Victims, violins in station row

The dispute over public access to Hunter Valley Station in Central Otago has made headlines in the United States, and not because a global public is interested in arcane arguments about property rights and foreign investment, but because a highprofile broadcaster is at the heart of the story.

Few in New Zealand knew much about Matt Lauer before he was revealed in early 2017 to be the buyer of the $13 million pastoral lease at the Hunter Valley Station, which borders scenic Lake Ha¯ wea. But in the US the former Today show host is a household name who was brought low by sexual misconduct allegations and fired by NBC.

This background actually has nothing at all to do with the current stoush over access, and the Overseas Investment Office (OIO) that approved the sale reassessed Lauer after allegations emerged and found him to be ‘‘of good character’’, a requirement of the lease. Some will argue that this re-approval merely demonstrates that the OIO is as soft in its personal judgments as it is in its decisions about land.

The separate stories about Lauer have become muddled in the public mind, not least because an interview this week with RNZ’s John Campbell was Lauer’s first about anything anywhere since he left NBC. US media picked up on Lauer’s complaint that the sexual allegations make him ‘‘an easy mark’’ for local groups who agitate for access to his land. One US headline after another accused Lauer of playing the victim – ‘‘cue the violins’’, wrote an unimpressed Fox News reporter.

Money, celebrity, sex, foreigners, a Kiwi birthright to the great outdoors: there are many combustible elements in the Hunter Valley Station saga. But if there is a villain, it is not another wealthy American who sees the South Island as a fisherman’s paradise or a bolthole for the apocalypse.

Lauer and his Queenstown lawyer Graeme Todd are adamant they have met the conditions agreed upon with the OIO, including improving access and upgrading some roads, and complaints about public access seem to be mostly anecdotal. Instead, as Acting Prime Minister Winston Peters and Land Information Minister Eugenie Sage have argued, fault rests with a combination of OIO officials and ministers from the previous government.

This might sound like convenient politics, but there is truth to it. The ‘‘easement’’, or right to public access, being fought over could have been a condition during negotiations before the sale to Lauer in 2017. During the public consultation before the sale, the Government’s Walking Access Commission proposed nine recommendations for access to the station. None were imposed by the OIO, which argued that the station’s status as a working farm made proposed access difficult.

However, Stuff and others argued for a compromise.

The issue is not that visitors want to bother Lauer or upset the sheep, but that the station provides access to Ha¯ wea Conservation Park and other tracts of public land in one of the most spectacular landscapes in ‘‘the most sensational country in the world’’, as Lauer himself enthused before a US TV audience in 2016. But at the time, Lauer’s public image was squeaky clean and his rave about our scenery was the kind of publicity money couldn’t buy.

A lot changes in two years.