For years we have had a Christmas party at our house at St Andrews, which sits on eight hectares forty kilometres north-east of Melbourne. We usually have it on a Sunday, and it’s become a tradition. We invite the sixty or seventy people that I know I should visit before Christmas but haven’t got the time.
My father is the first to be invited. Dad enjoys visiting us, and we are always thrilled when he makes the trip to see us. Dad knew I had made and lost a fortune, then made one again. That I’d been on and off the Rich List. And it’s something he has never been able to get his head around.
After lunch one year I was sitting with Dad, who was in his early eighties. He was sitting enjoying a glass of white wine in the summer sunshine.
‘Son,’ he said, ‘how much do you earn? You can tell me, I’m your Dad. Is it much more than the average wage?’
‘Yeah, a bit more.’
Dad had been a working-class person all his life, and it was natural for him to be concerned about money because he knew a lot of people who didn’t have any. I told him I was earning quite a considerable amount more than the average wage. As I told him a waitress arrived with a bottle of wine, probably quite an expensive one.
He thought for a moment. ‘That’s terrible, son,’ Dad said. ‘No one should earn that much money. Yes, I will have another glass.’
I thought back at the days of when there wasn’t much money, and I felt a moment of pride that I had made a success of my life and that my beloved Dad was here to see and enjoy it. It was part of history catching up with modern life. When you’ve come from a modest background you spend the rest of your life having a strange relationship with money. When you end up having lots of it, more than you could ever have dreamed, that relationship becomes stranger. Money can be used for good, or it can be a destructive and divisive force. I have seen a lot of families with money and awkward scenarios: I don’t think it’s a comfortable way to live, waiting for your parents to die. So, when I was in my early sixties I made a decision to give a substantial amount of money to my two children. This takes the mystery out of the equation.
I don’t mind if I die with nothing. But I do mind if the money I had when I was alive wasn’t put to good use, to help improve people’s lives and provide opportunities where before there were none. To me, that’s the true beauty of being rich.
I am lucky in so many ways. One of the main pieces of luck is that I came from, as so many Australians did, quite a basic and ordinary working-class background. I would hate to have been born rich because perhaps it would be just that little bit harder to achieve anything.
Money hasn’t affected me in any way whatever. I grew up learning about sharing at a very basic level. I learnt not to look down on anybody. I have lived in the same house for forty years. Many well-off people move from house to house, I am not quite sure why, probably trying to get a better house, take even bigger mortgages to get into it, buy bigger cars. But none of that really makes much difference to the kind of person you are or how happy you are.
I regard myself as a decent man, but not as anyone particularly special. I am proud of my achievements, I’m proud of my family and I’m proud of having such delightful friends. These sources of pride have a very high priority. But when I gave away $10 million, it wasn’t pride that I felt. It was more a sense of right. Giving away money— that amount of money—was something I could do, and easily. And, like most people who are in a position to perform such acts as this, I received joy from it. So it’s a two-way street. I’m not that interested in money, but I’m interested in what money can do and, in this case, money did a lot.
In 1999 I made $11.5 million overnight. That’s a strange thing to happen in anyone’s life, especially perhaps someone who had grown up the son of a sawmiller, without much money to splash around. We had just floated emitch, and I was one of quite a few investors who did well. Soon I learned from the Australian Taxation Office that I would be taxed at 48.5 per cent, which meant I would lose half of it. And the money was to be put into escrow, which means, because of a Stock Exchange rule, that I couldn’t get it for two years. Further, I would have to pay tax on it within nine months of getting the shares.
I didn’t think that made sense so I decided to give the money away. That, I thought, was a much better use of the money. Instead of giving it to the Tax Office and waiting around for the rest, I could put the money to good use straight away. So I started the Harold Mitchell Foundation and gave it $10 million to allocate to people who needed it.
It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. I didn’t tell my family until much later. My children Amanda and Stuart were very supportive and understood completely. So was Bevelly. She didn’t even know we had that much. They all thought it was a great use for the money.
In 2007 I gave the Brookes Oration for the Deakin Business School at Deakin University on the subject of ‘Corporate social responsibility … just too much hot air?’ In the speech I talked about the reasons for my foundation and the work I’ve taken on for less advantaged people. ‘I am often asked why I give money away … [It’s for] one very simple reason. And it’s the same reason … I want to build things: better things, things that improve and enrich lives. It excites me and I like being excited.’ I mentioned the foundation: ‘We began with $10 million and in six years we have given away nearly $2.5 million while increasing the corpus to $15 million. It is my dream and the dream of my family, that the generations of our family to come will have a steadily increasing capacity to exercise effective social responsibility and be able to exploit the luck of their birth for the benefit of others.’
Once you’ve made the decision to do something positive with the money, the next step is to put it out of your mind and don’t try to examine why you’re doing it, other than knowing it’s the appropriate thing to do. Just know that it’s a good idea. If you’re trying to do it so that other people say ‘Good on you’ or to make yourself feel better you’re going up the wrong path. You’ve got to have a deep-down feeling that life just won’t work unless some of the rich people give back.
The foundation’s purpose is to provide money for projects in the arts and health. I believe governments will never have enough money to do everything, and that we have to help ourselves. I believe the arts can give meaning to life from the earliest years until you die. And money can make all the difference with health. I believe times have changed. In 2000 I told the Age: ‘As a society we’re becoming richer and at the same time poorer. As a result, in Australia we have what is called the “me society” where we are all the centre of attention. We’re not as generous as our parents were with time, money and love. I believe that each of us in our own way can do something to give back and, by our action, encourage others. For my part, I can do a bit more than the average person.’
The foundation has given me access to some extraordinary experiences. One of the programs we helped fund was Somebody’s Daughter, a theatre group started nearly three decades ago for women who were in prison, had been in prison or who had been drug addicts and were trying to rebuild their lives. We were able to help with some money that allowed them to branch out from solely working with women out of prison and set up a group helping troubled young people in Albury–Wodonga. Some of the kids had been victims of incest, brought up in families where both parents were drug addicts. Some had been squatting or living on the streets. More than half of the first twenty young people in the program whom we funded ended up going back to school.
In 2002 we received a call saying a small group of people we’d helped would like to have lunch with us to say thanks. I was delighted to be able to meet them. We went to my usual haunt, Café Centro in Clarendon Street, South Melbourne. There was a mutual fascination. We were interested in their lives and some of the struggles they’d been through, and they were interested in us because we were rich and in advertising.
I asked one woman about her life. She had been in jail five times because of crimes associated with gambling. I think she had been convicted on fraud charges to support her gambling habit. A couple of the women were talking about their gambling addictions. None of this shocked me.
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I know about addictions, I am an alcoholic.’
At that point the whole meeting changed. They completely opened up. They thought I was one of them. It was a fascinating lunch. I went and saw a play they were producing at the Gasworks Theatre in Port Melbourne. I sat in the front row with Ian Roberts. He said: ‘Do you see that girl who’s the lead?’ Ian asked me. ‘Eight weeks ago she was a heroin addict an hour from death.’ The young woman had rebuilt her life to the point where she could act in this play. It was very impressive and very moving. I felt honoured to be there, and involved. It was an incredible feeling, knowing some money had helped save a life.
How good is that?