At a financially troubled educational institute in New Zealand, a student group was given $3500 to participate in a hip hop dance competition in exchange for recruiting students to boost enrollment and gain as much as $348,000 in additional public funds. Or it could have been a hip hop dance group in a more general competition, in any case, the outing is ambiguously described as a “school hip hop trip.” Maybe they just listened to hip hop music on the ride over.

This controversy emerges as an NZ jobs program that spent $445,000 and got jobs for four people is under investigation after initially raising attention for funding a $26,000 tour to study hip hop.

I’ve been getting the impression that hip hop is pretty big in New Zealand and Davey D. recently commented, after Monday’s shooting, that he was “getting calls about this from everywhere, even New Zealand.” Perhaps that’s not as surprising as it sounds. Sitemeter’s reading of the time zones from which people view my site shows NZ’s time zone as the 4th busiest after, in descending order, the U.S.’s East Coast, the West Coast and Central Standard which includes Texas and Illinois. So why don’t I get any mail from New Zealanders?

Try this Google News search for more on hip hop in New Zealand.

[Note: All figures in NZ dollars.]