Brought to book

He's rich, opinionated and believes in doing good for the community. Property developer Mark Todd is a study in contrasts.

- MICHELE HEWITSON

Mark Todd, the "accidental" property developer whose company is the chief sponsor of the country's biggest literary awards, the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, is pretending to be apoplectic. He excels at pretending to be apoplectic and sometimes he actually is. He shouts: "I'm not a fucking leftie. I'm a fucking thinker." He uses the F-word the way other people use commas.

If I inserted every example of every time he swore, the Listener letters inbox would implode. So I'm going to settle for removing most of the choicest examples from here on and you can choose to insert them yourself after every second word, or not, depending on your tolerance for swearing. That "every second word" is an exaggeration, but not a wild one.

"I like swearing," he says, in a brilliant example of stating the bleeding obvious. Swearing provides emphasis and he is an emphatic character. You will never be in any doubt as to what the co-founder of Ockham Residential thinks about things, and the things he has emphatic opinions about are wide and varied, and sometimes contradictory.

He rails, for example, over the property development industry's use of lobbyists. His company employs a lobbyist. He is too smart not to know that opens him up to accusations of hypocrisy. Pah.

"We just try to influence policy, cut through the bullshit. Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing and everyone will say they're doing the right thing. So, I understand, you know, being charged with being a hypocrite. All I'm trying to do is broaden the viewpoints of ministers and bureaucrats and public officials."

He had phoned me back after our interview because he'd had a thought and that thought was that he wanted to, yes, emphasise something that he'd already told me: that he was "100%" going to vote for incumbent Wayne Brown in Auckland's next mayoral election.