National's Mega Donors.

Nick Mowbray, Balloonaire.

Recently I’ve written about the enormous amount of money being invested in the National and ACT parties in order to get them elected. Huge donations, dwarfing contributions to the parties of the left, from the mega rich who want this government gone.

This is the first, and possibly the last, in a series looking at the people writing the large cheques, and influencing our democracy. Today we’ll look at Billionaire Nick Mowbray, who last year gave the National Party a quarter of a million dollars. A larger donation than any other party received from an individual.

It was also reported in March that Nick gave $100k to the ACT Party.

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Nick describes himself as an entrepreneur, a label seemingly favoured by those who want us to know how innovative and important they are. Personally if I had a Billion dollars and owned the Dotcom mansion, I’d go with arch-villain. But that’s just me.

He has gone from being a student at St Peter’s, an elite private school in the Waikato, to owning and running a successful organisation with 5,000 employees in over 30 global locations. Nick, along with his siblings, has taken a business from door to door sales out of Mom and Pop’s garage to the Walmarts of America via the factories of China. Their company, Zuru, makes toys.

Lots and lots of plastic toys. They’re best known for their product Bunch o Balloons, which enables you to fill and tie a 100-pack of water balloons in less than 60 seconds!

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We all know plastic is bad for our planet. I’m guessing there is a Turtle suffering an agonising death right now as a result of the plastics in our oceans. Not to mention who knows what cancers are growing inside of us as a result of plastic material entering the food chain. Still, imagine being a kid again - 100 water balloons in 60 seconds!

So you’d want to do be doing something about all that plastic you’re releasing, at least for the purposes of public relations. Mummies and Daddies might decide buying plastic, that’ll just be thrown out, might not be leading to the sort of future they want for their precious wee ones. It seems that Zuru is swimming against the tide of history.

When Nick won EY's New Zealand Entrepreneur of the Year award, sustainability consultant Campbell Sturrock said, "I don't think celebrating producing 400,000 pieces of plastic a day is contributing to building a better world."

Sturrock, who has more than 20 years experience in corporate sustainability, says celebrating an entrepreneur who has made a fortune out of producing plastic goods was not in line with where the world is heading. "It just seemed completely out of step with everything that's going on. It's completely irresponsible."

​Sturrock says Zuru is guilty of green washing, a term used when companies attempt to appear environmentally friendly by making unsubstantiated or misleading claims about their commitment to the environment and sustainability.

However, Zuru's website says sustainability is a commitment to current and future generations to leave the world a better place.

Zuru are also experiencing other issues that might discourage parents from purchasing their products. Last month it was reported that “about 7.5 million singing and swimming “Baby Shark” bath toys are being recalled in the United States after multiple lacerations and puncture wounds were reported in children playing with them”.

To be fair Nick has ambitions to do something much more important than Bunch o Balloons or Baby Sharks. He wants to build houses, as he says here:

“The Tech team have developed some of the leading architectural software in the world where you can design and view your home in real time including staging furniture. The home is then built on fully automated production lines by robots and shipped to site for assembly. ZURU Tech details are still very much under wraps but we can disclose that we are in the process of building one of the world’s largest factories and have prepared a multitude of unique patent claims.”

So that sounds pretty good, and clearly the Waikato lad has learnt about the importance of trade marks and patents. You might have seen a Stuff article last week on Zuru’s trade mark case against Lego. A court battle over their use of the Lego name on the packaging of their own plastic bricks. The judge ruled in favour of the Danish company saying “Zuru’s claim failed in it’s entirety”.

In addition to the numerous IP infringements Nick says they’ve made over the years, Zuru have also had their problems with disgruntled employees leaving feedback on website GlassDoor. If you’re unfamiliar with Glassdoor it allows employees to post anonymous reviews of companies and share salary information.

Zuru sued Glassdoor over these anonymous posts, and won. A Californian judge ruled that Glassdoor must hand over the identities of those who posted the negative reviews about Zuru to the company. Judge Alex Tse’s decision said the reviews refer to Zuru as a “[b]urn out factory” with a “toxic culture,” where an “incompetent” management team “consistently talk[s] down” to employees and treats them like “dirt”. He said that the reviews make Zuru “sound like a horrible place to work”.

Zuru says these and similar statements are false and have cost them financially. They now plan to sue the former employees who anonymously provided the reviews.

