This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation, the Auckland anniversary floods, arts patron Sir James Wallace’s prison sentence, the election of Christopher’s Luxon government and the All Blacks’ narrow defeat in the Rugby World Cup final.
The following are 23 of the best-read Premium articles in 2023.
Inside Head Hunters’ luxury overseas trip
A squad of Head Hunter gang members have enjoyed a round-the-world holiday flying business class, staying in luxurious hotels and visiting ‘bucket list’ tourist attractions.
Earlier this year the group travelled to Cambodia, Dubai, Egypt, Rome, Paris and Greece and like many tourists, posted photographs of their dream destinations on social media.
Led by an influential member of the “Northside” faction of the gang’s East chapter in Auckland, the five Head Hunters have filmed themselves riding dune buggies and camels in the desert, brandishing guns and firing rocket launchers on a shooting range, and cruising on a boat in the blue waters of the Mediterranean.
Photographs posted on several Instagram accounts show the gang members sitting in business class, without their shirts on, when leaving New Zealand.
The ostentatious lifestyle displayed publicly by the Head Hunters on social media is an example of the generational change in gang culture, a new breed of gangster dubbed the “Nike Bikie” in Australia.
Where the first generation of gang members were often unkempt and wore scruffy leather, the modern gangster is cleancut and more likely to wear designer clothing.
Who wrote ‘letters of support’ for Sir James Wallace?
Some of New Zealand’s biggest names in film, art and classical music wrote letters ahead of disgraced patron Sir James Wallace’s sentencing - many asking for leniency from the judge for his decades of philanthropy.
Named earlier this year as the prominent businessman who assaulted three men and twice tried to pervert the course of justice, Wallace had ahead of his May 2021 sentencing twice emailed more than 100 people and organisations asking for letters of support to present to the judge. In the follow-up email, which the Herald has seen, he does not disclose the nature of the charges but says he is innocent and states: “we will win the appeal”.
“I would doubt I would survive any period in prison. In these circumstances, innocent people can and do rot in jail only to be cleared some time later. Such is the law,” the former rich lister said.
Wallace wrote to his friends and industry leaders while fighting the Herald and other media for six years to keep his identity hidden.
In all, 89 letters were written by actors, writers, artists, musicians, academics and political figures to High Court Justice Geoffrey Venning in April and May 2021.
The judge said “the letters of support were an important consideration in the sentence ultimately imposed” when he granted the Herald access to publish them. He explained they allowed a 30 per cent reduction to Wallace’s eventual two-year and four-month prison term.
Revealed: NZ’s top 50 builders
Private family-owned Mansons TCLM has the lion’s share of commercial building work in New Zealand according to a top 50 list of companies ranked by the value of work.
The BCI Construction League, released in April, said Mansons has $857m of work at three huge sites: the $650m Fifty Albert St, ex-New Zealand Herald site between Wyndham and Swanson Sts, where new offices are rising; commercial work at 121-127 and 129-135 Beaumont St, a 6711sq m Wynyard quarter site near Fanshawe St; and the nine-level 13,865sq m $250m Aurecon House, Carlton Gore Rd, leased to Aurecon for 12 years.
The Herald featured 10 of the 50 builders whose projects started last year.
The inside story of Jacinda Ardern’s resignation
On Friday, January 13, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told one of the very few people who knew she was thinking about resigning that she had made her final decision.
She was at her home in Sandringham, Auckland, having spent the summer between Gisborne with her fiance Clarke Gayford’s family and Tairua with her own parents.
Her chief of staff, Raj Nahna, flew up, as he did every year, to talk through the plan for the year ahead with her: the usual caucus retreat, the start of Parliament, the focus for the year and the election.
This time Nahna had brought two plans: one for if she was staying and one for if she was going.
Her Deputy PM and closest friend Grant Robertson was usually at that same January meeting, but this year was not able to get there because of an appointment in Wellington.
