Rob Campbell is facing an uncertain future as the chair of Te Whatu Ora/Health New Zealand and the Environmental Protection Authority following criticism of the National Party’s Three Waters policy. Under the Public Service Commission’s code of conduct, directors of Crown Entities are supposed to act in a
Rob Campbell on Zen and the art of business cycle maintenance
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A Herald study of independent director performance, analysing NZX data between 2009-19 to identify board members whose presence was positively associated with shareholder returns, resulted in Campbell being ranked fifth-best of the three dozen professional directors assessed. His CV includes chairing SkyCity, Summerset and Tourism Holdings. And now, at age 71, there's at least one more reincarnation under way for Rob Campbell.
He has begun stepping away from chairing billions of dollars in NZX capitalisation and side-stepped into the public service. Last year he was shoulder-tapped to oversee the reform of tens of billions of dollars annually spent in the health system.
All this is quite some distance from what he planned to do while he was a student at Victoria University of Wellington in the 1970s.
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Robert Reid, the president of FIRST Union, was a contemporary of Campbell's at Victoria and remembers him as a rising star in radical left circles, comparing his early trajectory to that followed by Andrew Little.
"Although he was young, he was very eloquent and the media loved him and he became a bit of a household name," Reid recalls
This prominence didn't make him loved by everyone. Muldoon famously and publicly named Campbell as one of several "dangerous subversives" linked to the Communist Party, a label he still wears with pride. "Frankly, it was a badge of honour," he says. "To have Muldoon dislike you was kind of about as good as it gets."
It was a power struggle within the union movement, Reid understands, that resulted in Campbell being sidelined and the once-rising star shoot off in a wildly unexpected direction by becoming an investment manager for rich-listers Trevor Farmer and Alan Gibbs. The split saw the pair lose contact for several decades, only rekindling their friendship over the past few years. "In the end he left, and when he left he made a few accusations that the unions needed to modernise, get with the times, and stop being dinosaurs," Reid says.
Campbell's transition into the corporate world was reportedly challenging for all involved. One rich-lister, who would only speak anonymously, told the Herald the prospect of working with - rather than against - Campbell in the 1980s was jarring.
"He was the most difficult prick I dealt with in my life when he was union, but eventually I ended up employing him. A lot of people who aren't up for it leave you in no mans' land, but you'd always know why he disagreed with you, which was a very good trait."
The rich-lister has closely followed Campbell's career arc and is amused at where he's ended up: "I was probably the only outsider who went to his wedding, because everyone had to wear a red tie. He's come a long way."
Campbell also found himself working alongside the (formerly) Sir Ron Brierley as government-appointed directors - with each intended to ideologically balance the other - at the BNZ in the 1980s.
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He says the two laughed at their first meeting once they realised board minutes had already been typed up for the following day's meeting and it was expected they would simply work their way through them - "It's no wonder the BNZ ended up in trouble" - but later clashed when Campbell was appointed to conduct last rites for Brierley's Guinness Peat Group in the early 2010s.
"I would have described to you Ron as a very quirky, isolated, quite intellectual figure," says Campbell. "He obviously had other sides to him that were a whole lot more distasteful, and you can't justify them," referring to Brierley's conviction and jailing for possessing thousands of images of child sexual abuse.
"What can you say? A terrible, terrible thing to have been going on, and to have been found out so late."
In recent decades, as Campbell metamorphosed into the country's pre-eminent independent director and the NZX market capitalisation of firms he chaired grew beyond $8 billion, he conversely found his own wellbeing shrinking. But he also found help from unexpected quarters.
Despite Muldoon's claims, he says he was never a card-carrying communist, but admired many of his colleagues from the 70s and 80s who were. And his reincarnation as an agent of capitalism never saw him fully embrace - or be embraced by - upper-class culture.
"I was a middle-class intellectual in a working-class movement, and therefore there was also some suspicion of me. And well-grounded suspicion: the history of the working-class struggle is that it's best conducted by the working class," he says of the 70s and 80s.
And he feels the second half of his career has also seen him remain on the outer.
"I never fitted in, really. I don't think anyone in the company directors' business world would say I became one of them and joined their clubs or played their golf. I did have a few old clubs that I tried a couple of times, but it certainly wasn't my game.
"The truth is, emotionally and intellectually I probably am - I've realised later in life - a bit of an outsider. I'm a bit of an introvert and probably never been as much a part of things as I might have liked to be."
