David Parker starts moving chess pieces in looming LOTR/Hobbit Law backlash
Gimmie more money!
David Parker is the giant brain behind Labour and he is brilliantly moving chess pieces in the looming LOTR/Hobbit Law backlash.
National are already strategising around the Government trying to push through the Hobbit Law reforms.
National is hoping to create a sequel to the devastatingly destructive Hobbit Union fight. Key not only dealt a serious body blow to the Union movement by picking on the very small Actor’s Equity, but he turned that into a huge political win by supposedly securing the Hobbit being filmed here.
The cost was huge corporate welfare to Warners Bros and re-writing our law for overseas companies. It later turned out that there was no real risk of the Hobbit going offshore and that National, Warners Bros and Peter Jackson collectively played the country to give the Unions abash.
National want to double down on that enormous win, but this time will try and claim the Hobbit Law will stop possible filming of the LOTR TV series here.
Parker knows all this and by heavily criticising and questioning the current level of film subsidies being pumped into Wellington, he’s attempting to blunt National’s looming attack…
Government mulls reining in ballooning Hollywood film subsidies
The New Zealand taxpayer has forked out nearly $600 million to Hollywood producers since 2010 to support the Wellington-dominated film industry, and despite commissioning numerous studies the Government is unclear whether this represents money well spent.The subsidy scheme, originally conceived to facilitate filming of the Lord of the Rings, has steadily increased over the past two decades and now sees mostly overseas producers paid subsidies of up to a quarter of production costs – resulting in $161m paid to the makers of the wildly profitable Hobbit trilogy and $12m for animation on Alvin and the Chipmunks 4.
It also appears $3m of the $31m paid to makers of Ghost in the Shell, a critically derided science fiction bomb filmed in Wellington in 2016, was used to subsidise the A-list salary of starlet Scarlett Johansson.
The Government is now looking at ways to limit taxpayer exposure to a high-profile film subsidy scheme.
Economic development Minister David Parker, speaking on the release of a long-delayed review that concluded the Wellywood-dominated industry was now reliant on the subsidies for continued survival, said while they generated positive spillovers for tourism and technology they came with a downside.
“It is though at a very significant cost. It is a heavily subsidised industry,” the minister said.
…by questioning putting more money into Peter Jackson being able to buy a new private jet, the Government are immediately reducing the leverage National might generate by screaming the LOTR series won’t be filmed here as the response from taxpayers will be ‘good’.
There’s more than one way to skin a hobbit.
If they can reform Key’s disgraceful Hollywood toadying law, perhaps they can next address Peter Dunne’s equally bad legislation also designating the kids who deliver junk mail self-employed independent contractors running their own businesses, with all that that entails.
Worse, some of the bumf deliverers were/are sickness beneficiaries directed to do it by WINZ, incl a lovely former colleague of mine with motor neurone disease up at 6 am barely able to hold her head upright enough to shove stuff in letterboxes, and mercifully dying in her sleep aged about 55. They all earn a pittance.
Dunne’s bill derived from a ruling by Martin Smith of the IRD, which was wrong law, and in conflict with the IRD’s own then guidelines on self-employment.
Scarlett Johanssan is very beautiful, but unlike John Key and Peter Smug Jackson, I think we have a moral obligation to support our own Kiwi film workers in every which way we can.
I’ll say that again, a moral obligation.
Nice to see our NZ landscapes not digitally altered any more too.
Ahh, so that’s why they get paid such an astonishing pittance, my daughter did that for a couple of weeks but the literally 3rd world pay rate turned her off it really quickly
My daughter did it too.We had piles of untidy brochures being sorted over the livingroom floor, sometimes other family members roped in, or me driving her around in foul weather; she worked hard because she needed/wanted the money; makes me tearful thinking of it now.
When Dunne’s law went through a senior IRD manager commented to me that he must have had some very powerful influential business backing to get it though; think I know who it was.
Don’t worry it’s dead easy to import some cheap no skilled labour! Those guys will work for nothing! They can build as well.
Progress.
Any new LOTR series will be shot in Eastern Europe, Ireland and Iceland because it will be cheaper.
New Zealand does not and never has ‘owned’ this.
Not to mention that Key manipulated the whole ghastly saga and put it out that Helen Kelly was the nasty unionist twisting the truth but he lied to media and the public – which Helen Kelly was able to
prove but by then Key had turned he public against her.
Guess who ended up with the knighthoods?
And these are the people who say let the market rule
– yeah right but lets subsidise our big players.
It was always terribly ironic and inexplicable that a government like National, who hated ‘bennys” had pet benny’s of their own in the likes of Knight of the Realm, Peter Jackson. This dude has his hand out more often than farmers!
It makes me angry when I think of the public good that could have come from not throwing tens of millions at this guy, his ego and Hollywood shareholders.
Yes, terribly ironic Xray, but not necessarily inexplicable – the rich like the rich, not the poor.
Also, people often dislike those who they know they have wronged.
Hence as Peter Cooper notes, Key maligning a very good woman.
Trouble with Key’s invisible hand, is that one never really knows where Key’s hands have been.