Gollum and the Rat-Monkey

In the illustrious pantheon of Wellington’s past and present heroes Sir Peter Jackson is a benefactor without peer, a literal colossus in fact.

Not only has Sir Peter featured Wellington locations in his films, he immortalised Newtown Zoo as the home of the ferocious Sumatran rat-monkey in his zombie splatterfest, Braindead, which features one of cinema’s most poignant lines: “Your mother ate my dog”.

Now in the tradition of legendary Wellington benefactors such as Mark Dunajtschik (Wgtn Children’s Hospital), Sir Frank Renouf (Renouf tennis Centre) and Sir Charles Norwood (Wgtn Free Ambulance), Sir Peter has donated a new Mayor to the city.

The catalyst for Sir Peter’s financially backing council hack Andy Foster’s successful mayoral campaign was their shared opposition to the proposed 500 million dollar development of Wellington’s Shelly Bay.

The Shelly Bay project proposes replacing rotting, eyesore buildings with a Sausalito-style community replete with affordable housing, retail outlets, restaurants, hotel, a rest home, verdant public spaces and a ferry service to the CBD.

Global fame as a filmmaker and the eye-watering riches Sir Peter has accumulated by building towering citadels in polystyrene undoubtedly qualify him as a leading expert on architecture, and he has labelled the Shelly Bay plans as a “Soviet-style” abomination.

It’s axiomatic that the less gifted should blindly accept the lead of their artistic and intellectual betters, which is why Sir Peter has not felt the need to share an alternative vision for Shelly Bay with Wellingtonians, nor to meet its owners to resolve his objections despite numerous invitations to do so.

The naïve might think a revamped Shelly Bay was a good idea considering the paucity of affordable housing and tourist facilities in Wellington, but obviously Sir Peter knows better and we should all follow his lead as Andy Foster will surely do in accordance with the maxim ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’.

On the very morning his win was confirmed, Foster felt the need to tell Radio NZ that Sir Peter would not be calling the tune, although he (Foster) immediately started singing along when he talked about the need for a Peter Jackson Film Museum in Wellington and a review of the WCC’s approval of the Shelly Bay development.  

Disrespectful knockers have had the temerity to call Sir Peter’s anti-Shelly Bay motives into question, citing nimbyism and hubris and in a nasty turn for the worse, they have compared him to Braindead’s rat-monkey whose Sumatran ancestors were, according to the film’s Newtown zookeeper, “great big rats which come (sic) scuttling off the slave ships and raped all the little tree monkeys”.

Even though Sir Peter is not above using animal metaphors (he recently did so to describe his accountant and lawyer as “both guppies in the clutches of a piranha”) during the fraud trial of a former employee, he does not deserve to be compared to a rat-monkey, as everyone knows he has Wellington’s best interests at heart.

As far as Foster is concerned, the knockers have cruelly compared him to LOTR’s Gollum – except it is the golden mayoral chains rather than a golden ring that make him trade away his integrity – just as Gollum’s lust for the ring turned him into a repulsive shadow of his former self.

The knockers need to accept that rich people can buy whatever they want, including politicians, and it’s just the normal order of capitalist societies that the mighty dollar triumphs.

This writer for one does not accept the knocker view that unless Sir Peter can persuade the government to amend the RMA to allow him to personally control the development of Wellington, ultimately both he and Foster will be eating humble pie on the beach in Shelly Bay as the rule of law, landowner rights and common sense prevail.