Sir Ian Taylor reveals the unique way we won one of his top TV roles. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Battles over wealth taxes, Covid, and a future for New Zealand. Inside the life and mind of one of New Zealand’s top business leaders: From TV star in the 70s to outspoken columnist.
He revolutionised how we watch sport, earned a knighthood for his services to broadcasting and business, and became an outspoken columnist as New Zealand’s Covid response became increasingly muddled. Right now, over lunch, Sir Ian Taylor is singing a children’s poem.
“Incy Wincy spider climbed up the spout…” he recites at our waterfront-facing table at Giraffe restaurant on Auckland’s Viaduct. “… down came the rain and washed the spider out.”
He sang the ditty at a Television New Zealand audition in the early 1970s to earn himself a role of presenter on Play School – and, with that, a place in the hearts of a new generation of New Zealanders.
He was in his early 20s at the time, studying law at Otago University and needing a part-time job. Taylor, who was previously the brooding lead singer in the band Kal-Q-Lated Risk, had been encouraged to audition for the role.
In those days there was just one television channel in the country; you watched whatever was served up.
At Play School, Taylor sat alongside iconic toys such as Big Ted, Little Ted, Manu and Jemima. Television had been in New Zealand for barely a decade and the educational show was already a hit.
At the Dunedin studios one day, he bumped into Mike Stedman, the producer of Spot On, the primetime Sunday evening show targeted at older kids and adults.
Stedman had seen Taylor on Play School and wanted him to audition. “I remember thinking, ‘It’s the job of a lifetime’.”
The audition started at the City Hotel. “There was no New Zealand wine then, so we drank them out of German white wine. We went back to the office, and he gave me a bow and arrow – there was a target on the wall. He said, if you can hit the target, the job’s yours.”
Taylor hosted Spot On from 1976 to 1979, a role that shifted his focus from law to television fulltime. Stedman died in July last year.
“We joked right to the end, the fact that neither of us remember whether I hit the target. But I got the job and that’s how it started.”
At lunch, Taylor and I have broken celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s early but now outdated rule. We’ve ordered fish – hāpuku in this case – on a Monday.
Being the start of the week, it’s relatively quiet in the Viaduct but one of those rare days in Auckland this winter in which we are dining under a cloudless sky. The sun is soaking our table.
Taylor, who turned 73 last week, has been on a 16/8 diet. Sixteen hours of fasting, with an eight-hour window – always between lunch and dinner – when he can eat.
“I did the two-day fast – a full two days and that actually got boring. You sat around and couldn’t eat.”
He’s back on a diet because of a conversation with one of his five grandchildren two weeks ago.
“Little Emily, the 3-year-old, was sitting down with me and she said, ‘Why is your stomach so big?’.
“My wife Liz had been telling me that and I’d been saying, ‘No it’s not true’. So, from that day I’ve gone back to my 16-8.”
Taylor’s politics are difficult to pick. He’s struggling himself these days.
Over lunch today – the hāpuku, seasonal vegetables, an Anchorage pinot gris for Taylor and a Mon Cheval rose for me – he takes aim at various parties and recent comments from politicians.
He says he has no idea who he’ll vote for at the election. “I’m always looking for somebody with a vision that will make a difference.”
He’s clearly still scarred by his experience with the Labour Government during Covid and their reaction – or lack of action – over his regular Herald columns that urged Jacinda Ardern to use the “bench” for the “team of five million” by bringing in businesspeople and experts to help advance New Zealand’s response to the pandemic, including safe, innovative methods to reopen the borders faster.
Those columns all started after Taylor posted a brief LinkedIn comment in September 2021, in which he teased an original piece. He had been shunning social media for some time, deflated by Facebook’s slow corporate response to the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019.
We approached him to say we would be interested in publishing it; he was touching on themes that were becoming an increasingly important public-interest narrative.
At lunchtime on September 12, we published the first of his columns. It was headlined: “Prime Minister, it’s time to bring on the bench in the fight against Delta”.
Over coming weeks and with more columns, Taylor’s frustrations grew, along with those of a sizeable percentage of Kiwis who were finding themselves locked in or out of New Zealand, unable to see family members for the likes of funerals and other milestone events.
Taylor pushed for proper testing, which, he says, would have not only helped with the border issues but avoided the likes of valuable teachers and doctors being lost to their professions because of mandates. He is not, by any means, an anti-vaxxer: one of his visions was for New Zealand to create a vaccine itself that we could export.
