Graeme Hunt: Hustlers, Rogues and Bubble Boys

By JIM EAGLES Herald business editor

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report on New Zealand last month registered concern at the low regard for entrepreneurs in this country.

"The term entrepreneur," it noted, "is sometimes equated by the public with dishonesty and opportunism. An entrepreneur's success is seen as being at the expense of other people."

Certainly anyone listening to the chattering classes - including many politicians - could be forgiven for imagining that New Zealand is in the middle of a white-collar crime wave. This book provides a helpful corrective to that particular silliness.

Graeme Hunt's combing of newspapers, libraries, official records, encyclopaedias and other sources shows there is remarkably little business misconduct in this country. It also demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, the corporate excesses that have occurred have not been confined to the more market-oriented 1980s and 1990s.

Probably the worst period for white-collar chicanery was the first 50 years of colonisation, when land-grabbing, abuse of public office for personal gain, misleading investors and straight-out fraud reached extraordinary levels.

By those standards, the corporate scene today is extremely law-abiding - only a tiny proportion of the country's estimated 350,000 entrepreneurs ever go astray.

All of that said, there is no doubt New Zealand has experienced some spectacular rip-offs and disgraceful betrayals of ethics. Hunt has performed a useful service in pulling them all together into the one volume.

It is not a particularly well-constructed work - more a catalogue of events than a coherently linked narrative - but it is packed with interesting information.

It ought to be compulsory reading for all those who imagine that the lifting of the suffocating controls in recent years has somehow transformed New Zealand business into the Wild West.

Reed Publishing

$39.95

* Jim Eagles is the Herald business editor.