Baz Macdonald has found an underbelly of underground survival bunkers installed around NZ by Americans. Photo / Supplied
Baz Macdonald has found an underbelly of underground survival bunkers installed around NZ by Americans. Photo / Supplied
"Come here ... ," whispers a man as he excitedly points at something off-camera.
The man in question is VICE journalist Baz Macdonald and the object of his extreme excitement is revealed to be — wait for it — a double garage.
Or is it? Buried into the side of a hill on an exclusive $33 million property north of Queenstown, could this garage actually be one of the underground survival bunkers rumoured to have been installed around New Zealand by super-wealthy Americans?
It's a question posed by Macdonald in his new documentary Hunt for the Bunker People, a sometimes amusing but often fruitless search around the Queenstown district for these supposed boltholes.
These rumours about New Zealand's bunkers came to prominence last year when American company Rising S said it had shipped and installed more than 30 of them Downunder, a claim that local councils swiftly denied.
In Hunt for the Bunker People's opening interview, Rising S general manager Gary Lynch still maintains his company has organised 38 bunkers in New Zealand which, according to its website, reach prices as high as $12 million and can include a gym, sauna, swimming pool, bowling alley and media room (because one shouldn't let the collapse of civilisation get in the way of working out or having some good, honest fun).
As Macdonald points out, it's basically impossible to confirm what Lynch is saying about these bunkers, but that's not deterring the journalist from finding at least one in the country's sanctuary for the super-wealthy — Queenstown.
It's a quest that feels a lot like aimlessly throwing mud at a wall and hoping something sticks — but it's an entertaining one all the same.
Macdonald unexpectedly meets his doppelganger at the local council as he discusses what consents a billionaire would need to apply for in order to make their very secret "I don't want anybody to know this is here" underground bunker legal.
When he's denied access to one particular building site, he decides to climb up a mountain — of which there are plenty in the area — to see if he can peer in from up on high.
He also rather comically stalks his way around another $10m home and taps a combination of piano keys to see if it unlocks a secret bunker door — although the best he can find there is a very large wine cellar, which honestly sounds as good a place as any in which to wait out the end of the world.
VICE journalist Baz Macdonald.
Macdonald's self-confessed enthusiasm for post-apocalyptic fiction is obvious in Hunt for the Bunker People, as is his apparent obsession with Peter Thiel.
Thiel, of course, is the American billionaire who was granted New Zealand citizenship after spending just 12 days in the country and became a poster boy for the Silicon Valley elite supposedly setting up "apocalypse insurance" here.
Macdonald boldly knocks on the door of Thiel's Queenstown home, nicknamed "The Plasma Screen".
He sniffs around another of Thiel's expensive properties in Wanaka. He mentions Thiel and his swift journey to citizenship constantly.
He asks others what they think of the billionaire and his New Zealand citizenship.
It's during these moments when it starts to feel a little more stalker than investigative journalist.
But what Thiel's wealth and influence likely got him is really what Hunt for the Bunker People is examining.
It's not about the super-secret bunkers that Macdonald is desperate to find or why they're allegedly being installed.
Instead, it's another look at the growing divide between the rich and the poor.
While Macdonald chats about Queenstown locals who are struggling to afford anywhere to live in the town they've called home for decades, he also hears a story from somebody who helped carry "a tonne of gold bricks" into their friend's bunker.
So as interesting as this quest to find New Zealand's bunker people is, it ultimately isn't revealing anything we didn't already know.
As Macdonald is told early on in the documentary, money doesn't just buy you that doomsday sauna, it also "buys you your own set of rules" — and that's a truth as old as time itself.
• Hunt for the Bunker People premieres tomorrow at 7.30pm on VICE (Sky channel 13)