Unusually for a businessman, Campbell is open about mental health struggles. In the middle of last decade, as his march through NZX-listed boardrooms was taking off, he says he increasingly became aware he wasn't well.
"I sought some help. I got sick of trying to treat depression with drugs and alcohol," he says sombrely, before immediately leavening the mood by laughing and noting "I got sick of the drugs before I got sick of the alcohol!"
He confided in friends, who steered him to a Buddhist nun, and from there developed a friendship and an interest in the mediation-heavy Kagyu tradition. Ever the outsider, Campbell says organised religion wasn't for him but he found the experience useful.
"I don't attend the centre anymore - again, I've taken a more solo approach to that - but it has impacted significant parts of my life. I no longer drink, I no longer eat meat. I'm a vegan."
A similarly left-field meeting with a South Auckland ex-boxer reinforced these lifestyle changes. Hosting a fundraising function for David "the Brown Buttabean" Letele at SkyCity, when he was chair of the casino operator, he made another unexpected friend.
"I met Dave there, and my health and things still weren't very good at all - it was bad. And as we were chatting, he said, 'well, I'll work out with you tomorrow morning'. And we each turned up at 6 o'clock outside SkyCity thinking that guy will never come. But, anyway, we both did, and started working out."
Campbell acknowledges many abrupt changes of course through his career and that his life is a "repeat pattern".
"You know: Maybe I've got a reasonably short attention span? But it does run in years rather than weeks or months. But I do get dissatisfied with things. And if I think I'm just satisfied with them, I'd rather be openly critical of them."
And he has certainly been critical of New Zealand business, despite spending decades at its heart.
When he was getting gonged in 2019 he delivered a sermon that "I think that business is a major cause of most of the evils in society," caveated only by "equally it's very difficult to envisage a solution to any or all of those evils without business being a major contributor to that."
He got his degree and even worked for a time as a lecturer in economic history, but thinks its sister field economics has now had all too much prominence: "There's many people pretending to be economists, working out fancy mathematics, rather than thinking about economies," he says.
Campbell says the biggest lesson he has learned from his time as a director is to distrust "carefully curated" information from management and work on overcoming blind spots.
"It's easy to get the illusion on a board that you know more than you do," he says. "You are also going to be lied to a lot. And I think that's probably one of the really hard things to overcome."
He's been a long-time critic of inequitable board compositions, despite now - at age 71 - often being the stalest male around the table.
"One of my failures has been despite what I think and say about those things, it's been really hard to change the composition of boards. I have had an effect on the gender composition of boards that I've been in. And I think I can demonstrate that. I haven't had a great impact on the Māori and Pasifika representation at board level," he says.
"I think at the moment I'm marginally more useful to change to be advocating for it. But it's fairly marginal. I'm aware of that as a tension."
His old comrade Reid admits smiling when, decades after Campbell's broadsides at what he saw as inflexible and pre-modern beliefs in the union movement, he began making similar complaints - but this time about what he saw as antiquated corporate boardrooms.
"'Belligerent' is the wrong word, but he likes a challenge," says Reid.
And Campbell's biggest challenge is now in front of him.
Government plans to abolish the District Health Board system and restructure the entire health sector resulted in Campbell being appointed interim chair of new national provider Health New Zealand.
With the government having spent $24 billion on the health system just this year, this project is many times bigger than even the largest private companies, and comes with embedded factional interests and competing priorities that have sunk the careers of many ministers.
And why does Campbell want to take on this hospital pass? "Well, it's intellectually interesting, isn't it? At my age and stage, what a great opportunity to try and get my head around something of that size, and something that big. And equally, it's something worthwhile."
It is a challenge he fizzes about, talking unbroken and at length about systemic problems in providing for Māori and Pasifika communities, and a system whose sprawl has grown so broad that no one person can really understand it all.
"Why would you have 20 different organisations, sometimes even competing with one another, owned by the same structure providing services in different parts of the country and trying to pretend it's a good system?"
He goes on to sketch out his impression of the health system that stretches far beyond just hospital buildings.
"What we call a health system, is basically a hospital and I call it almost a repair service, for what hasn't worked, in terms of building healthy communities. I don't even think the health services necessarily is rightly at the centre of that - I haven't quite worked out where I think the centre should be - but it's pretty obvious it's spread wide."
He's braced for inevitable criticisms of mission creep as reforms start to take shape and political debate intensifies.
“I don’t really care about that. If you think it’s the right thing to do, it’s what you should advocate for and say.”