He arrived later that day and went out for dinner with Ardern to Cazador in Dominion Rd, ahead of a day at the tennis the next day.
At the table next to them were a couple of tourists who had no idea who she was. Other customers told them it was the Prime Minister after Ardern left.
Those other customers had no idea Ardern had just decided to quit the job.
Political editor Claire Trevett traced the inside story of Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation.
Marc Ellis: Why I’m leaving NZ
Marc Ellis is among the best-loved sports characters this country has ever had, a man with a maverick style that lifted the spirits.
Now the flamboyant former test back is trying to inject some magic back into rugby, a sport he says has lost its way.
The Ellis X-factor thrived in the All Blacks, Highlanders, Otago, Warriors and Kiwis.
That morphed into a successful business and TV career, where he mixed smarts with the larrikin persona so attractive to the public.
The 51-year-old Ellis now heads a group, including former test stars Taine Randell and John Timu, which has bought an 11 per cent share of their beloved Highlanders.
Ellis, who will be their board representative, believes a greater sense of fun can be good business for rugby union, and is hoping the struggling Highlanders can help spark that revival.
The Herald caught up with Ellis as he was about to depart for Italy in July, with plans to live there, saying New Zealand had lost its mojo.
Ellis talked about his hopes for rugby and love of the high-flying Warriors, why he was planning to quit this country as his main home, his faith in Scott Robertson, World Cup concerns, and more.
A rare insight into gang’s alleged chief
How did Wayne Doyle amass his wealth?
The Police Commissioner says it was largely because of his role as president of the Head Hunters, one of New Zealand’s oldest, largest and most sophisticated organised crime groups.
But Doyle has not been charged with or convicted of any offence since he was last released from prison in 2001.
During the first week of his judge-alone Criminal Proceeds Recovery Act trial in October, the court heard evidence from detectives who had gained knowledge of the outlaw motorcycle gang over the years.
Prosecutor Conrad Purdon, acting for the Police Commissioner, said Doyle’s personal wealth has grown considerably over the past 20 years despite his only real source of declared legitimate income being benefits.
During the trial veteran organised crime detectives gave a rare insight into the workings of the Head Hunters and the man alleged to be its chief.
How much NZ’s top bosses get paid
The country’s most powerful bosses have cashed in on the pre-Covid bull market, with the value of the average chief executive pay packet soaring over the past year.
Packages for chief executives of some of the country’s biggest firms increased by an average of 14.13 per cent in the 2022 financial year compared to the previous corresponding period as measured by the Business Herald Executive Pay Survey.
In many cases the increase was driven by incentive schemes, including performance bonuses that are tied to a company’s share price over a defined period.
For example, in one case a chief executive received a long-term incentive payout last year that reflected share price performance from mid-2018 to mid-2021. The S&P NZX50 index peaked in January 2021 but has fallen about 13.5 per cent since then.
The average CEO pay for the top NZX-listed companies was a record $2.29 million in 2022, up from $2m in 2021 and $1.82m in 2020, a year in which the average fell 1.25 per cent on 2019 due to Covid-induced salary sacrifices.
Flood fury: Wayne Brown’s 30-minute call with the Herald
“Don’t f**k me over,” says Wayne Brown, mayor of Auckland, after about 30 minutes of a frank discussion with the Herald.
Brown rang the Herald on a Monday night at the start of the year after a request for comment about his message to his tennis group that he couldn’t play on Sunday because he had “to deal with media drongos over the flooding tomorrow”.
“I am the mayor for three years. You can’t do anything about that,” he said. “No one else in New Zealand is going to get 180,000 votes. That was my mandate.
When talking to Brown, there are times when it feels like there’s an Antipodean echo of Trump-like self-endorsement.
There’s the reflex to self-justify and defend himself. There’s the prickly relationship with the media, the biggest vote count claims and then while criticising Auckland Transport he told the Herald he “could have done better” if he was doing their job.
