PESCHARDT: Nature has made this the perfect hideout. Disappear all the way down here and who would ever find you? Until now, Queenstown’s main claim to fame has been its pioneering of the bungy jump but these days it’s attracting a very different kind of dropout.

This place has emerged as a surrogate international life raft. It’s become a sanctuary for wealthy Americans and others so scared of terrorism, they’ve opted for the ultimate sea change.

There’s never been any doubt that New Zealand has the scenery, and well rather a lot of it. The vast majority of overseas tourists come from Australia but the thought, or perhaps the prejudice has always been, great for a holiday but who would really want to live here? Well the answer now is a great many. Quietly, this has suddenly become the great escape.

YEVRAH ORNSTEIN: The world’s a scary place today. It’s in turmoil. You know there’s a feeling of being threatened out there. You come here, you know it’s a safe haven.

PESCHARDT: Yevrah Ornstein is typical of the new so-called survivalists who believe in surviving in some style. He’s bought this exclusive lodge in a spectacular location on the outskirts of Queenstown. Originally from Washington, he moved here in September 2001 right at the time of the Twin Towers attack.

YEVRAH ORNSTEIN: I went from a, you know an environment quite frightened, very very traumatised to coming back here where it’s worlds away. You know the way I describe it, it didn’t only feel like a world away, it felt like world’s away and you know maybe this sounds selfish but to be quite truthful, this is where I prefer to be. I don’t want to live in, I don’t want to live in fear. I don’t want to, I don’t want to be in a place where people are concerned about being attacked.

PESCHARDT: A regular visitor to Australia in the past, he’s convinced the streets here are now much safer, not least because New Zealand refused to sign up as a member of the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq. The survivalists believe that by coming to the South Island, they will drop right off the terrorist radar.

YEVRAH ORNSTEIN: And New Zealand’s a neutral country. It has no enemies in the world. They’ve not been, you know they haven’t been imperialistic. They’re like Switzerland in the sense of being quite neutral.

PESCHARDT: It’s not just Americans heading for the hills. Following the bombing of the London Underground, some of the normally more stoical Brits are rushing for the exists as well.

When you saw it, what did you think:

PETER SHAW: Well we’d spent a couple of weeks looking at properties around the area and we came out here and we just…

HELEN SHAW: We fell in love with it instantly.

PETER SHAW: … fell in love with it instantly.

PESCHARDT: Helen and Peter Shaw moved in six months ago, buying this not so modest mountain retreat.

HELEN SHAW: One of the bombs that didn’t go off was the tube station that I would have used every day to go to work and that just reconfirmed that to live your life in this beauty and this safety is fabulous.

PETER SHAW: And yeah one does feel secure here. If one thought where one would like to be, I think if you did a poll, a lot of people would say well as far away as possible and New Zealand is probably about as far away as you can get.

PESCHARDT: Since the survivalists started arriving in Queenstown, it’s been raining real estate agents. Al Qaeda is the developer’s friend down here. We were shown round the newest townhouse on the market.

Thanks to survivalists, property in Queenstown is now more expensive than the central business district of Auckland. This three bedroom home for instance could be yours for around $2.2 million Australian dollars.

ESTATE AGENT: About 80% of my enquiry is from overseas at the moment and especially for properties at this level there’s a lot of enquiry from Australia and England and also America as well.

PESCHARDT: And there’s been a huge property boom?

ESTATE AGENT: We’ve just come through a huge property boom.

PESCHARDT: Give us an idea of the scale.

ESTATE AGENT: In the last year in Queenstown the property values have increased probably 25%.

PESCHARDT: And over the last five years?

ESTATE AGENT: In the last four years 70%.

PESCHARDT: For the Queenstown posties like Dave Yates, more houses mean more work, more sorting, more walking but no more money. Locals like him earn about fifteen dollars an hour. Affording any sort of home in your own hometown has suddenly become an impossible dream. Not surprisingly there’s resentment.

DAVE YATES: That has to be said that’s quite true, well I feel it’s quite true. You have got the locals who work hard, live here on a daily basis and may not earn great money and then you’ve got the super rich who come into town with truckloads of cash and they’re throwing it around like water, building colossal homes and they just keep, keep coming. They keep arriving with money to burn and the ability to make it all happen really.

PESCHARDT: Do you think it’s expensive here?

HELEN SHAW: No I don’t. I think it’s remarkably good value.

PESCHARDT: You sound very, very pleased right now.

HELEN SHAW: Well we are but we don’t like to shout too loud about it because we don’t want to spoil it but yes it is, when you come from England living in New Zealand is great value for your money.

PESCHARDT: There are some locals however with the wherewithal to compete with the foreign raiders. Actor Sam Neil was brought up on the South Island and has returned to stay.

SAM NEIL: We grow organic vegetables down here. It’s very Prince Charles.

PESCHARDT: It is very Prince Charles. And you’ve got a sheep over there as well.

SAM NEIL: Yeah I try, I do bad watercolours.

PESCHARDT: Oh right.

SAM NEIL: He does good watercolour and I do bad watercolours.

PESCHARDT: I’d like to see your bad watercolours.

Whatever the two men’s differences, they do share a distaste for what developers are doing to their respective lands.

SAM NEIL: I have mixed feelings about that frankly. I mean I welcome the idea of immigrants from all sorts of places in the world, at the same time, I don’t want to see the place chock-a-block you know - elbow to elbow with each other. I think one of the reasons that this is a country that’s relative free of tension is we are not overcrowding each other.

