Erebus. Cave Creek. Pike River. The Mainzeal Meltdown. Find out what really happened, separate the truth from the cover-up, and learn why we keep doing it again and again and again.
"She'll be right" is more than a catchphrase. It's a national strategy, and a lethal one. New Zealand likes to think of itself as practical, sensible, no-nonsense. But strip away the spin and our history is littered with catastrophic failures, bureaucratic cover-ups, and the same mistakes made over and over again.
"Warning signs were ignored. Obvious questions went unasked. Not because people were incompetent, but because the system rewarded looking the other way."
In Great NZ Failures, former CEO Dr. David Ware pulls back the curtain on the disasters and scandals we'd rather sweep under the rug, puncturing both the unhinged conspiracy theories and the sanitised official narratives in equal measure.
The book moves across New Zealand's history, from mass tragedies to boardroom failures to the myths we've built around both.
Erebus, Cave Creek, Pike River, the CTV Building Collapse, White Island: the tragedies where the warning signs were there all along.
Georgie Pie, the Mainzeal Meltdown, South Canterbury Finance: what happens when the people running a company aren't the ones who pay for its failure.
The Featherston Camp Massacre, the meth testing debacle, the Unfortunate Experiment: where the official story and the real one parted ways.
The Dawn Raids, the America's Cup, Smokefree 2025: moments that forced the country to look at itself differently.
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Just an hour north of Wellington, 69 people died in under thirty seconds. The government suppressed it for thirty years. This is what actually happened at New Zealand's only WWII internment camp, and the fight over how to remember it that's still going on today.
Send me this chapterNew Zealand's third-largest construction company collapsed owing $140 million. The subcontractors lost everything. The man who ran it walked away a billionaire. An eight-year Supreme Court battle finally answered the question: who really pays when a company like this fails?
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Dr. David Ware is a tech entrepreneur and former CEO who spent his career operating outside New Zealand's old-school-tie establishment. The son of working-class UK immigrants, he bypassed the local gatekeepers entirely, marching straight to Silicon Valley to secure the venture funding that eventually saw his company listed on the NZX.
Along the way he rubbed shoulders with New Zealand's business elite, and learned exactly how the game is played. Through his former marriage he gained a rare window into the backrooms of political power, watching firsthand how ministerial decisions are really made. He knows who pulls the levers, and why the people at the top so rarely pay the price when it all goes wrong.