It’s been difficult for Auckland to get to know its new mayor. Brown refused 106 media requests in his first month, granting only two interviews. His press conferences are few and opportunities to grab him for interviews at events emerge only rarely.
Rating the top candidates for next Public Service Commissioner
Ask those who should know and two names emerge as the best in class of New Zealand’s public service leaders.
The first is former diplomat Brook Barrington, currently on leave as the chief executive of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
The other is Belfast-born Naomi Ferguson, who last year finished as head of Inland Revenue.
Both are considered the outstanding public sector leaders of their time who would be the strongest contenders to replace Peter Hughes as Public Service Commissioner next year, when his term is up.
But there is no certainty either would want it and succession is more in the thinking stage than the planning phase.
If neither was keen on the Public Service Commission (PSC) job, the field is open with some clear possibilities but no clear favourite.
Audrey Young looks at New Zealand’s public service leaders and which ones are shaping up as possible contenders to take over from Hughes.
Scotty Stevenson on his wife Claire’s death
A former All Black wrote a lovely message to Scotty “Sumo” Stevenson on the first anniversary of his wife Claire Silvester’s death. “Good people attract great people,” offered Wyatt Crockett. “You’ll always have special people on your side brother! Love you, mate.”
Stevenson – “Sumo”, as the world knows him, by deed of his once-but-no-longer bulky frame – has always seen the good in people, epitomised by the way he conducts himself in the rugby commentary box and on the sideline.
It may be unorthodox – possibly even frowned upon by some old-school broadcasters – but he is genuine friends or close to many of the players he’s critiquing. He is most certainly never cruel, operating by a mantra that he’s always answerable to a player’s mother.
Stevenson’s compassion came to the fore in the heartbreaking final months of Claire’s life as he looked after her full time.
The TVNZ senior producer suffered a seizure in late November 2020 and was diagnosed with brain cancer in the following weeks. She died in February 2022, aged just 50.
Stevenson spoke to Shayne Currie earlier this year, opening up on heartbreak, a new life as a solo parent to two boys, and men’s health.
C-section scrap: Private obstetricians fume
In April this year it was revealed New Zealand’s largest hospital put stricter conditions on new private obstetricians, amid concerns about high rates of caesarean sections.
The rules have been criticised as “impractical and inappropriate” by the Auckland Association of Private Obstetricians, which says there are valid reasons why women under the care of private specialists are more likely to have a caesarean.
However, Auckland City Hospital management says the new regime “strikes an appropriate balance between public and private care”.
In 2020 the hospital stopped allowing more private obstetricians to access birthing facilities, citing their high caesarean rates.
Hospital leaders were also unhappy that many women paying for such specialist care lived outside its central Auckland catchment, but gave birth at the hospital because it was where their obstetrician was based.
That put more pressure on an understaffed system struggling with demand, the hospital said.
However, emails obtained by the Weekend Herald reveal the “pause” has ended, after hospital leadership reasoned it would be too controversial to continue indefinitely.
The McDonald’s franchisee power list
Some McDonald’s Kiwi franchisees own five or six outlets: happy times for Happy Meals for this crew.
They’re often husband-and-wife teams who didn’t start out wealthy but had a big serving of chutzpah.
Much of the store profits aren’t going into the Chicago giant’s pockets either. Instead, they are enriching Kiwi business owners who bought franchises, supporting communities via sport and charity.
It takes guts, time, and a fair wad of cash to buy into the world’s biggest restaurant chain if you’re a Kiwi. Many of the stores are owned by the American parent.
To get a prized franchise these days, you’ll need at least $1.7m, perhaps money to buy the property, undergo a full-time unpaid year-long training programme and agree to a stringent set of rules, the corporation indicates.
Yet around 50 highly driven individuals or couples have done precisely that and often it’s second-generation owners these days.