PESCHARDT: Driving around his country estate in his vintage ute, he is personally proud that New Zealand didn’t send combat troops to Iraq but struggles with the unexpected consequences for this small corner of his once perfect world.

SAM NEIL: I don’t mind admitting it. I am fairly nostalgic for the days when these were all shingle roads here. There was no tar sealing. New Zealanders like to have a big second home and Australians and Americans like to have a big second home here and you, you know this, it’s only a small country. There’s only so many fields it can sustain big second homes.

PESCHARDT: But as if the survivalists were not enough, Sam Neil’s backyard is also being assailed by another more perplexing band of invaders. Welcome to the world of Middle Earth. In Queenstown you’re also in the heart of Lord of the Rings territory. These devotees have come to see the real life locations where the award-winning trilogy was filmed. Add some special effects to the scenery and you get this… [clip from Lord of the Rings].

The South Island was the real life backdrop for much of the mythical and mystical epic. These people are on a two week Lord of the Rings tour visiting just about every major location. The film has brought people here who would normally never have dreamt of coming. Many of course are now planning to stay. Being among them is a bit like entering a parallel universe.

JANE ROUNCE: Well here’s my bear Elijah that I bought in England.

PESCHARDT: Yeah.

JANE ROUNCE: And I brought him with me and Elijah is my factor actor in the film so I called him Elijah and then when we went to the cloak factory he got an Elvin cloak. And then he’s also had his foot tattooed with the Elvin nine by the calligrapher who did all the work for the film.

PESCHARDT: You are a bit balmy aren’t you?

JANE ROUNCE: I am totally obsessed with Lord of the Rings and I’ve seen all the films. The last one I’ve saw twenty five times at the cinema.

PESCHARDT: It’s hard to over estimate the effect the film has had. Whole industries have sprung up to cater for the incoming fans, the national economy is still basking in the glow. The Ring fanatics are also sure the author Tolkien would have approved of setting the film in New Zealand. They believe the country’s foreign policy matches the film’s anti war message.

For its part the central government in Wellington has been very quick to put a price on all this. It’s determined to cash in on the survivalist bandwagon. As a result, if you’re rich enough, you can now effectively buy your way into this country. A residency visa is yours as long as you’ve got a lazy two million dollars to invest in a government controlled account.

As New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Labour’s Helen Clark made the decision not to send troops to Iraq. It was a key plank in her campaign for last weekend’s national election. The outcome of the poll is still too close to call but for her, this was one issue never really open to negotiation.

PRIME MINISTER HELEN CLARK: I think that many people look at New Zealand and see a haven of tranquillity in a troubled world. It also happens that we’re physically very distant from anybody else. Our nearest neighbour is Tonga and New Caledonia around eleven hundred miles away so geographically we’re safe but I think there’s also a feeling of sanctuary about New Zealand.

PESCHARDT: You’re getting more than your fair share of rich and famous aren’t you?

PRIME MINISTER HELEN CLARK: Oh we’re doing very well with people who show an interest here. There’s the odd person who’s made their hundreds of millions and the United States economy who find sanctuary here in New Zealand.

PESCHARDT: There is an issue though isn’t there, a serious issue, do you think it’s morally right for a country as it were to sell a visa?

PRIME MINISTER HELEN CLARK: I think that we would not be the only country that had an investor category and New Zealand needs investment. As a country right through our history, we’ve been short on capital. We import the savings of others. We haven’t been great savers ourselves so having people able to come here with investment resources that they can put to use in New Zealand, actually helps out a lot.

PESCHARDT: Suddenly star spotting has become a big part of the New Zealand skiing experience. There is an eclectic mix. Canadian country rock superstar, Shania Twain and the former Premier of New South Wales Bob Carr, are among those to have invested in the area.

At the local newspaper the editor at large is known by everyone simply as ‘Scoop’. In every way he is a thoroughly old fashioned journalist and all the better for it, preferring to be in the pub as soon as humanly possible.

SCOOP: Yeah I want to show you this bar Michael. It’s called a boiler room. It goes off at night. You’ll love this place.

PESCHARDT: I don’t think there’s anyone who knows this town better than you. What are you having?

If you want more of a real handle on why this place has become so popular, Scoop typically is the man with a story.

SCOOP: In terms of crimes against person and you know rape, murder, we’re just, you know as I say, just don’t seem to have it at all.

PESCHARDT: Can you give us an idea of the sort of crimes that there are? I mean some of your recent front pages?

SCOOP: Well we just, we do a police column and I mean someone knocking over mailboxes in the countryside you know?

PESCHARDT: So knocking over a mailbox would be a big story?

SCOOP: Yeah, yeah I mean that’s, it gets reported you know so maybe that’s a good litmus test isn’t it? You know the scale of things.

PESCHARDT: You must be one of those sort of happy reporters in the world so that when the London bombings happened for instance or 9/11 happens, that must seem like a different world to you.

SCOOP: You know in a funny way when you hear about that you almost say well there’s, that’s just added to the value of this town because you just know there’ll be another wave of you know immigration almost you know? Cause people will, I mean we’ve noticed that since 01 you know?

PESCHARDT: For the first time in its history perhaps, the tyranny of distance is now actually working in New Zealand’s favour.

YEVRAH ORNSTEIN: And I remember what it was like walking off the plane and walking into the airport in Auckland after being back in the States for three weeks and my first two thoughts in, I mean I remember it very clearly, impressions were, were calm and civility and no fear.

PESCHARDT: Ask any real estate agent in Queenstown and they’ll tell you that that lack of fear is a priceless commodity. New Zealand has always offered isolation but never before for so many has it seemed quite so splendid.