Utopia, you are standing in it!

New Zealand filmmakers have used trade treaties to pry open access to foreign markets by challenging failures to honour promises of nondiscrimination in trade and investment in the Federal Court of Australia.

This should please the Twitter Left because they are also a film going left as are most members of the educated middle class as a point of identity and snobbery.

Back in the day, New Zealand television programming was sold cheaply into the Australian market. Many cultural and other products are exported into foreign markets and sold for whatever they can get above the price of shipping or digital transmission. What else explains all that rubbish on cable TV?

Under the Closer Economic Relations agreement that creates a single market between Australia and New Zealand, New Zealand made television programming content must be treated the same way as Australian content so it was included in their 50% local content rules for commercial television back from whenever I remember this story from.

There was a Federal Court of Australia case that ruled that New Zealand television programming was Australian content programming for the purposes of the relevant media regulations because of Closer Economic Relations.

From the late 1990s, with revival of the New Zealand film and television industry, New Zealand content was starting to flood the Australian market, especially in the off-season in the summer when stations were looking for cheap content to fill a low ratings period.

Naturally, this Kiwi invasion did not please the rent seeking Australian television programme production industry and many a mendicant actor, writer and producer

Where there is a will, where there is a way: minimum quality standards are introduced into the Australian content rules defined by price – a price that happen to be above what the television stations used to pay for New Zealand made programming in the off-season.

This court victory in favour of various New Zealand film industry in enforcing a trade and investment treaty puts the Twitter left in a bit of a conundrum. Which is more important? The New Zealand film industry or their hatred of globalisation and the rule of law.