Glassdoor can provide useful feedback to a business, provided they are open to it and can accept the odd disgruntled employee comment along with it. Some can’t and load up Glassdoor with positive reviews added by HR, which everyone in the company knows are fake. Zuru didn’t do that, they demanded that those with critical things to say be named. As a result Glassdoor now displays the following warning for Zuru.

OK, so the guy is a tough businessman, but what’s that got to do with the National Party? Well it turns out Nick has quite a lot to say in the political arena, and if you think Christopher Luxon talks down Team New Zealand, well let’s just say Nick is definitely a tumbler half empty kind of guy.

For example his post on LinkedIn yesterday, the Social Media platform choice of Entrepreneurs:

“If NZ was a company or a stock our share price would be at an all time low. If we were a sports team we would be bottom of the ladder…

The share [sic] magnitude of the miss management if you add it all up is staggering. Time to get the right Leadership. The right talent. The right culture. The right priorities…

NZ can win again.”

Nick also likes to go on Twitter. Between retweeting the likes of Elon Musk, The NZ Taxpayers’ Union, and opposition MPs, Nick also offers his own thoughts as to just how awful things are.

So not a big fan of government spending then. He’s also made numerous tweets indicating his displeasure at the suggestion of tax increases. Nick might be interested to know that in New Zealand, his Venezuela of the South Pacific, the average single worker faced a net average tax rate of 20.1% in 2022, compared with the OECD average of 24.6%.

Nick also seems to particularly dislike the Greens. Hmm, I wonder why a man who makes billions of dollars, using labour in China, to mass produce plastic, dislikes the Greens so much? That was a rhetorical question, but feel free to answer anyway.

To be fair to the man, I’ll give him credit for the fact that despite being a billionaire, he clearly still does his own social media. I’m assuming this based on the way he handled this query about Zuru’s Shenzhen office on Twitter at 11:17PM on Friday.

Why should we care?

I don’t much care for Nick’s reckons, but that’s all right we’re not electing people based on his views. Or are we? Surely if he’s making a donation he either wants some benefit in return, or he is funding something that he feels represents his views. I guess that’s just chicken and egg semantics.

I also don’t like what Nick Mowbray does. Trendy toys that will rapidly fall out of fashion and into landfill. But producing plastic like this is not a crime. He’s entitled to make money however he wants, regardless of what people who feel differently think.

He can do what he wants and it’s no one else’s business - right up to the point where he starts impacting elections beyond his single vote, as a major donor, and also as a political influencer with his social media profile and the media platform given to him.

We don’t allow Public Servants who express political views to continue in their roles. Why should we allow “entrepreneurs” like Nick, who are outspoken critics of the government, and financial backers of the opposition, to have government involvement.

Can you imagine, for example, if a future National government were to offer Nick’s company a contract, for a lot of money, to construct houses? Would that “donation” still be a “donation”, or would we then call that something else?

So what does Nick want?

Maybe Nick just loves unbridled commerce? It has treated him very well. I don’t actually think he has an ulterior motive for his donation. I mean, what could the government possibly offer a man of Nick’s means?

Cheaper Labour? Maybe, although it seems unlikely Nick would want us to compete on labour costs with his factories in China.

Fewer environmental protections? They don’t really seem to be impeding his business at the moment. Perhaps if enough people voted for the Greens, then maybe someone might say yeah nah, it’s time these plastic toys went the way of single use supermarket bags and plastic straws. But that would only apply in Aotearoa.

A contract with the government? There is no reason to think Nick needs this. Although we should certainly be on the lookout for any involvement between Zuru, or any of the companies owned by large donors, and a future National Government.

A public/private Social Housing partnership with Zuru, mass producing homes. It sounds good in principle - but any such an arrangement, if it ever eventuated, would look like contracts for contributions.

Perhaps one thing to take from all this. Next time you’re buying a toy for you kids, or your grandkids, at the Warehouse or Toys R Us. When you come across a collection of bright, colourful toys from Zuru. Don’t just think of it as buying more plastic.

Much better to think of it like this - when you buy Zuru you are helping Nick, to help the National Party, to get elected.

Now, who’s up for a water fight?

I wouldn’t normally say this, but you might like to check out the YouTube comments on this one. The music is pretty great too.