John Key will be making announcement on The Hobbit this evening, with a press conference due to be held at 7.20pm.
Will update this post after the announcement.
Make your predictions!
Here’s my prediction. Key will roll over and sell New Zealand’s employment law for thirty pieces of silver. He will have moved on tax breaks too, something moderate, enough to feed a significant quantity of taxpayer’s money to the studios, but he’ll be allowed to save some face. The Hobbit will stay in NZ.
Here’s my conclusion. Key has been played like a cheap violin. He piled in against Kiwi workers right from the start. The studios saw we had a muppet for a PM, and saw how easy it would be to exploit him to score a cheap few million. So they did.
And as folk have been saying in the comments:
Where was the public outrage, to keep Skellerup, Firestone, Fisher and Paykel, boat building, coastal shipping, rail way and marine engineering, shoe making and all the other industries, as successive Governments did their best to remove employment and productive business from NZ.
Where indeed?
Update: RNZ reports that the movies will stay in NZ, and the Nats have sold our employment law (overriding the courts) to “clarify” the distinction between an employee and a contractor in the film industry.
Key has also agreed, on our behalf, to a US$7.5 Million dollar per movie tax rebate, and to pay for a US$10 Million advertising campaign in the US, a totalcost of US$25 Million. This adds to the existing US$60 Million tax rebate.
IrishBill: just a quick note on the contractor change – the union took the action despite nearly every one of its members being an independent contractor. While this is arse for film industry employees (the few there are) it doesn’t really change a thing in law in relation to the Hobbit. In short it’s a meaningless distraction from the real issue of tax cuts.
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