Taylor could not understand why politicians and bureaucrats were either too slow to react, or not responding at all.
He eventually took part in a sanctioned (and successful) travel trial, isolating himself as he flew from Dunedin to Auckland to Los Angeles and back again, to prove there was a better system than the MIQ hotels. But again, he felt his work was stymied, or ignored, and he did not hold back on those feelings.
Taylor’s work has put him largely offside with a number of senior Government politicians.
He cites second-hand conversations he’s heard about himself, involving certain Cabinet ministers. He names two in particular who have allegedly told various acquaintances – Taylor is extremely well-connected – that working with him “is not going to help” their causes. Another minister allegedly said: “He’s not in our good books”.
Taylor is genuinely baffled about that – he despises the polarised political debate that has caused a deep societal chasm. He cannot understand why he has sometimes become the focal point, when he insists that none of his criticisms are personal.
He sometimes takes personal criticism to heart but is often very self-deprecating. When he is targeted, he can be relentless in ensuring he has the right of reply, or given the chance to defend his position. He is energetic and articulate in his conversations – a typical phone call that starts on even the smallest of points might last 15 minutes, sometimes half an hour, sometimes even longer. He is very enjoyable company.
While he was critical of the Government, he has no time for the likes of the misogynistic targeting of Dame Jacinda Ardern.
That was “crap”, he says.
Nonetheless, that does not save her from his professional criticism.
“She had a wonderful vision... but in my opinion just totally lacked the skills to make it happen and there’s nothing wrong with that. There are a lot of things I can’t do either.
“You started to see the health [response] had taken over entirely and that was the thing that fired me up.”
He says his overriding conclusion from the Covid response was a lack of leadership.
“Everyone talks about leadership and strong leadership but – and this isn’t an attack – it was easy.
“When you’re in a country at the bottom of the world surrounded by water, the easiest thing to do is lock it, especially if you’re the Government. You just say lock all the doors.
“That’s not leadership, that’s the power you’ve got.”
That approach was right for the first lockdown; by the time of the second, there should have been systems in place to get stranded Kiwis home, he says.
“But instead it was this medical-driven thing that says do not open the border. Those people over there, they’re not Kiwis anymore. You know, they’re all on the waka together except for the ones we left stranded.”
I wonder aloud if the Labour Government might now regret the knighthood he received in the 2021 New Year Honours.
“If it came by Labour and they think it was a condition you don’t criticise them, then that’s their problem,” he responds. “You don’t hand these things out as a reward that came from you [as politicians].”
He doesn’t know who recommended the knighthood in the first place; he suspects it was Sir Pita Sharples. “It caught me by surprise; my first reaction was to say no.”
He then spoke to his wife, Liz, who came up with an inspiring suggestion.
“Maybe you think about taking it – and then earning it,” he recalls her saying.
“And that shifted it entirely. It was like, ‘Actually, I don’t deserve it now but if I say yes, now I earn it’. That’s kind of driven me in speaking out.
“Because as she said, ‘Maybe it’ll make a difference with Sir on it. Maybe people will return your phone calls when you’re talking about your Mātauranga site or when you’re talking about numeracy or literacy and prison programmes, or a project you’re running.
“It was an amazing approach. And I thought ‘Shit, actually, yes’.”
He says he knows other people who should be knighted, citing businessman Dennis Chapman – a millionaire, he says, who imposes a capital gains tax on himself, and delivers that money to schools to encourage students into technology. “For some schools, he’s bought all their computers.”
When he came to launch Mātauranga, a digital educational platform that showcases the early Polynesians’ journey to New Zealand, he approached the Ministry of Education and various iwi. None were willing to step up, he says.
Chapman gave him $500,000 after a 10-minute conversation. “We owe this entire platform to a guy who’s not a knight. I look at that and think, ‘Take mine’. It’s amazing. I mean, you don’t get any more pākehā than a businessman in Christchurch, do you?”
If the impression, then, is that Taylor is more aligned to the political right, you’d be wrong.
He also gives Christopher Luxon a swipe, over recent public comments.
“I don’t accept this ‘wet and whiny New Zealand’. Not where I’m sitting. There’s nothing wet and whiny about it.
“It’s really exciting and yes, there are some terrible things happening.
“But you know, a lot of that I put back to the politicians, the politicians have got to stop talking about wet and whiny or this and that. I’m looking for somebody who steps up to actually solve this.”