They are the wealthy, busy owners of a select number of stores in areas with high populations, often operating 24-hour-a-day businesses spending millions every year on food, packaging, wages, electricity, cleaning, repairs and maintenance.
Their struggles? Insiders say that just like the rest of us: the fast-changing economy, inflation, rising wage bills, import holdups and labour shortages.
These entrepreneurial 50 or so are Kiwis working to the knock-out formula of the world’s biggest food retailing empire: 39,000 outlets, 119 countries.
Jaimee Lupton on the heartache of losing a baby and infertility struggle
We look like two women meeting for a catch-up in an Auckland cafe, chatting about this and that. No one would guess, glancing at us, that the subject is about heartbreak, loss, unimaginable grief.
Jaimee Lupton is talking about losing her baby daughter “Gingernut” at 24 weeks, the result of a much tried-for pregnancy after IVF treatment. And a miscarriage after that, and more rounds of failed embryo implants.
The memories are still painful but Lupton, at least from outward appearances, is calm and controlled. She wants to share what she calls an “incredibly isolating” journey so other women going through it don’t feel alone.
At first she thought she’d talk later on, “After I’ve got my baby and my happy ending”.
But she realised that would be pointless. How could she connect with couples trying unsuccessfully to have a child while she was bouncing a baby on her knee?
“I’d be doing others who have gone through the same thing a disservice if I didn’t speak about my experience.”
And by speaking out, she wants to change the perception that women’s health issues are a private issue.
In October, more than a year on from the loss of her baby daughter, Lupton and partner Nick Mowbray announced she’s expecting a baby.
Prior to this, in an exclusive interview in June, Lupton talked to Jane Phare about the heartache of losing a baby and struggling with infertility.
Seismic shift in Christchurch gang scene
The Quake city gang scene rumbled with a seismic shift earlier this year, when an entire chapter of the Rebels MC “patched over” to the notorious Comancheros.
The move has sent shockwaves through the underworld, the Herald understands, and led to fears of new gang tensions.
It will be seen as a humiliation for the Rebels, an outlaw motorcycle club that originated across the ditch and is among the biggest in Australia.
The Rebels and Comancheros have always had close links in New Zealand, particularly Rebels MC Christchurch president Luke Mathers and former Comancheros national acting commander Seiana Fakaosilea.
The relationship between Fakaosilea and Mathers dates back to when they both lived in Queensland. Police Operation Cincinnati revealed Fakaosilea was delivering large quantities of methamphetamine to Mathers.
Is this Auckland’s wildest bar?
When 2023 dawned, BayLuck Karaoke & Lounge was recovering from a New Year’s Eve party where “VVIP” tables went for $1500 a pop, while planning for another year of raucous, lucrative events.
Meanwhile, police and Auckland Council officials were doing everything in their power to stop the venue selling alcohol, saying it had become a magnet for mayhem, citing stabbings and a shooting linked to patrons.
The CBD bar’s legal problems were about to get a whole lot worse.
As authorities battled to stop a downtown karaoke bar selling alcohol, a Herald investigation revealed the untold story of the short but colourful life of BayLuck Karaoke.
Fletcher Hawkesby’s cancer battle
Gretchen Hawkesby burst into tears when she told her son Fletcher he had testicular cancer.
The mother-of-four and daughter of New Zealand’s richest man, Graeme Hart, was usually the one supporting other families’ sick children - as the former vice-chairwoman of the Starship Foundation, which has raised millions of dollars.
Gretchen told the Herald on Sunday she would swap places with her son if she could.
“Finding out Fletch had cancer freaked me out, it’s not something you want your kid to go through at all. He should be down at Otago living it up and having fun with his mates, running amok, not here at home with Mum and Dad. He is a legend, and I have drawn strength from him. He has a very good sense of humour and pulls the cancer card to avoid doing the dishes.”
In his first interview with the Herald in May, Fletcher, 18, said he was on a mission to create awareness about testicular cancer and to encourage young men to “give those jewels a fondle”.
