Noteworthy: in the past few days, Apple has said it is making some computers in the USA, ie. it is acting like it has a national allegiance.  

Went to the NZ Supreme Court, looks like.

https://www.google.com/search?q=lord+of+the+rings+tours

If you don’t think these local tax incentives for film production help the local economy, see Vancouver or Louisiana. Both have benefitted greatly from legislative initiatives regarding film production

make the moist of a bad situation

Dude, your typos rock!

one of them was the resin outrageous fortune was cancelled.

Wow, typing in a Kiwi accent. Choice, bro.

The Lord of the Rings also encouraged an entire industry and brought about a lot of employment and many successful careers were prompted by them, as will happen also with these great movies being made now. The successful films and the conducive movie making environment encourage other film makers to make films in New Zealand and so there are significant spin offs.

Thousands of people owe their livelihoods to the great successes and prosper by them. The truth is that people who work in these big films get well looked after. The arts are a precarious industry and anyone who seeks to succeed in that field knows that. New Zealand has gone from being a ‘back water’ to being state of the art and that is very helpful.

New Zealand has a lot of worker protections as a whole. It would be misleading to claim otherwise.

Also, the high profiled Dotcom case has not led to the adverse outcomes that the author here might fear. There has been high public scrutiny of the events and on-going accountability and calling to account for mistakes made. New Zealand is not as is painted here in the article and the freedoms are more telling than the constraints. The movie industry in New Zealand is in good shape. It is the employment that has been generated that should be emphasized and the great work that has recently been done.

But then along came greedy power hungry people who realising the importance to NZ of the hobbit tried to hold the movie to ransom.

What else could the government do but make the moist of a bad situation, regardless we now have a marketing vehicle of amazing potential

They weren’t at all related to The Hobbit, they just happen to all tie into the TPP negotiations that the author very clumsily introduces at the end which is criticised for being basically yet another vehicle for those same pressures to corporately fuck sovereignty.

Not a single cent of taxpayer money was spent on this. NZ earned money on the production, both at private and public levels.

I’m not a fan of John Key in any way, but I always thought he must have photos of Warners’ execs doing something iffy considering the deal he got. The promotional rights on the DVD/Blu-Ray sales alone are a bargain!

Can Joe Karaganis please get his nose out of our business! Perhaps he should try living here first before he sticks it in again.

Speaking of unions – the CTU, under the leadership of the incredibly naive Helen Kelly, put their weight behind the Ozzie unions on this. As a result, the CTU lost huge amounts of public support; in a time when we need unions to be strong, and savvy in their actions. I remember witnessing a huge anti-union march in central Wellington – by film industry workers telling the unions to fuck off, basically.