Greens MP Chlöe Swarbrick found herself the target of an open letter by Taylor in the Herald recently, a column focused on the party’s wealth tax and Swarbrick’s earlier comments about a wealthy few who were putting money in their back pockets.
Swarbrick and Taylor have subsequently met at the Product Accelerator at Auckland University, for which Taylor is the co-chair.
They had an amicable and, by all accounts, fruitful conversation.
Taylor was cautious about accepting the Product Accelerator role. “I’m terrible at governance; I couldn’t chair anything. I like to be where I can say what I want.”
But he has been using the role to help drive an inclusive discussion about New Zealand’s economic future. He was won over by the ideals of the Product Accelerator, a collection of nine New Zealand universities and research institutes connecting business leaders, experts, politicians and others on research, product development and technology initiatives.
“I thought initially... that’s a no-win job.
“[Co-chair Steve Wilson] said, ‘Look, could you just have a look at what we’ve done?’ And it’s amazing. I went to a meeting and I was surrounded by people who had no ulterior motives for anything other than wanting to make a difference.”
The unit focuses on New Zealand’s “tomorrow economy”, including sustainability in the face of climate change, and how the country can ride a wave of ingenuity in areas such as farming and bioforestry.
“I thought, if you step back, that’s a no-brainer. Ten years ago, it wasn’t an economic driver, even though we should have been doing it. That economic driver has arrived.”
He sees huge opportunities for New Zealand in the bioeconomy.
“We could talk about start-ups doing crypto, but everybody does that. We’re competing with the world. In New Zealand we have this opportunity in sustainability for food, plants.”
He cites the issue of fertilisers that are being quickly washed into our rivers and waterways. One researcher has looked at coating the fertiliser for a slower release on the land; another is looking at plants that can absorb the fertiliser more quickly.
He wants to see a more collaborative approach to resolving issues. He is especially keen that farmers stop being targeted – he is devastated about the mental health issues and suicide rates in the rural sector.
“Why are we yelling at farmers? Farmers don’t necessarily know about the science.”
Taylor often invokes Māori mythology and the Earth Mother, Papatūānuku, about lessons learned. With Covid, he stopped buying things he didn’t need – “but the thing we didn’t stop buying was food”.
“Food – New Zealand is really good at that. And tech, we’re pretty bloody good at that, too. We launch rockets, you know.
“What happens if we bring food and tech together? What happens if that’s our opportunity? So we don’t lambast the farmers who built the schools that I was brought up in, and who built the hospitals that are now crumbling.
“It’s easy to step there – ‘you bloody farmers’. Well, actually the schools we went to were built on the back of those ‘bloody farmers’. And it’s still huge. Instead of diminishing the value of that sector to all of us, why don’t we look at it through the eyes of science and technology. How do we grow that even more?”
Work is being highlighted by the Product Accelerator that we could sell to the world. “We’ve now developed IP that doesn’t have to go on a ship, doesn’t have to go on a plane.”
Taylor was born in Kāeo in Northland to a pākehā father and Māori mother and was raised in a state house in Raupunga on the East Coast. He attended a boarding school in Masterton before briefly studying at Victoria University. A talented musician, he became lead singer of Kal-Q-Lated Risk in 1967.
I ask Taylor why Dunedin holds such a special place in his heart.
He was called up for compulsory military training in Waiōuru – forcing his withdrawal from the band – and after that was left to contemplate where he’d head next.
Having toured New Zealand with the band a few years earlier, he recalled Dunedin as “the best place we’d ever played”.
He headed south from Waiōuru. “I rang up some mates – they got me a job in the [Speight’s] brewery.”
He sang at an Otago University capping ceremony and – inspired by the students – headed to class himself. He chose law ahead of medicine because he’d graduate more quickly.
“I think what stayed at the core of Dunedin was that I was too scared to go somewhere else. I didn’t think I’d be able to find a job. I sort of looked up at Auckland and said ‘Holy... ’ how would I get a job there?”
Apart from his television auditions, he’s never applied for a job. He had some legal industry interviews lined up after graduating from university but his Spot On audition sidetracked him.
His new television career path was set.
As well as hosting Play School, Spot On and New Zealand’s Funniest Home Videos, Taylor took interest in the production side of the television industry.
In the late 1980s, Television New Zealand closed its Dunedin studios. Taylor convinced a local bank manager to lend him $500,000 with which he bought the studios.
