International Kiwi

Doug Myers is wary of New Zealanders' attitudes towards those with money. Photo / Janna Dixon

On her return from the America's Cup circuit in Spain two years ago, socialite Gilda Kirkpatrick remarked over lunch with broadcaster Paul Holmes that the most beautiful New Zealand boat she saw belonged to Doug Myers.

Myers who, with other wealthy yacht owners, visited Spain's Palma de Mallorca on his 194-foot adventure superyacht Senses for the glamorous Millennium Cup regatta, considers this remark.

"I think," he says, munching on a ham and tomato toasted sandwich at an Auckland cafe, "it's the most beautiful boat in the world."

He says this without a hint of self-consciousness. And he doesn't lay claim to Senses' beauty. Her "beautiful lines" are to the credit of a previous owner, he says. Not that Auckland's Viaduct is likely to catch a glimpse of the vessel, even if Senses could fit in.

Myers is wary of flaunting his wealth, wary of a Kiwi attitude to other Kiwis with money; he's not sure at his age he wants to be bothered with it all.

His New Zealand summers are spent mostly hidden away on the family farm at Matauri Bay looking out at the Cavalli Islands from a no-frills 70s house.

He has emerged for a few appointments - catching up with friends and business colleagues, an interview with the Herald on Sunday, a photograph with this year's Myers Scholar, Arkesh Patel, and to fly to Wellington to give the vote of thanks to Stephen Jennings, the Kiwi billionaire who founded the Moscow-based global investment bank Renaissance Capital, who delivered the Business Roundtable's annual Sir Ron Trotter lecture.

This week he'll fly out to join Senses in Noumea for a couple of weeks' fishing with friends.

He's had an offer to buy the boat that morning on his well-used BlackBerry, which means there must be at least one tycoon left out there with money.

He might sell, Myers shrugs. He and his half-French-Tahitian, half-English wife Barbara, are on their second time round the world - including Alaska and up the Amazon River - and "there's not that much left to see".

After New Caledonia he'll return to his base in London for another operation on his pesky heart, which has let him down badly.

That, and dealing with prostate cancer, a shoulder operation and a leg still feeling the effects of a fight with a jetski three years ago, has left him a little put out with his 70-year-old body and fed up with doctors in general.

However he can still think and observe and talk, all of which he does well, apart from a habit of mumbling which, in a cafe with enough barista banging and general din to compete with Beirut, makes him almost impossible to hear.

He admits he is feeling a little more cheerful after observing Prime Minister John Key in action. He detects a change of attitude in New Zealand and thinks Key will succeed because "he is a nice person", a "toughie" with a good manner.

"I think Key genuinely wants to see New Zealanders doing well."

Myers gives him a tick for being the only Prime Minister who has worked overseas (the inference being Key had a real job rather than being an academic or involved in trade unions), and having come from a humble but hard-working background and made money.

Myers makes no secret of his disdain for Helen Clark, who he admits is "super smart" but he says had "an agenda" and was not a "servant of the people". He argues that Clark's Labour Government spent more time trying to "bring the top down" rather than concentrating on bringing "the bottom up". "I think her vision of New Zealand is not mine, and I think she's wrong."

He's spent the past Labour/Clark-controlled summers at Matauri Bay feeling increasingly "pissed off" and, since 2002, retreating to England where he could shrug off the failures and problems he saw around him.

He could get on with his personal and business life and not really care if the country "self-destructed" around him.

But he admits his heart is - and always has been - in New Zealand and he will probably one day come back to live.

In the meantime he's backing the best, brightest, all-round students as New Zealand's hope, each year, funding a Myers Scholarship and another to send a King's College teacher overseas. He also donated $1 million to the Auckland Business School for a visiting lecturer to teach free-market thinking.

Myers rejects any suggestion he is trying to influence the business school's teaching.

He's sure someone else will be busy teaching the opposite view and at least he knows free-market theories are in the mix.

