Richlister and Xero co-founder Hamish Edwards finally has the go ahead to build his dream golf course, after four frustrating years wading through the “horror” consent process. For NZME’s On the Up campaign, Jane Phare visits the coastal site at Ōhau, an hour north
On the Up: Xero co-founder Hamish Edwards’ battle to build a links golf course
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Edwards, 52, has left his sky-blue Ferrari 296 at the farm gate, hitching a ride up to the cabin in a 4WD. A 700m road will eventually connect to the clubhouse but that’ll be about it in terms of tar seal.
From up at the club’s restaurant and bar, golfers will get a spectacular 360-degree view: the links golf course stretching out below and the wild west coast surf beach beyond.
In the distance lurks the haunting outline of Kāpiti Island. On a clear day, the tip of South Island, Marlborough Sounds and Farewell Spit will emerge. To the south is the meandering Ōhau River and to the north, Mt Ruapehu and Mt Taranaki. In the winter, they’ll see snow on the top of the Tararua Ranges behind.
Edwards can imagine (he’s done a lot of that in the past few years) sitting on the clubhouse deck, daiquiri in hand, watching the sun set over the Tasman Sea.
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The wind’s up at Ōhau today (it’s blowing even harder in Wellington), whipping up the thunderous surf on the beach beyond. A large group of royal spoonbills wade in the river below, a stretch of water rich with flounder, whitebait and the occasional kahawai.
Edwards’ exhilaration is palpable, the energy and excitement bouncing off him as the frustration of the resource management consent process fades. Now he’s thinking about earthworks and getting his hands on enough fescue grass seed - ideal for links courses - not to mention 154 tonnes of refined chicken poo.
The perfect site
Five years ago Edwards flew Australian golf course designer Darius Oliver over from Melbourne to look at a piece of scrappy farmland just south of Levin. (Oliver designed The Farm, a 9-hole par 3 course at The Hills Golf Club where Arrowtown-based Edwards is a member.)
Oliver spent four days walking the 107ha site before telling Edwards: “Hamish, I think you’ve got a nine, or a nine-and-a-half-out-of-10 golf course here.”
Edwards couldn’t have been happier if he’d just hit a hole-in-one.
Right, he thought, now let’s get started and build an 18-hole links course to rival the best in the world. It would be a no-expense-spared legacy project, both the world-class golf course and the hectares of ecological restoration around it.
Fired up, he made a good offer to the landowner, with settlement dependent on obtaining consent. Neither he nor the landowner dreamed it would be five years before Edwards could seal the deal, finally paying for the land this month.
It was a delay that tested Edwards’ resolve to build Douglas Links, named after his late father Douglas Edwards. He admits there were days when he woke and wondered “why the hell am I doing this?” he says. Support from his wife Tineke, his team, the local council and Golf New Zealand kept him going.
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The frustration was evident in earlier conversations in the months before this interview. At one stage he said he wished he’d taken his investment overseas. And, “if you had told me it was going to take five years just to get consent I wouldn’t have bothered with the project”.
Compare that to the how-are-you response once consent was granted in February.
“I am ace,” he said. “Finally, we’re here.”
It was always going to be hard for someone used to click-your-fingers action in the fast-developing world of technology, someone without experience in property development.
“I’ve never done anything in property in my entire life apart from owning my own home,” he says.
Life had previously smiled down on Edwards: a BCom in accounting and marketing at Otago University, five years as a soldier in the New Zealand Army, followed by a stint working at, and modernising, his father’s accounting practice. And then came Xero.
Edwards is a let’s-get-this-done sort of guy who made his fortune by shunting clunky and inefficient accounting software out of the way and, with tech entrepreneur Rod Drury, launching the revolutionary web-based global software platform Xero in Wellington back in 2006.
Within a year Xero was listed on the NZX, and the ASX in 2012. He’s still a shareholder but his sale of Xero shares over the years made Edwards rich, very rich. (He has an estimated fortune of $450 million.)
‘Is this really how it works?’
Edwards’ first reaction when his company, Grenadier Ltd, came up against the consent process was one of disbelief.
“Is this really how it works in New Zealand?” he asked his lawyers, planners and consultants.
“Yes, this is how it works,” they said.
Edwards: “You’ve got to be kidding.”
He was so incensed he wrote a document entitled “New Zealand is broken” and gave it to Resource Management Act (RMA) Reform Minister Chris Bishop. Minister for Regulation David Seymour also got a copy.
“The process is horrible and ridiculous,” Edwards says of the RMA.
“It’s the same for everybody that goes through this process and tears their hair out and goes ‘this is frustrating and terrible’.”
‘There isn’t really a budget’
Edwards wants to put the RMA “horror” behind him.
“Now we get to do the fun stuff.”
For someone who made his living, but not his fortune, as an accountant Edwards is a bit vague about what the delays and consent process have cost him. Around $1.5m he thinks, maybe more.
He’s similarly vague about the Douglas Links budget. Maybe $50m or $60m, he says.
“It’ll be what it’ll be.”
He wants to build the best golf course he can on this wild stretch of coastal land. “So as such, there isn’t really a budget.”
Earthworks are scheduled to start in the middle of the year and, if all goes to plan, he hopes golfers will be playing at Douglas Links in under three years’ time.
Edwards has had a team, including Oliver, ready to go for some time. Brendan Allen, former general manager at The Hills, will head the golf course construction; Wellington businessman and top amateur golfer Tim Wilton will be in charge of construction around the golf course, and will become general manager of Douglas Links; former golf professional Allan McKay (Edwards’ golf coach) is also part of the team.
