NICK MOWBRAY and his brother Mat got rich from plastic non-biodegradable toys made in Chinese factories by poorly paid workers. When young Nick was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 2018, a sustainability expert observed that 'I don't think celebrating producing 400,000 pieces of plastic a day is contributing to building a better world.' Maybe it's been this kind of criticism that has led to Nick developing a deep dislike for the Green Party and prompted him to donate $100,000 to Act's election campaign in 2023.
The Mowbray duo wholly-own the toy manufacturer Zuru and last year they topped the National Business Review's 2024 Rich List. The NBR estimates they are worth in the region of $20 billion.
Their prosperity has arrived when New Zealand's wealthy elite have never it had so good. The collective wealth of the 2024 NBR Rich list was $95.68 billion, well up on $72.59 billion in 2023.
But while it's good times for Nick and Mat and others like them, it's been hard going for the rest of us. A cost of living crisis combined with the Government's austerity agenda has led directly to more unemployment, more poverty, more homelessness, more desperation. It's ordinary people who been forced to carry the burden of an economic system in crisis, not wealthy people like the Mowbray brothers.
None of this should be news, though. Indeed, Karl Marx predicted many years ago that the growth of capitalism would also lead to a greater concentration and centralisation of wealth. He wrote: 'Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.'
Nick Mowbray though, thinks he knows better than Marx. Responding to the heavy and sustained criticism that has been levelled at David Seymour's cut-price school lunch travesty, Nick posted to X: 'This school lunch thing is so pathetic — this country is made up of so many whiners and losers with their hands out.'
Mowbray is not talking about landlords who received a handout of some $3 billion in the Government's budget last year.
This outrageous attack from Richie Rich comes at a time when the number of children living in poverty has increased. In its 2025 State of the Nation report, the Salvation Army observes: 'There has been a sharp rise in food insecurity over the past two years, and it reached the highest level for more than a decade in the year to June 2024.'
More than one in four children live in households that run out of food with increasing regularity. For these children, the school lunch has not only become the main meal of the day, but it has also become, in many cases, the only meal of the day. But, under David Seymour's el cheapo school lunch programme, the meals are estimated to have been shrunk in size by a third. As well, a considerable number of the lunches have proven to be inedible and are ending up in the bin. That means many children are going without anything to eat.
Although Nick Mowbray is an idiot, he's an idiot with dangerously far right views. David Farrier has noted that Mowbray has, on several occasions, posted on X his support for Tommy Robinson. The UK neo-fascist has led an often violent anti-Islam movement. It's just a short step from scapegoating Muslims to scapegoating the poor. That's a step Mowbray has been happy to take. Portraying the poor as unworthy, irresponsible and, in many cases, potentially criminal, diverts attention away from the actual causes of poverty and unemployment and onto the victims of inequality.
Nick Mowbray is rich because other people are poor. As Marx also noted, poverty, if it did not exist, would have to be invented in order to reduce wages and, therefore, production costs in order to promote profit accumulation. That's not a view you will hear expressed in New Zealand business circles, however. In December, the Mowbray brothers were named the 'visionary leaders of the year' at the Deloitte Top 200 Awards.
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