Exposing Kiwis to a world beyond is a consistent theme with Myers. Possibly, he admits, that stems from his experience as a child when he was bullied for being different (he grew up largely outside New Zealand) and from finding the country "smug" and "colonial" when he returned from Cambridge in 1965 in his mid-20s.

Back then Myers did all the things expected of a young man from a background of wealth and privilege.

He joined the Middlemore Golf Club and became a member of the Auckland Racing Club, paid his dues for 40 years, and never once went.

He also joined the Northern Club but is a rare sight at its lunch tables.

Having only wanted to be the same as other young Kiwis when he was a child, now he was "terrified" his life would slip into a predictable rut.

These days he warns the bright young students who apply for his scholarship that they will come back different people and if they don't want their lives to change, they shouldn't go.

He is fond of saying New Zealand's problem is not so much its isolation in distance but in attitude - hence his insistence that scholars funded with his money will study abroad.

It was a theme taken up by Jennings in his Roundtable address, in which he said New Zealand needed to move quickly to change its attitudes and policies otherwise its economic growth would be overtaken by emerging countries.

He pointed to our relatively low ranking by the World Economic Forum and the large number of young Kiwis who had chosen to follow careers overseas as indicators that all was not well at home.

Jennings said MMP had to go to allow for strong leadership, and that economic and business success needed to be celebrated in a country where the people were culturally conditioned "not to stand out in a crowd". Myers agrees with all these points.

He acknowledges that the average New Zealander will look at Jennings, with his billions, and Myers, with his millions, and dismiss them as rich businessmen who have no idea what it's like to struggle to pay a mortgage or to lose a job.

But Myers makes no apology for being wealthy or being born into money. To borrow a favourite Myers expression: "It's just the way it is."

If anything, having plenty of money is a disadvantage, he says, in New Zealand, at least.

Myers is only half joking when he says if public figures can find a "truck driver" father or uncle to put on their CVs - or in Key's case a Jewish mother raising her family in a state house - then that's an advantage.

The closest Myers gets to that sort of claim is to say that he was "born in Glen Innes". Technically he was.

His parents, Kenneth and Margaret Myers, recreated a corner of England on 24ha of land, now rezoned as Glendowie, which ran down to an estuary where a young Douglas Myers happily fished.

The large brick Georgian house is still there, but the formal lawns and gardens have long since been subdivided.

Being born into money is "the worst thing", he says, and is a contributing reason why he lives in London.

So do his three children, Jessica, Laura and Campbell, and his three grandchildren.

But then again, it comes in handy.

Myers and his wife have just bought an English country home, a 200-year-old house with soaring ceilings in a tiny Surrey town with "no pubs and no shops" on the edge of a forest. Barbara Myers is overseeing the renovation and Myers is obliging by keeping out of the way.

Later this year the couple will cruise Indonesia on Senses for two months with friends - and 13 crew, including several New Zealanders and a Kiwi skipper. After that it's on to the Seychelles.

The yacht has an aft master cabin 12m wide, and a chic interior done by French designer Philippe Starck, the kind of interior design that if you have to ask the price you can't afford it.

It has its own helicopter, which Myers brought to New Zealand so he could explore rugged parts of the South Island.

A generous two hours is up and Myers' next appointment is due.

With perfect private-school politeness he glances surreptitiously at his magnificent limited-edition Philip Stein watch - which he managed to buy recently after jumping a seven-year waiting list - and murmurs, "Well, I mustn't keep you any longer."

Maybe age has mellowed him but there has been little sign of Myers' trademark swearing during our chat. Being "pissed off" at New Zealand's direction is as colourful as it gets.

As he settles the bill for his toasted sandwich Myers proudly pulls from his wallet a handwritten card from his 8-year-old granddaughter, who has been staying with him at Matauri Bay. "Douglas Myers," she has written in curly, joined-up writing, "please stop saying the 'f' word and 'b' word."

That explains a lot.