“All you do is grab your testicle, move your thumb around it like a joystick, like you’re holding a controller, then feel them up. If you feel anything other than a smooth sphere, get them checked immediately.”
In August 2022, he felt a lump on his left testicle but ignored it because he thought it was hormonal.
But when the lump became painful in January, his mother sent him to see the family GP on his own. An ultrasound revealed he had stage 1 testicular cancer.
In June, Fletcher got the good news he is cancer free.
Top consultants, contractors making the most money from the public sector
Government spending on outside help from contractors and consultants is a long-standing political football. And while stories of waste and eye-watering fees are perennial, they come into sharp focus in an election campaign.
In the 2021-22 fiscal year – the most recent for which the Public Service Commission has published data – spending on contractors and consultants by core public service departments and ministries rose to $1.2 billion, an increase of $303.7m or 32 per cent over the previous year.
While the Public Service Commission (PSC) publishes totals for each public agency, there is no data which aggregates how much each firm made across the public service - or indeed, across the wider public sector.
The Herald has made a limited tally. It looked at the 10 core public service agencies with the highest contractor and consultant spending and totalled the 10 most highly-paid providers of consultant and contractor services to those agencies.
How an original biker gang outwitted rivals
It was the envy of all South Island gangs. A vast, archetypal bikies clubhouse, nestled in the industrial fringe, just out of sight, but commanding enough for everyone to know they are there, and around.
Lofty fortified fences and steel gates surrounded two sprawling acres, while spying cameras also protected the two-storey pad housing a fully equipped bar, resplendent with pool tables, grunty motorbikes, carved bar-tops, tables and other Devils Henchmen MC gang insignia.
The Henchmen had been a famed and feared presence in the South Canterbury town of Timaru for decades. A long-running beef with rival outlaws, the Road Knights MC, were still talked about in hushed tones by locals, recalling the car and firebombs, armed home invasions, shootings and drive-bys from the early 90s – gang warfare once described by cops as “Wild West stuff”.
The Henchmen were pretty chill these days though, with original members getting on in years. They were described as model neighbours, never any issue.
But any serenity the Devils Henchmen may have had was brutally snapped over the weekend of May 6-7.
Seemingly without warning, a squad of heavy-hitting, patched Rebels MC gang members, including senior figures, rolled south from their Christchurch pad.
They were on a mission: to take over the Henchmen’s mighty clubhouse.
When armed members of the Rebels MC gang stormed into rival Devils Henchmen’s renowned clubhouse in May and kicked them out, police and locals were worried about potential gang warfare. But just days later, the old Henchmen, whose origins date back 50 years, sold the property to the local council for more than $1 million - foiling the raiding Rebels’ efforts.
Mass exodus at top football club after women players ‘disrespected’
One of the country’s top women’s football teams faces an exodus of senior players after months of disputes with the club about inequities between the treatment of men’s and women’s teams.
The walkout at Western Springs earlier this year came after a spate of concerns from female players who felt they were “completely disrespected” by the “highly misogynistic behaviour” of the club’s predominantly male board.
One player told the Herald: “I felt shame going to that club – I will never wear the jersey again.”
Some players are considering retiring from the game, while others are looking to join other Auckland clubs.
The Herald understands head coach Ryan Faithfull’s contract was abruptly ended after he sided with the players.
Senior players said Faithfull had supported their calls for equity and was “turned into the scapegoat” for their actions.
Meet the millionaire ‘Spud King’
Allan Pye hunches at his dusty dining room table and gazes out the window. Beyond, the jagged majesty of the Southern Alps. An early autumn snow dump has already melted. The high Canterbury sky is clear, creasing the old farmer’s eyes, and looking out, across the creaky wooden deck, with its flaky paint and rusty nails, the land around the basic modern farmhouse runs straight into a sprawling carrot patch. This is home - basic, functional, pragmatic - and there is no place Pye, the multi-millionaire Spud King would rather be.
