Adam Dudding
Overwhelmed by the latest deluge of Dotcom-related revelations? does his best to explain.
at the last minute because the FBI figured New Zealand would make a nice holding pen for him while they constructed a legal case against his Megaupload filesharing website. If Dotcom had been turned down for residency here he might have gone to live in Switzerland, where he’d have been safer from US extradition than in spineless New Zealand. Patience grasshopper. So – you’ll recall that late 2010 was also the moment when Peter Jackson and his bosses at Warner Bros were at war with Kiwi actors over their Hobbit movie contracts, and Key made everything better by meeting with the Hollywood oligarchs and rewriting our labour laws in their favour. Join the dots: our Government likes to bend over for Hobbit- obsessed Hollywood which hates Dotcom because of all the movie file-sharing on his site and we all know the FBI is Hollywood’s poodle anyway – therefore the New Zealand Government was only too happy to help ensnare Dotcom in a Coatesville honey trap, thus pleasing the FBI, Hollywood, Barack Obama, Key, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Because last week some emails came to light between Immigration New Zealand and the SIS, which seem to show that there was ‘‘political pressure’’ exerted on Immigration officials to give Kim Dotcom residency. They also show that Immigration knew the FBI was sniffing around Dotcom. Depending on how you interpret the emails, this may be the smoking gun that proves the conspiracy theory. Well no. One of the weirdest things last week was listening to Dotcom (and politician/employee Laila Harre) accusing the Government of being disreputable on the grounds it failed to acknowledge he was disreputable and should have been booted out of NZ. Maybe. The boring explanation given by Immigration NZ is that officials were under ‘‘political pressure’’ to overlook the minor indiscretions of pretty much any passing squillionaire who wanted to live here because the Government wanted to boost to its ‘‘Give-us-$10mand-you-can-be-a-Kiwi’’ immigration policy. This hardly paints our immigration decision-making processes in a good light, but does successfully remove the Hobbits from the equation. Then again, Dotcom reckons he has an even bigger smoking gun proving John Key’s involvement, which he will pull from his pocket a few days before the election. Frankly, they’re nowhere near as interesting. The Independent Police Kiwi as: Kim Dotcom poses with Pakihana Butler and his daughter Te Kotahitanga at a ManaInternet Party meeting in Kaikohe. Complaints Authority has ruled police were justified not to prosecute the GCSB spy agency for illegally bugging Dotcom (though Dotcom now says he’s thinking about taking a private prosecution instead). And Radio NZ reported that Crown Law has worked, or privately contracted, more than 20,000 hours on Dotcom’s extradition case, which works out at $6 million of legal toil.
Yes.