeko. They're hardly endangered. And if you get too many of them, they're like bloody weeds. Those two are too close together anyway. They have to come out. The council's already told me that. One of them's got to come out."
One opponent was of the opinion the work could be placed in a better position for the public to enjoy. In Morgan's opinion, that is "hilarious".
"I mean, that's actually about as public as you can get. You figure how many people go past this corner. There are thousands and thousands."
He also reiterated the offer was dependent on the sculpture being placed outside his house.
"I got a phone call from one of them saying, 'We love the artwork but we'd like it somewhere else.' And I said, 'Oh yeah, pigs will fly.' I said, 'That's not even part of the offer'."
Last Saturday, 10 days after the vote, Morgan invited the city councillors to his Mount house.
"I just wanted to put the record straight with them. I said, 'I've read eight different reports in the newspaper about this bloody thing,' and I said, 'Some of the things that have been said are totally inappropriate in terms of the offer I actually made, like 'Gareth Morgan's demanding this, this'. I'm not demanding anything, alright. 'This is the deal, and you know, this is how it should've been explained to you'."
He says he brought them into the lounge, which is furnished with green leather sofas and a grand piano, to get a bird's eye view of his proposed site for the sculpture.
"All I did was lean over the fence and said, 'Do you want it, or don't you? Stop torturing yourself. It's not a big deal'."
Morgan says the ball is now in the council's court but suspects the vote would be difficult to change.
"If they want to rescind it, then they have a whole process to go through. We'll see them in two years," he says with another huge laugh.
Gareth Morgan. Photo/John Borren
Morgan was born in Putaruru in 1953 and his ties to the Mount stretch back to childhood.
"In the '60s, my dad built a house on Oceanbeach Road. We'd come up here every weekend while he was building the house," he says, recalling his father visiting the Oceanside Hotel each time.
"I'll never forget that because it was in the days of six o'clock closing. He'd go out and buy me a bottle of lemonade and tell me to sit on the beach, and we'd sit down on the beach while he had his beer, then we'd go to the chip shop just next door to it and have steak and eggs and chips. Every Friday. It was awesome. I lived for that."
The Oceanbeach Rd house no longer exists, but Morgan's parents retired to Valley Rd, and his mother lived there until she died last year.
Morgan spends about 10 per cent of his time at the Mount and loves the vibe, pointing to a group of young surfers in sleeping bags out his window.
"They're sleeping all up the steps of Mt Drury. I love that eh. It's bloody awesome. That's what we did when we were kids."
He has lived in Wellington, "the best city in New Zealand by a mile because it's bohemian," for the last 40 years, but says the Mount has one up on the capital when it comes to climate.
He climbs Mauao every day he's here and says the Bay weather allows people to be much more active, including doing boot camp by the beach.
"In Wellington, you'd be swept into the sea," he quips.
Fishing, however, is something he reserves for Wellington.
"The fishing down there's so much better, in the Cook Strait. But of course, it's rough, rough as guts. That's why the fishing's so good, because no boats will go out there."
At this point, another tour bus pulls up, the passengers staring up toward the marble kitchen, where a huge painting of the Mount by artist Timo fills the wall.
"He did that one first and put it up," says Morgan, pointing to a smaller painting in the lounge.
Morgan told Timo he wanted a bigger painting and Timo said, "I've never done one as big as you want.''
Morgan replied at the time, "There's always a first, man, push yourself''. "So he did," Morgan tells me.
Gareth Morgan. Photo/John Borren
Pushing himself is something Morgan has done throughout his life and he shows no signs of slowing down, despite a shift in focus.
"I'm just not in the money-making game anymore," he says.
Morgan has spent just two months in the country this year, the rest of his time in Asia and America on motorcycle adventures with Joanne, and visiting projects funded by the couple's philanthropic foundation, The Morgan Foundation.
The two are United Nations goodwill ambassadors and Morgan is also an ambassador for the UN's He for She gender equality campaign.
Furthermore, he was recently appointed a global obesity commissioner for international medical journal Lancet and heads to Washington in February in that capacity.
