Govt timed its move on Hubbard: writer

Photo / Sarah Ivey

The Government arranged a "controlled demolition" of Allan Hubbard and his South Canterbury Finance company on a timetable designed to do it the least political damage, his biographer claims.

Virginia Green, in Allan Hubbard: A Man Out of Time, describes the rise and demise of someone revered in South Canterbury but misunderstood in other parts of the country.

Mr Hubbard had avoided public scrutiny and Green says that when she started writing his biography in 2007, neither of them could have imagined what would happen over the next few years.

The book opens with Mr Hubbard's early years of poverty when the family's rented Dunedin home had no electricity or hot water, and all five children slept in one of the two bedrooms, the two girls sharing a bed. The furniture was of the apple box variety, while sacks doubled as blankets.

"For bathing and food preparation, the family had to make do with a scullery sink and a single tap," Green writes.

"Once a month, Margaret Hubbard would heat water and wash her family in a tin tub on the kitchen floor."

Mr Hubbard's mother worked hard to raise her children and keep them clean and fed, taking in washing and working late into the night. Not so his father, a plumber by trade but too fond of gambling and booze - and a man not scared to beat his eldest children.

Allan Hubbard was 6 when he decided poverty would not feature in his future, prompted by seeing his mother unable to pay the milkman.

"I decided I was never going to be so poor I couldn't pay the milkman," he told Green.

He achieved that goal, and this year was reported to be worth $550 million. Now it is gone, as have his companies, two of which are being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office.

Mr Hubbard, wife, Jean, and some of their firms were put into statutory management and the couple get an allowance of $1000 a week - "more than they'd ever spent on themselves before", Green writes.

Mr Hubbard's flagship company, South Canterbury Finance, is not in statutory management but its inclusion in the Retail Deposit Guarantee Scheme - designed to protect investors in failed finance companies - put it in the Government's sights.

Green believes the receivership, announced on August 31, was executed with precision.

"My conclusion is that there was a controlled demolition of SCF on a timetable that suited the Government," she said.

"They wanted to get control so that it could be dismantled quickly or, rather, it could be liquidated on a convenient timetable."

That timetable was to be nowhere near an election as taxpayers had to swallow a $1.6 billion bailout of the company through the guarantee scheme.

Green hopes her book can explain Hubbard and what kind of man he is.

"I'm hoping that once people read this book, the Kiwi sense of fair play will reassert itself ... Allan always tried to do his best for everyone."

- NZPA