“We went for a long walk, I told him what I wanted to do and he said, ‘You’ve got the money’,” Taylor told the University of Otago magazine.
“At that stage, I probably had about $1000 in the bank. It would never have happened anywhere else.”
Taylor started his own business, Taylormade, in 1989 followed by Animation Research Ltd (ARL) in 1990. ARL was a joint business venture with the university and Dr Geoff Wyvill’s university computer science department. Taylor later brought out the university’s shares.
From the bottom of the world, Taylor’s team has transformed television viewing of sport. Whether that’s showing the respective positions and speeds of America’s Cup yachts, or the flight path of a cricket or golf ball, ARL’s graphics have made sport much more engaging, opening it up to new audiences.
The business almost closed in the global financial crisis in 2008 and made its first profit in 2019; he says if it wasn’t for that profit, they’d have closed when Covid hit.
“Someone was sitting on my shoulder... we had enough money to get us from March to Christmas [in 2020].”
Staff, including the CEO took, a salary cut, except those who were earning less than $69,000 a year. “That’s the culture, that’s not me.”
He is at huge pains to point out the business achievements are a collaborative effort. “I really could never have done this without the team around me – I know everyone says that but in my case it is resoundingly true.
“For me the important thing is we have built a family, not a company – the three students who started with me 32 years ago are still with me and we have a couple of their kids working here now as well.
“The most encouraging thing is that the culture they built is being added to by the young people who have come on board over the years and I am seeing the real power of the respect everyone has for the wisdom that has been built up here over years combining with new knowledge and new ways of doing things. It’s such a pleasure to go to work with this team every day.”
Dunedin was also the city where Ian Taylor found love. He met Liz Grieve while studying law at Dunedin – he barely remembers the first, chance encounter. She happened to answer an advertisement he had placed to sell some legal textbooks.
“I didn’t need them... the lecturer always gave us the questions anyway to make sure you got through the legal systems [exams]”.
The pair later met, properly, through one of Taylor’s flatmates and then when they both worked at the Wānaka THC during the Christmas holidays.
Taylor and Liz still live in the Kaikorai home they bought 40 years ago; Liz went on to be a partner in Ian Galloway’s law firm in Dunedin.
“She’s from Southland so she’s just a no-nonsense [woman]. In building the business, I used to travel a lot. There was a four-year period where I was in Dunedin from Monday to Friday just three times in four years.
“I was overseas so much and she had a job but she also brought up our two boys. She had the real job. She did the most amazing job.”
The couple have two boys – Sam, a doctor who has overcome incredible odds after being diagnosed as deaf as a child, and Ben, who works as head of sports at ARL.
“When Liz and I first discovered Sam was deaf, Liz said to me that we should set aside one day to cry – the Southland girl coming out in her – and then get on with making sure Sam got every opportunity we could give him to live as normal a life as possible.
“We needn’t have worried because Sam simply got on with life himself. Nothing ever seemed to hold him back and I never once heard him complain about things being tough.
“I remember when he completed his physics degree, he taught me about black holes, he then announced he was going to go on and do medicine. I have to admit, my heart sank. I simply had no idea how he was going to do that. But he did, and we are really proud to see him well down the path of his dream of one day becoming a surgeon.”
Meanwhile, Ben Taylor recently wrote of his father’s commitment following a Herald column by senior writer Simon Wilson.
Wilson had responded to Taylor’s open letter to Chlöe Swarbrick about the Greens’ wealth tax, writing that Taylor was an “outstanding” New Zealander and “we need many more like him”, but employees were not “widgets being pushed around on a sorting tray”.
In response, Ben wrote: “When Ian nearly lost everything during the GFC you assume he downsized his company – he didn’t. When Covid hit in 2020 and his business stood to lose every sports contract it had in under 24 hours, the first thing he did was guarantee everyone’s jobs. Ian didn’t start his career as an employer, first he was an employee creating wealth for the businesses he worked for as a barman, factory worker, presenter then producer.
“...the bigger picture he’s trying to paint is that those jobs wouldn’t be there in the first place if we stifle success and punish risk-takers.”
Taylor is still recognised by a range of generations – as the former television star, the high-flying businessman, or the columnist.
On the very morning of our lunch, he’d been at Kmart and a worker had implored him: “Hey are you the guy...? Keep going!”
“I’m still a bit gobsmacked,” he says. “I mean the response has been amazing. I still think I’m just a guy from Dunedin.”
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