Philip Carter: Who is Canterbury’s most powerful person?

Saturday, 23 March 2024

Today, the Press Power List anoints a new #1. For the first time, private wealth is at the top. Philip Carter epitomises the Christchurch establishment but still cuts a cryptic figure. How did he get here? MICHAEL WRIGHT reports.

Power is an elusive quality. The people who have it, tend to share that elusiveness. Philip Carter - the Christchurch businessman at the helm of a dynastic fortune and today named atop the Press Power List - has it in spades.

“He’s a secretive creature,” one observer put it. “He's obsessed with money. He's obsessed with secrecy … he'd be paranoid about being on this list.”

He doesn’t have much choice. The Carter Group - the current shopfront of the family empire started by Carter’s father, Maurice, in 1946, and which he now leads as an owner and director - is one of the biggest property owners and developers in Christchurch. Built on a foundation of residential construction and hotel development, its ambition has loomed ever larger in the city’s post-earthquake landscape. The Crossing shopping precinct was an anchor of the CBD retail revival; its $500 million IPort business park has driven and capitalised on Rolleston’s position as the South Island’s logistics hub; and its expansionist designs may or may not transform the settlements of Lincoln and Ohoka.

More widely, the Carter Group’s property portfolio extends to Queenstown, Auckland and Australia. It has a major stake in local construction company Southbase and interests in other property developers including Williams Corporation. The National Business Review last year estimated Philip Carter’s fortune at $340m. In Christchurch, if you need to reach for a name to connote wealth and influence, ‘the Carters’ would be many people’s first choice.

Yet Carter himself remains an enigmatic figure. He is a private person, deeply concerned with his public image. For years, he has retained a PR firm to handle media enquiries and is known to be acutely sensitive when he believes the resulting coverage is unfair. This reporter remembers him as the only interview subject who ever asked for shorthand notes to be read back for accuracy. Few people approached for this story wanted to discuss the matter of Carter’s power - another indicator of someone who wields a lot of it - and those who didn’t decline outright spoke largely in platitudes, or off the record.

One of the few to speak freely was former Christchurch mayor Garry Moore. Moore and Carter were colleagues around the council table in the early 1990s (Carter was a Waimairi district councillor in the 1980s before being elected to the amalgamated Christchurch City Council in 1989). He remembers Carter as an astute politician and one of the brains behind forming Christchurch City Holdings Ltd (CCHL) to retain and manage council-owned companies at a time when the neoliberal inclination was to “sell anything that wasn’t nailed to the floor”. “He was a very good city councillor,” Moore said, “hugely skilled”.

Now, as CCHL finds itself debt-ridden and locked in something of an existential crisis, Moore - a vocal critic of any reform that might lead to asset sales - said the company could again use some of Carter’s acumen. “The last five board members of CCHL have all been appointed from out of town. Philip should be standing up saying, ‘Hang on a minute, have we not got the skill base of people who are patriotic and love the city that are prepared to actually contribute to the city's wealth? … It needs the brains of people like him to look beyond their own personal business. And he's more than capable with the values he grew up with.”

The Carter Group has always sported a social conscience. Maurice Carter, a devout Catholic who emigrated from the UK in 1937, was a city councillor from 1956 to 1989 and deputy mayor his last two terms. He and his wife Merle established a charitable trust in his name in 1969 and made annual grants. When he died in 2011, aged 93, The Press noted he left behind an “immense legacy”. His son Philip (though numerous people mentioned his personal frugality) has continued this. The Philip Carter Trust was founded in 2020 and he is a keen patron of the arts. Other motivations, however, have garnered more attention.

Last year, Carter was one of several property magnates to petition the city council against proposed traffic changes around the new Te Kaha stadium, particularly the plan to make Lichfield St one-way. This, Carter said, would affect access to The Crossing car park, for which the Carter Group had negotiated a $28m payment from council to operate when it was built: “You guys [the council] continue to make it so hard,” Carter said. “You are now driving investments away.” In 2016, he was one of several institutional city investors to lobby the council against a property deal on High St they were concerned would “dilute” their own retail developments. The same year he complained a planned hotel at Christchurch airport would undermine central city regeneration.

“A few times where he's come out against a street development or something … I've thought, God, Philip, when we sat around the council table, we had to balance that all the time,” Moore said. “The old saying, you gain the whole world and suffer the loss of your soul, in my opinion, applies to Philip.”

Is there a correlation between Carter’s power and his self-interest?

“Yep,” said Moore. “100%.”

Another source who had done business with Carter framed it differently: “When you talk to him, you realise he’s asking you questions and not telling you anything.”

But there is a flipside to self-interest, real or perceived. Carter, even his critics would agree, is deeply committed to Christchurch and after the earthquakes that commitment was invaluable. “People like the Carters … have put their money on the line and reinvested,” fellow developer Ernest Duval said. “Obviously it's given people confidence. The families, the large property owners and stakeholders in the city, they basically … [had] to do the significant landmark developments which would enable other developments to pivot off and around that.”

In a city the size of Christchurch, Duval said, that matters. “The wealth funds will buy properties in Auckland and Sydney and places like that because they’re, you know, category A major cities. We don't have the same allure of those cities. And so we actually require individuals to have a fair amount of horsepower to do those big projects.”

“Families such as the Carters have provided the ability to do that, and that doesn't come about through a transactional approach. It comes about through an investment mentality where you are saying we're going to develop these assets and retain them for 10, 20, 30, 50 years and build upon that.”

There again is that commitment - an intergenerational responsibility to a place. Philip Carter is not the only property scion in Christchurch, but by this measure he stands apart.

“The Carters are probably the only family that I can think of that have continued to endure and push their way through,” Duval said. “In many cases developers will rise to the surface and do projects for a period of time, and then they'll recede back into the background to be replaced by someone else.”

Power is, by necessity, scarce. In order for someone to gain it, it usually has to be relinquished elsewhere. The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto believed this to be an inevitable dynamic, and called it the ‘‘circulation of elites“. It’s an alluring theory; one that makes the Carters’ longevity all the more telling.

And even the fiercest critics can be won over in time. “He's a really good bloke,” Garry Moore said. “Genuinely, you can write this down. I genuinely like Philip Carter. But in my opinion he has the challenge of rising above personal gain and contributing community gain, which he's also done in his lifetime as a councillor. And that's the bit that I would like to see him turn back to, because I think he will find it quite rewarding.”