On Friday, RNZ reported:
Jones imposed himself on the New Zealand consciousness like few other businesspeople of his time.
He amassed a multi-billion portfolio of commercial buildings in Auckland, Wellington, and Glasgow, Scotland, as well as forming a political party to challenge Robert Muldoon's National Party.
Born in Lower Hutt into a poor but talented family, he won a boxing blue at Victoria University but dropped out to work in advertising and publishing.
What most of the MSM articles aren't telling you is that Jones' political interference has substantially degraded New Zealand. In 1983 he founded the New Zealand Party, not out of some noble vision for the public good as the right wing propagandists wish you to believe, but to dismantle the National Party’s grip on power under Robert Muldoon, who Jone's viewed as being too liberal.
Bob's political party was a calculated manipulation, siphoning votes off National to deliver the 1984 election to Labour, who then unleashed the terribly damaging Rogernomics, which sold off state assets, undermined unions and decimated numerous essential industries. Similar to Thatcherism and Reaganomics, Finance Minister Roger Douglas’s neoliberal blitz in the short term lowered wages and increased unemployment...but in the long term it killed off industries and pushed investment into non-productive sectors, putting the dream of owning a house forever out of reach for many Kiwi families.
Jones himself admitted his party was redundant once Labour adopted his free-market dogma, disbanding it post-election. This wasn’t democracy; it was a rich man buying an election. His wealth and media clout turned the New Zealand Party into a battering ram for Labour's deregulation, privatisation, and tax cuts that favoured the elite, including Bob Jones, and disenfranchised everyone else.
And boy, did Jones profit. His property empire, Robt. Jones Holdings, ballooned as Rogernomics slashed regulations and opened up markets. Commercial real estate, his bread and butter, thrived in the new laissez-faire landscape, making him one of New Zealand’s richest men. The government he helped install didn’t just align with his ideology; it padded his wallet, while ordinary Kiwis faced job losses, wage stagnation, increased taxes, and soaring inequality. Markets crashed and the social fabric of New Zealand frayed, and Jones, perched in his skyscrapers, couldn’t have cared less.
Then there’s Jones' racism, which cannot simply be brushed off as “satire” or “wit.” His 2018 National Business Review column suggesting Waitangi Day be replaced with a “Māori Gratitude Day” was a grotesque insult to Māori culture, sparking a petition with over 90,000 signatures to strip his knighthood. He doubled down in court, suing filmmaker Renae Maihi for defamation, only to slink away after five days, later paying her legal fees. His dismissal of Māori language as “bullshit” and the haka as “infantile” revealed an unrepentant racist steeped in colonial arrogance, not intellectual rigour or someone who should have held a knighthood.
Jones’s other antics (punching a journalist, deriding women and Jews, and flouting Air New Zealand’s rules until he bought his own jet) paint a picture of entitlement, not heroism. Yet some people are fawning, perhaps seduced by his anti-establishment rhetoric or nostalgic for his Muldoon-baiting days. This is a mistake. Jones didn’t fight for workers or the marginalised; he fought for his own wealth and ugly worldview. Rogernomics gutted communities, and his bigotry alienated Māori and encouraged politicians to implement institutionally racist policies. The left should be clear: Bob Jones largely wrecked New Zealand for profit, not progress. Let’s stop the eulogies and start trying to fix the damage Bob Jones has caused.