And he really could be anywhere. The shores of Lake Wakatipu, Dubai’s tree-shaped Palm Jumeirah, a Parisien apartment on Place des Vosges, Barbados, Lake Como, Sydney Harbour...
But those places hold little attraction for Pye. And neither do flash cars (he drives a bog standard Hyundai), superyachts, designer clothes, or high society cocktail parties.
“I have no interest in playing golf, or bowls, or billiards; I just enjoy farming,” he says several times during a rare interview with the Herald on Sunday which visited his vast, largely fenceless property on the Canterbury plains between Rakaia and Methven.
Now aged 82, Pye shows few signs of slowing down. He gets about the farm – actually, several joined-up farms – most days, checking on progress. He just snapped up another 2700 acres (1093ha) to make his Highfield property total about 7000 acres now, growing lots of spuds, carrots and other crops. He also owns nine dairy farms, milking 9000 cows.
And it all started with the humble, ubiquitous spud.
Pye left school at 14, leased two acres of land, and started growing potatoes. Now, seven decades later, the ‘Spud King’ is still going, with the family business estimated to be worth $1 billion. So, what does he do with all his money? Kurt Bayer meets a quiet self-made millionaire with few interests outside of farming and turning a profit.
Inside NZ’s biggest cannabis bust
“We thought they were growing capsicums and tomatoes,” said Brian Lewis, dairy farmer, of the extraordinary cannabis crop hidden beneath 600 metres of half-round greenhouses.
He made a mental note not to put maize in the field over the fence shared with the new neighbours. “Tomatoes only need a small amount of chemicals and they fall over.”
Lewis need not have worried. The six Vietnamese nationals who worked from dawn late into the night weren’t growing tomatoes. Or capsicums.
Rather, it is alleged that they had 6500 cannabis plants into which they were pumping fertiliser and other compounds to force-grow seedlings into a cash-crop worth millions of dollars.
Largest gang funeral in NZ history as ‘OG’ Head Hunter dies
A towering figure of the criminal underworld died in November after years of ill health.
Better known as “Bird”, William Hines was one of the most senior members of the Head Hunters motorcycle club and revered in New Zealand’s gang world.
He was serving a 17-year prison sentence for running a methamphetamine syndicate but was released by the Parole Board late last year on compassionate grounds.
Hines was living with type 2 diabetes, which required dialysis every second day and resulted in limb amputation, heart disease and end-stage renal failure.
His death was marked by family and friends paying respects to the “OG” (Original Gangster) on social media and his tangi was anticipated to be the largest gang funeral in New Zealand history.
The esteem in which Hines was held in the Head Hunter fraternity is illustrated by a sign in the East chapter’s pad at 232 Marua Rd which simply states: “In Bird We Trust”.
Dad’s dream destroyed after kids fail to get into ‘cut-throat’ dentistry course
An A-grade student whose father is a top Auckland dentist has twice been rejected by New Zealand’s only dentistry school in a process she described as like the Hunger Games.
Lancely Yung and her brother Lachlan have ditched their dreams of being dentists - and their dad’s dream of them taking over his practice - because they say the bar is too high and they are not eligible to apply under the school’s subcategories.
Otago University has the only dentistry school in the country, and the Government caps the number of domestic candidates for the Bachelor of Dental Surgery at 60 per year, despite a shortage of working dentists in New Zealand. But Health Minister Ayesha Verrall says there is work under way to increase the number of places.
Lancely, 22, was put on a waiting list after her failed applications, treatment her parents describe as “cruel” because of the lack of communication.
Yung’s father Dylan, a cosmetic dentist to media and sports celebrities, believes the selection process lacks transparency and is critical of race-based admissions. He’s so incensed by the treatment of his children, that he’s decided to give up lecturing nationally.
Yung wonders if his son and daughter were discriminated against for being privileged.