‘When it comes to fighting gross injustice and standing up for the underdog, it is not the wealthy who come t

MWhen it comes to fighting gross injustice and standing up for the underdog, it is not the wealthy who come to the party. It is the generous.

y absolute favourite (fictional) group of people du jour is the Roy family – I love every mean, base, callow, rapacious one of them. Which is to say, I hate them. Supposedly modelled on Rupert Murdoch and his offspring, the central characters of the streaming series Succession are rich beyond belief, and breathtakingly awful in every way.

As a general rule, a work of fiction needs at least one sympathetic character, or at least a character with a tiny amount of conscience (or one redeeming characteristic for pity’s sake!) – to work. The Roys and their acolytes have none – they’re all just as bad as each other – and it somehow makes for terrific entertainment.

I’m sure more scholarly people than I have looked into this and found the usual stuff; we love the idea that wealthy people are unhappy; that a fatal lust for money and power has taken over their lives and turned them into monsters. I’m too busy snorting in horror as Logan Roy commiserates with one of his feckless children who has had to fly ‘‘scheduled’’, instead of by private jet. Poor baby.

The concept of rich, and not, can be deeply relative. When I was growing up, I thought people who lived in two-storey houses and wore new clothes instead of hand-me-downs were wealthy beyond imagination.

Now, compared with way too many people in our society, it’s me who is wealthy (I own a home in Auckland). But I know I’ll never be really rich (I’m very OK with that) and I find the dizzying statistics attached to the 1 per cent just as bamboozling as everyone. The news in this newspaper today that we don’t even know – because they make sure we don’t know – how rich they really are, does not come as much of a surprise. Inequitable, for sure – but no surprise.

It’s not really their fault, is it? The system is set to help them keep this information hidden, and their money helps too (teams of lawyers and specialist accountants do not come cheap).

That I get. It’s when I’ve had the opportunity to see first-hand who gives in this country and who doesn’t, and what they might give to, that I get rather confused.

In 2017 a group of strangers (including myself) set up a trust to raise money for Rachel MacGregor, a young woman who’d been sexually harassed by her very wealthy boss, and was facing a long legal battle in the civil courts to get her life back on track. We estimated that the legal costs that would be incurred in her case would top half a million dollars. We knew that for Rachel to have a fighting chance, for the playing field to be levelled here and for her to have any kind of access to justice, we would need to find this money from somewhere.

So, we approached a list of New Zealand’s wealthy who we considered would be sympathetic to Rachel’s plight. We appealed to them directly in phone calls and via emails which laid out the issues of justice at stake, and assured them any donation they made would be kept private if they so wished.

Surprisingly few agreed to give anything. Some didn’t reply at all. A handful gave generous amounts, but only a handful.

Some who declined gave reasons, including that they felt uncomfortable giving money to a cause that was still in front of the courts. At the time I accepted that reason and thanked them for their consideration. Later, I began to wonder whether there was much logic to it at all. We were not asking them to take sides; merely to help create an even playing field and let justice take its course. Whatever the facts of the case and whatever the judgments to come, without the legal help she had no way of affording, Rachel had no access to justice to start with.

But here’s the most interesting part of the story. The trust has raised more than $120,000 towards Rachel’s legal bills, but it was not the wealthy who turned up. In fact, most of that $120,000 came from the very much non-rich; hundreds of ordinary folk who spared $20, or $50, or $100 they could have used for themselves. They did it out of outrage at the injustice inherent in Rachel’s situation and from an instinctive knowledge that what was being played out here was deeply, deeply unfair.

Alongside were lawyers Linda Clark and Hayden Wilson from Dentons Kensington Swan, who’ve worked many, many hours with no expectation of financial recompense.

Rachel’s case says a lot about our legal system and how it favours those with money. It shows us that a person with a lot of disposable income can essentially keep using the court system and the reality of legal action to further entrench their position of power, and continue to harass and pursue others to suit their own ends. Those with no funds are quite literally forced to give up. Unless, of course, others step in to help, to give money and support. When it comes to fighting gross injustice and standing up for the underdog, it is not the wealthy who come to the party. It is the generous.

All this will be challenging for some wealthy people to hear. I’m likely to get emails, some of which, no doubt, will patiently set out why financial support wasn’t possible/ prudent/sensible at the time.

I’m sure those explanations will make great sense fiscally. It’s their money, most of them have worked hard for it, and it’s entirely up to them how it is spent and which philanthropic efforts they contribute to.

Some of these folk give millions privately to causes – more polite and genteel causes than ours was, perhaps – and we will never know about it.

But in raising funds for Rachel’s legal fees, I’ve learnt is that there is a chasm between the wealthy and the generous; between the rich and the compassionate; between the instinctive, intuitive desire to help, and a more statistical analysis of whether a cause is nice and tidy and worthy of support. When it came to Rachel, everyday New Zealanders recognised instantly what those wealthy folk could not; that the imbalance of power here wasn’t on, and that we should all do what we could to help.