Amazon dinner on taxpayers
They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but Amazon employees visiting New Zealand to negotiate a higher rate of film subsidy for the Lord of the Rings television show were treated to two flash dinners and a ‘‘Waiheke Island Experience’’ on the taxpayer dime.
After enjoying more than $5000 of state-backed hospitality, Amazon went on to negotiate a lucrative subsidy deal with the Government, netting the technology giant grants estimated to be worth about $160 million for the first season of Rings.
The cost of the meals was revealed in written parliamentary questions by ACT deputy leader Brooke van Velden.
The executives were in New Zealand in March last year to negotiate a higher rate of screen production grant for Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings production.
Most films and television shows get a rebate of 20 per cent of what they spend to film in New Zealand, but large productions can apply for a 25 per cent rebate. Amazon applied and, after negotiations, received that higher rate of subsidy.
The negotiations, including a visit to Waiheke Island, were revealed in the response to an Official Information Act request made by Stuff.
Now, Stuff can reveal the cost of wining and dining three Amazon staff was almost exclusively borne by the New Zealand taxpayer.
On Sunday, March 1, Amazon staff were treated to what was scheduled as a six-hour ‘‘Waiheke Island Experience’’. Those six hours cost Tourism New Zealand $2850.
Negotiations commenced the next day and finished with dinner at upmarket Auckland eatery Amano. The taxpayer picked up the cost for this too, with the Film Commission forking out $1428, which worked out at $102 a person.
On the second day, both sides got dinner on their own, but after negotiations concluded on the third day, representatives again broke for dinner, this time at Odette’s Eatery. The Film Commission again picked up the tab for this, which was $1101.41, working out at $137.68 a head.
The expenditure is within the commission’s rules, which say business expenses can be incurred for the purpose of ‘‘building relationships’’ and ‘‘representing the organisation’’.
Those guidelines say the leadership are entitled to ‘‘entertain filmmakers, other business clients and support staff’’, but that ‘‘the expenditure incurred must be moderate and conservative’’. Expenditure in excess of $200 must be signed off by the chief executive. The commission confirmed to Stuff that it was signed off.
The guidelines also say that only ‘‘moderate’’ amounts of alcohol can be consumed, with no more than half a bottle of wine per person (up to $70 a bottle) purchased.
The wining and dining wasn’t a one-way street. New Zealand representatives met with Amazon a few months earlier at a Los Angeles trade fair. This time the hospitality was on Amazon, although it wasn’t quite to the same standard. The written questions reveal Amazon laid on a light lunch of ‘‘sandwiches and soda’’.
Van Velden said the negotiating team should have reciprocated Amazon’s more modest hospitality. ‘‘Our Wellington bureaucrats could learn a thing or two from Amazon on how to avoid largesse, especially when taxpayer money is at stake,’’ she said.
Economic Development Minister Stuart Nash and Amazon were approached for comment.
When many Baby Boomers were in their cribs, New Zealand’s glaciers held twice as much ice as they do today.
In 1949, our glaciers contained 73 billion tonnes of ice. Seventy years later, in 2019, there was 32 billion tonnes remaining.
The melting has been speeding up in recent years. In two hot summers, from December 2017 to February 2019, 9 billion tonnes of glacial ice melted, turning to water and flowing down rivers and into the ocean.
A recent study found that globally, glaciers are losing 267 billion tonnes of ice each year. In an average year, New Zealand’s glaciers are losing about 1 billion tonnes.
The New Zealand-specific estimates come from a new book, Climate Aotearoa: What’s happening and what we can do about it. Chapter author and climate scientist Jim Salinger explained that both the formation and melting of glaciers had changed in the past 70 years.
Glaciers form on mountains that have a cap of snow year-round. When snow builds up over time on these peaks, it becomes packed together and forms ice, turning into a solid sheet. Eventually, this sheet begins to move under its own weight, creeping slowly down a valley.
In the past 70 years, New Zealand’s air currents had changed – with more westerlies and southwesterlies, which bring more rain and snow to the West Coast, Salinger said. This had added extra snow to the Southern Alps and partially compensated for the increasing temperatures. It led to a pause in overall glacial ice loss between 1970 and 2000. But since 2000, the warming had taken off.
Our glaciers were starting to melt at higher and higher elevations. If the melting water created a lake that lapped away at the remaining ice and carved off glacial bergs, the melting process cranked up a notch, Salinger said.
Some larger glaciers pick up rocks as they move, which can form a blanket that shields their ice from the sun. These were not melting as quickly, Salinger said. ‘‘Whereas the small ones respond immediately.’’
The Franz Josef and Fox glaciers were some of the most sensitive to global warming, he added, as their ice moved comparatively quickly down narrow valleys like a squirt of toothpaste out of a tube.
The melting of the glaciers provided powerful visual evidence that climate change was already here, Salinger said.