The sooner the Wellywood sign goes up the better.
It would be even better if the first vowel were changed to an a, and a Warner Brothers logo added.
Remember our fearless leaders clustered in the capital last year to pass ludicrous employment legislation under urgency without proper perusal, supposedly to placate the WB boys.
The New Zealand film industry, we were led to believe, would die without it.
But there is no time for a proper debate. Trust us, we know what we are doing, they said.
For the Prime Minister to be half-heartedly indicating he is not a great fan of the Wellywood sign just shows how mad politics is. If anyone who voted for or supported last year's legislation is now worried about the tackiness of a sign which might suggest the city is desperate to hang off the tawdry coat tails of Hollywood perhaps they are already starring in their own Walt Disney fantasy.
What does the enthusiasm for such silly debates say about us?
That we can only care about frippery?
We are talking about a sign on a gorsy hill, after all.
And while all that horn honking and hoo-ha was going on in Wellington, a decision was made about something a bit further south which only appeared to attract attention in the Nelson Evening Mail.
The Department of Conservation granted a concession for New Zealand Energy Ltd which would allow the building of a hydro scheme on conservation land at Lake Matiri, a development which would power 3000 homes.
The scheme makes the most of the natural steep fall from the lake. Most of you may be unfamiliar with the lake created by an earthquake 300 years ago, a wildlife refuge, near Murchison at the entrance to the Kahurangi National Park.
If you drive up the Matiri Valley to the last farmhouse on the left, it is a pleasant day's walk (providing the left branch of the river is not in flood) to the lake where there is a hut.
Energetic souls can tramp into the park, but those of a more leisurely frame of mind can enjoy a pleasant ramble and get a rejuvenating taste of wilderness without having to venture too far.
At the moment it only attracts about 200 or 300 visitors according to Doc, but the department has been keen to convince us recreation values will be enhanced by the development because access will be improved.
Carry that argument to its logical conclusion and it becomes easy to see every wilderness area will be improved by a six-lane highway.
At one point the department's documents lamely tried to suggest the three-weir and penstock construction itself would be an attraction.
Another delightful idea from the New Zealand Energy Ltd was that visitors could be encouraged to help monitor eel deaths by taking unhappy snaps of them on their digital cameras. It did not explain how many dead eels would be too many.
Concerns about the possibility the South Island long-tailed bats, described by Forest and Bird as being endangered as kakapo, could be affected by the development, were not enough to stop the proposal, or even delay it.
The company will be required to check there are no bats in the trees it fells, something it is clearly still unhappy about.
It understands that with bat detectors recording ultrasonic echolocation noise, it is impossible to know whether the sound represents a bat roosting or a bat flying past.
"So if we do this test and it records squeeks (sic) day after day, it seems we are not allowed to cut the tree down and no alternative action is proposed."
The easy answer, of course, is "leave them trees alone", but somehow I don't think the company will be too keen on that. It has already described the seven-year process for the company to get this far as a nonsense, and the $105,000 it will be required to spend on conservation mitigation measures as too much.
Arguments the concession to use the land should not be granted because electricity generation could take place elsewhere were not allowed by the department. It said the activity the Minister of Conservation was asked to approve was not power generation, but the placement of weirs, penstocks and access tracks. Power generation would occur on private land.
Never mind that the weirs, penstocks and access tracks were ultimately related to power generation.
At this stage the future of the development is not clear, as the company does its sums again.
Should we care more about this possible change to a relatively remote part of the country than the Wellywood sign?
I'd like to think so, but as an old bat who was a Murchison girl, I wood say that.
- Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
