A ‘LIFEBOAT’ IN THE PACIFIC
Wilds of New Zealand may not be the best place for pampered elites
The billionaires of this world clearly know something the rest of us don’t: It seems the human race is closer to Armageddon than we mortal wage slaves ever realized.
Perhaps it’s Donald Trump winning the White House that’s left them all a-jitter or maybe the Spanish veggie famine or the rise of the robots or the global inequalities finally reaching their breaking points. Whatever the cause, tech billionaires and hedge fund titans are all tooling up and making ready to head for the hills.
We’ve been here before. Back in 1999, all these people with too much time and money on their hands flocked to New Zealand terrified about the Millennium bug.
Most precisely, the hills of New Zealand. Maybe it’s all down to watching too many Lord of the Rings movies in their private cinemas, but according to recent reports, it is to private landing strips in the Mirkwoods of Middle Earth that the flocks of Lears and Gulfstreams will head when the balloon goes up.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, is among 92 high-net-worth individuals granted New Zealand citizenship under special terms for high-rollers, the Financial Times reported last weekend, as they seek a “lifeboat” destination to escape to when the rest of us are reduced to hunting and gathering along the shattered streets.
Thiel, ever ahead of the curve, owns a 200-hectare estate on Lake Wanaka that he is reported to have snapped up for $13.9 million in 2015. And to judge by skyrocketing high-end property prices in New Zealand, there are plenty more uber-wealthy types quietly acquiring luxury boltholes.
These are the kind of places, according to the man from Sotheby’s International, that “come with their own water supply, power source and the ability to grow food.” It was at this sentence that I, as a one-time former resident of New Zealand, started laughing.
You see, we’ve been here before. Back in 1999, all these people with too much time and money on their hands flocked to New Zealand terrified that the Millennium bug — remember that? — was finally going to trigger the end of the human race.
But the clocks struck midnight and the sky did not fall. And guess what? All the rich cranks went home.
I know because in 2004, I myself retreated from the world for a year, renting a beautiful beachside home in Golden Bay on New Zealand’s South Island that had been built by a Canadian Y2K refugee who had come to see out his days watching the sun set over the Southern Ocean.
By all accounts, the owner got bored of tending to his veggies and making fruitless fishing trips, all while home-schooling his kids and scooping up after his livestock.
“He was surprised how much s--t they made,” chortled one mirthful local who’d seen a few of these types come and go. The Canadian was following in the well-worn footsteps of a bunch of 1980s Greenpeace types, who were convinced Reagan was going to incinerate the planet — the same as Donald Trump.
All of which is to say none of us should be too jealous of the Silicon Valley super rich because, if the world really does go up in smoke, they’ll be the last to cope.
Kiwis are a hardy species used to surviving. Indeed, from a very early age, kindergarten children do their survival drills, ducking and rolling under their school desks when the earthquake alarm sounds and learning how to “get through” if they are cut off from the outside world.
The government’s “get through” website explicitly warns New Zealand “faces many potential disasters,” including volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis that could “strike without warning.”
Then, the rich guys will have to chop their own firewood and master the art of the “wetback” log burner that heats most Kiwis’ houses and must never be allowed to go out.
They will have to learn that fishing for sand flounders (a tasty flatfish, also known as a “dab”) with a sharpened stick looks easy on a YouTube video, but in truth entails many fruitless hours stalking across the mudflats.
And when the Bushman bug juice runs out, they’ll have to contend with the tiny sandflies that bite and itch like no other biting creature on Earth.
All this while in the next-door encampment, the locals (immune to the sandflies after a while) are tucking into their fire-grilled flounder, gorging on home-caught wild pig, while being warmed by a wood-burner that never goes out overnight (it’s the way you stack the wood) while the bazillionaires’ once-glittering infinity pools turn slowly green, then putrid brown.
No, they’ll not last three weeks before they fire up the Learjet and — mercifully to everyone who is not a real estate agent — use their last tank of gas to head back to what remains of civilization.
Whatever the cause, tech billionaires and hedge fund titans are all tooling up and making ready to head for the hills.