JezzaNZ
Everything you said a couple of posts back is completely correct. What you are seeing is a combination of healthy distrust, and the standard Kiwi tall poppy syndrome at work.
Plenty of people have had a rocky road to success - I offer the following examples:
Larry King has interviewed over 30,000 people during his career but his rise to fame for radio work in the 60’s derailed him financially. He was in debt $352,000, charged with grand larceny and accused of stealing $5,000 from a business partner. The charges were dropped but he struggled to get back on his feet and ended up claiming bankruptcy in 1978.
The 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, declared bankruptcy in 1833 and spent 17 years of his paying off the money that he borrowed from friends to start his business. It took Lincoln 30 years to achieve his goal of becoming President of the United States.
Donald Trump found himself $900 million in debt in 1990 and lost a lot of his business ventures but somehow restructured his debt to be back on top running a billion-dollar empire.
Walt Disney His name may be a stalwart brand today, but early in his career, Disney was just a struggling filmmaker with too many bills. In 1922 he started his first film company with a partner in Kansas City, Kansas.
The two men bought a used camera and made short advertising films and cartoons under the studio name Laugh-O-Gram. Disney even signed a deal with a New York company to distribute the films he was producing. That arrangement didn't work out so well, though, as the distributor cheated Disney's studio.
Without the distributor's cash, Disney couldn't cover his overhead, and his studio went bankrupt in 1923. He then left Kansas City for Hollywood, and after a series of increasingly successful creations, Disney debuted a new character named Mickey Mouse in 1928.
H.J. Heinz When Heinz was just 25 years old, he and two partners began a company that made horseradish. As the legend goes, the spicy root was the first of Heinz's famed 57 varieties, but it wasn't as lucrative as he'd hoped. A business panic in 1875 bankrupted his enterprise, but Heinz's passion for condiments remained strong.
The very next year, Heinz got together with his brother and a cousin to start a new company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The reorganized group started making ketchup, and the business took off. Last year the H.J. Heinz Company had over $10 billion in revenue.
Yeah real bunch of scumbags, that lot...
The point being - be careful, but not dismissive...