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The furor around Sir Peter Jackson’s e-mails about the Hobbit saga provides an interesting insight into the mind-set of left-wing bloggers. Unanimously, they all denigrate Jackson as a liar and some sort of evil corporate smurf because of the apparent discrepancy in two emails that he sent during the hobbit saga.

On the 1st of October he said:

““The Hobbit is being punished with a boycott which is endangering thousands of New Zealand jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign income, for no good reason.””

And on the 18th October:

““There is no connection between the blacklist (and it’s eventual retraction), and the choice of production base for The Hobbit. What Warners requires for The Hobbit is the certainty of a stable employment environment.””

Somehow, this is interpreted as bad faith on the part of Jackson. Of course, this deliberately overlooks two other very possible interpretations.

The first is that Warner Brothers lied to Jackson and told him one thing on the 1st of October and another on the 18th. This is possible but a bit unlikely. It is fairly certain that Jackson would have voiced his displeasure at being jerked around by Warners. However, this possibility is real and one wonders why the left prefer to take a dig at Jackson, rather than their favorite target, big business? Can it be because Peter Jackson is Sir Peter – and their egalitarian hackles are raised because Mr. Jackson chooses to be a tall poppy? Do they really think Jackson is this manipulative, or are they merely defaulting to their hatred of all successful people, in much the same way as the left react to John Key?  Certainly, the anti-Jackson rants on left-wing blogs are very reminiscent of the usual rhetoric spewed forth about Key. Is this some sort of strange default for socialists?

There is a third alternative. The most likely interpretation is that Jackson has been quoted out of context. After all, it is clear from the second email that the problem for Warners is the employment environment. This has been underlined for them by the purely gratuitous blacklist organised by a small union. The retraction of the blacklist did not alleviate Warners fears ($500 million is a lot of money), but the willingness of the government to provide a little legal protection for them  did much to assure them that New Zealand is still a safe place to do business . The problem, as I have said before, was not unionisation per se (Warners were considering moving to the heavily unionised Ireland), but the prospect of  unions using the Hobbit as a target for unionisation demands. It is this that Jackson was trying to convey – that the blacklist merely illustrates the underlying instability of the employment environment.

Let’s lay it down straight. The unions lost this battle badly. In Jackson and the Hobbit, they chose a target too well-regarded by New Zealanders and made demands too nebulous to resonate with anyone. They fronted their demands with two actresses and an australian. This gross miscalculation severely damaged their cause among the film industry and resulted in collateral damage to their campaign against the 90-day probation bill. Consequently, the left-wing are now trying to salvage some of the wreckage by denigrating Jackson, probably one of the most popular and well-regarded people in New Zealand. What a waste of time.

You would have thought they would have learned their lesson with John Key…

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