Stephen Fry and Cultural Cringe

I quite like Stephen Fry, particularly as, in an earlier life, he went down for credit card fraud in a prison in a village I know well in the UK, the delightfully-named Pucklechurch (a name some believe is derived from "pulcher", the Latin for beautiful, for it has a beautiful 13th Century church with both Norman origins and later additions, and an equally lovely 'ring of six'). Anyway, he is multiply-talented, very funny and no fool at all when it comes to the Digital Age.

However, I am somewhat baffled by our knee-jerk response to a UK actor's views of our broadband provision. Many of us have been fulminating (with longer and better justification) about both price and quality of broadband service. Is it only to be taken seriously when a visiting actor (however talented) tweets? Should we expect the government's asset sales' strategy to be revisited if Ian McKellen questions it?  Would the question of inequality on NZ be addressed the more quickly if AB de Villiers raised it as a concern? Would we get the Rail Tunnel in Auckland if Roger Waters so suggested? Are we not just a little vulnerable here to that cultural cringe whereby any foreign person of note (taken very broadly) becomes somehow vested in the right to direct our national decision-making?