Meantime, Morgan is off to Antarctica for the fifth time, and says he will be on the lookout for another project to add to The Morgan Foundation's portfolio of conservation, social investment and public policy projects.
Morgan now dedicates all his time to philanthropy and finds the task hugely rewarding.
"I enjoy it and I really admire the people who are in the frontline actually walking the [pest] trap lines or running the hospital that we fund in Bangladesh. God, I go over there. 'Oh man,' I think. New Zealanders don't know they're born. They have not got a clue. I'll never tolerate a New Zealander moaning again when I look at what I see over there. And I really admire those people and I feel to back them financially, which we do, to me, that's easy. It's not much effort at all compared to [how] they devote their whole lives to it."
Every now and then I'll get abused. I normally give it back with interest though.
Not so long ago, Morgan's focus was on the world of making money rather than giving it away.
In 2000, he established Gareth Morgan Investments, which grew to be one of the biggest personal portfolio investment businesses in New Zealand, and in 2007, he launched the Gareth Morgan KiwiSaver Investment Scheme.
The Morgan name became synonymous with fortune in 2006 when son Sam, now 40, sold his TradeMe auction site to media company Fairfax for $700 million.
Gareth and Joanne netted $47 million from the deal after investing $75,000 to help Sam, and Morgan also sold his investments business to Kiwibank in 2012 for an undisclosed sum, understood to be between $50 million and $100 million.
"I've been very fortunate because I've just made so much money," he says.
"I never sort of set out to do that. It just sort of happened, you know. We got the TradeMe thing. That was the first big one, I suppose. But I gave that one away basically. Joanne said, 'What the hell are we going to do with it? We're fine, aren't we?' I said, 'Yeah, yeah'. So that's been good. That's all gone to the charity, that stuff."
In establishing The Morgan Foundation, Morgan also recalled his wife's words to him early in their four-decade marriage.
"She always said, 'You know, Gareth, we don't need any money. We're resourceful people. So never think you have to work because we need money. We don't need money, alright.' And that's always stuck with me."
"Every now and then I'll get abused. I normally give it back with interest though. I had one in the weekend, but I had all my grandkids here so I didn't. I just said 'Thank you very much for your view'."
I'm a bit of an obsessive compulsive.
Morgan is a straight shooter and "opinionated'' - he proclaims so in his online bio and of that, there is little doubt. But what is perhaps lesser known is his energy.
He is in bed by 10pm but wakes at 4am each day, writing several times a week for his Gareth's World blog, which scrutinises public policy on issues including health, tax, welfare and climate change.
A PhD in economics, Morgan has written more than 20 books on subjects ranging from the Treaty of Waitangi to tax reforms, travel and global food consumption (that one was called Appetite for Destruction and caught the attention of Lancet, hence the global obesity commissioner role).
"But I think my book phase is nearly over," he says. "It's like everything I do. I'm a bit of an obsessive compulsive."
Morgan says his obsession with research stems from his university education and his wealth means his opinions are informed by the best research, giving the example of his climate change book Poles Apart, which was shortlisted for the Royal Society's science book prize in 2011.
"This is the privilege of having money I guess these days. I just hired the best scientists in the world on both sides and I set them against each other."
Being opinionated was also part of his upbringing.
Morgan was one of five siblings and vigorous debates around the dinner table were de rigueur.
"Very vigorous," he says.
"Too vigorous for my wife. It really upset her when she first got exposed to it."
Morgan also appears to have acquired his intrepid gene from his parents.
Originally from Wales, they spent a decade in Africa after his father began a forestry degree at Oxford University at the tender age of 17.
"Then they flipped a coin after the war as to whether they go to Canada or New Zealand. New Zealand won so they came here, and of course, all the forests in those days - Putaruru had seven sawmills around it - Dad was in heaven."
Morgan continued a life of adventure when he met Joanne, the youngest of eight children raised by a widow, at age 21.
They were married at 22 and lived with three of their children in a house bus in the early years of their marriage.