He comes with a top golfing pedigree, having done stints as head professional, or director of golf, at top courses including Mount Maunganui, Paraparaumu Beach, Queenstown, Millbrook Resort and The Hills.
In his honour, the clubhouse bar will be named “McKay’s”.
The three men are obviously good mates. When we talk about the thousands of natives that need planting, Edwards wonders aloud how many he will plant.
“Three,” retorts Wilton.
The men are all wearing white Douglas Links caps, hastily made for the interview and photos, sporting a logo of a Hairy Maclary-style “Scotty” dog.
Pointing to the logo, Edwards says, “This is my dog. His name is Dougie. He’s going to be our little mascot. Don’t take this thing too seriously Jane. It’s about having fun.”
Having fun is an expression Edwards uses regularly when describing his dream project. He wants golfers to drive down that long country road off the highway towards the sea, have a round of golf, relax in the clubhouse and, most of all, have fun.
There’s a way to go before anyone will be able to knock a small white ball around on this land. Allen has spent the past two and half years working on the site, driving a 30-tonne excavator rigged with a forestry mulcher, grinding away the introduced macrocarpas that cover the giant sand dunes. He sat in the excavator cabin for nine hours a day, headphones on, listening to podcasts about golf design. Now, views of the beach and the river are opening up.
Searching for the ideal site
McKay, too, has been involved in the Douglas Links dream for some time. Edwards asked him to help find the perfect piece of land: coastal so that wind is in play; sand-based; free draining; able to grow fescue grass; and within an hour’s drive of a major city.
The search took the pair to the Wairarapa, Hawke’s Bay, south of Dunedin, even Invercargill. Edwards looked at Oreti Sands Golf Club, the southern-most true links course in the world, which had fallen into disrepair.
Edwards also spent three and a half weeks with Oliver playing golf at top links courses in Scotland and Ireland as part of their research. Building a links course was the only option for Edwards.
“The kind of golf that I think is a lot of fun to play.”
He knows he has to aim high for his links golf course to compete on the world stage. He’s played on 40 to 50 top courses overseas and 30 in New Zealand. (Edwards plays at a 6 or 7 handicap.)
Royal Dornoch in the Scottish highlands is his No 1 favourite.
“That is the best golf course on the planet, for me anyway.”
Royal County Down in Northern Ireland is his second favourite. He lists others that have impressed him: Barnbougle in Tasmania, Sand Valley in Wisconsin, the stunning golf courses between Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, where Oliver hails from, and Melbourne.
“That is golf heaven right there. Unbelievable.”
Closer to home, he says it’s hard not to love Tara Iti, north of Auckland.
“Unbelievably amazing.”
He rates the neighbouring Te Arai courses, loves Kauri Cliffs, and mentions two of his favourite public courses, Paraparaumu Beach Golf Club and Hastings Golf Club.
It’s too early to say what membership and green fees at Douglas Links will be. Edwards isn’t out to make a big profit, with much of the income being ploughed back into the ecological project, but his golf course will at least need to wash its face.
“Don’t think it’s going to be sixty bucks a round,” he warns.
At a guess it’s more likely to be on a par with comparable golf courses - $15,000 for an annual family membership, $250-ish for a round of golf, with a special rate for locals under consideration.
Included in Grenadier Ltd’s consent is the ability to build 10 two-room units, although a decision has yet to be made on whether they will be built.
“We won’t be running a hotel,” Edwards says, but visitors will have the option of staying the night.
Neither will the company sell sections for luxury houses to be built around Douglas Links, unlike some other high-end courses. Well, that is, except for Edwards’ own four-bedroom home. And a stable for his teenage daughter’s horses.
Edwards thought his daughter, currently at boarding school, would be riding her horse along the beach by now. But with the four-year consent delay he thinks she’ll soon be off to uni and not particularly interested in hanging out with her father and his golfing buddies.
Too long, complicated and expensive
Although Edwards acknowledges the consent process is necessary, he takes issue with a process he thinks is unnecessarily complicated, time-consuming and expensive.
The Horowhenua District Council was “brilliant”, he says, granting non-notified consent within six months of the application. But when Horizons (Horowhenua and Manawatū-Whanganui) Regional Council became involved, permission for the earthworks was declined because of opposition from an iwi, Ngāti Tukorehe. Two other local iwi, Ngāti Kikopiri and the Muaūpoko Tribal Authority (MTA), supported the proposal.
As a result, the matter went before the Environment Court: Horizons against Grenadier Ltd.
The Environment Court judges found in Grenadier’s favour, pointing out it was better to allow the development to go ahead but with conditions to protect areas of sensitivity, rather than decline the application and leave those areas unprotected.
As a result the Douglas Links development will include a 2ha cultural heritage area, off limits to humans.
“There is an area of sensitivity there which we respect and we will leave that alone,” Edwards says.
The golf course will largely be powered by huge solar panels hidden on the club room’s roof and the greens will be mowed by robotic electric mowers. Water will come from a bore, fed by the Tararua Ranges and caught just before it discharges into the sea.
As part of the consent, the district council has reclassified a strip of a foreshore reserve, granting a 33-year licence, with two rights of renewal, to Grenadier to use the esplanade for part of the golf course. The company will also need to build and maintain a public walkway to the beach.
One of the first tasks will be to restore dunes flattened by a previous owner who bulldozed a big area with the idea of establishing a giant chicken farm.
“We are going to turn it back to what the dune scape should really look like,” Edwards says.
This project is not just about golf, he says. “It’s about being in a place off the beaten track. The land is amazing but unless you do something with it no one will go there.”
Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based business, features and investigations journalist, former assistant editor of NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.