"They were great years," says Morgan.
If the rights of females, both women and girls, aren't championed in a society, the society's doomed. To me, you're not civilised.
Since turning 58, Joanne has taken up mountaineering, so far climbing 21 of New Zealand's 3000m-plus peaks, as well as the tallest peak in the Arctic Circle, where she battled frigid temperatures of -38C.
Her and Morgan's love of motorcycling in far-flung corners of the earth is already well documented, and despite their children thinking they are "absolute nuts" and Morgan breaking his leg on a dawn ride to a hidden military airfield in the jungles of Laos this year, the couple have clocked up almost 200,000km on rides worldwide.
Their journeys bring them face-to-face with poverty and inequality, and one of The Morgan Foundation's charities is a women's eye hospital in Pakistan.
"The reason for that is the state-run one down the road only does men," says Morgan.
"That's what I call human rights abuse. If the rights of females, both women and girls, aren't championed in a society, the society's doomed. To me, you're not civilised."
Gareth Morgan. Photo/John Borren
Conservation projects and climate change policies also feature high on Morgan's agenda, and Antarctica is one of his favourite places to visit.
"You can't believe there are any other human beings in the world when you're there. We sat on the beach on Macquarie Island and the penguins walk across your legs. It's unbelievable. It is life-changing. That's where you really suddenly realise that we just come and build another suburb and blitz it all. It's so irresponsible when you think of your own children and grandchildren and so on."
In his opinion, New Zealand has been slow to take up electric vehicles (he drives a hybrid Lexus, saying it is hard to get a plug-in), and he is critical of our fuel policies.
"New Zealand's got the filthiest fuel on earth subsidised - diesel. It's the most expensive fuel in most countries because it's the worst on emissions. We subsidise it.''
I'm going to get those f***ing cats.
Morgan funded Million Dollar Mouse, a project to eradicate mice on the Subantarctic Antipodes Islands, and he now has an ambitious plan to rid 175,000 ha Stewart Island of predators (the biggest island done so far is Campbell Island at 11,000ha).
But, he says, the plan, sold to locals on its economic benefit, is not without opponents who object to bag searches when returning to the island.
Cats are another target for Morgan.
"I'm going to get those f***ing cats," he says with another loud laugh.
"I mean, wipe that out. "I'm going to get those cat owners. You can't blame the cats."
Morgan wants councils to introduce compulsory microchipping of cats to encourage owners to contain cats on their properties, thereby reducing deaths of native birds and other wildlife.
"It's very common overseas. It's just not part of our culture so we need it to be part of our culture.
"Confine them in your property and then the problem's solved."
Wellington City Council announced last month it is reviewing its animals bylaw and investigating limiting the number of cats per household, public education to keep cats inside from 7pm to 7am, and microchipping of cats.
Morgan is expecting a public stoush but is confident of eventual success.
"Once I get one council over the line, I'll get them all. They'll all fall. That's what politicians do."
Morgan has attracted the ire of many cat owners for calling household moggies "serial killers", but in a twist of ironic humour, he is now suffering at the hands of his daughter Jessi's cat.
"She's got a cat and the bloody thing's got diabetes so Joanne and I have to go round when they're away and give this thing two injections a day. It's pathetic."
The adage I always like is 'Money isn't everything, but no money is'.
At the end of our interview, Morgan sits for the first time during our 1¾ hour talk and reflects on his love of New Zealand while looking out into the waves crowded with surfers.
"We're a selection of little towns in a very little country, aren't we, far away, and it's got an amazing charm about it. It's lovely. We're very lucky."
He also reflects on the joy he gets being a philanthropist, but says none of it would've been possible without watching his money over the years.
"It's that age-old bloody adage that came from Dickens, wasn't it? If you've got $100 and you spend $105, misery, but if you've got bloody $20 and you spend $15, happiness."
"So you still live by that?" I ask.
"Hugely," he says. "A lot of guys blow it all away. The adage I always like is 'Money isn't everything, but no money is'."
