GUEST BLOG: Matt Blomfield – A review of Dirty Work, sort of.

Nicky Hager has a new book out. Dirty Work: The Taxpayers’ Union and New Zealand’s Hard Right, launched last week at Unity Books in Wellington to a crowd of hundreds, the third instalment of what’s being called the Dirty Politics trilogy. This is meant to be a review of it. It won’t really be one, and I should declare why.

I owe my friendship with Nicky Hager to Cameron Slater, which is not a sentence either of them would enjoy.

Cameron has been telling people lately that Nicky’s book is what put him back on the path to Jesus (who sounds like a kiwi apparently). I can’t speak to the state of anyone’s soul. I can only report that the same chain of events sent each of us somewhere unexpected: Nicky’s book turned Cameron to Jesus, and Cameron’s blog turned me to Nicky. Of the two conversions, I’m confident I got the better deal.

Some background for anyone who arrived late. From 2012, Slater ran a sustained series of attacks against me on his Whale Oil blog, built on a hard drive of my files that was never his to have. I sued. It took eleven years, but in 2024 the High Court found the campaign against me was exactly what I had always said it was, and I won one of the more significant defamation judgments this country has produced.

In August 2014, partway through all of that, Dirty Politics landed. Nicky had built his book out of Slater’s own correspondence. I’m barely in the book itself, a mention at most. But I was all through the files it was built from. When the book came out I picked up the phone and called him, a complete stranger, and he invited me to come down and see him. He already knew who I was. He’d been reading about me in Cameron’s files, in Cameron’s own words, describing what was being done to me and why. We went for a walk on the beach next to the airport and talked for hours, and we’ve been talking ever since.

Note the order of events. After the book came out, Slater and several others accused me of being Rawshark, the source who supplied Nicky with his material. Think about that for a second. I’d never met the man. I’d never spoken to him. My first contact with Nicky Hager happened because his book was already published and my name was in the files behind it. You can’t be the source for a book that introduced you to its author. The accusation wasn’t just wrong, it was impossible.

There is one more connection between my case and Nicky’s new book, and his name is Jordan Williams. Long before he was known as the co-founder of the Taxpayers’ Union, Williams was the lawyer at Franks Ogilvie who filed submissions for Cameron Slater in my defamation case. That’s how I first met him, at the Manukau District Court. What has stayed with me is not the hearing itself but the scene beforehand. Watching Williams and Slater together in the courthouse was like watching two teenage boys who had snuck into somewhere they shouldn’t be, mucking around, delighted with themselves and the occasion. I was there because my name, my family and my livelihood were being torn apart online. They appeared to be having the time of their lives.

Then we went inside, and the results didn’t match the mood. In September 2013 Judge Blackie declined to give Slater the source protection the law reserves for news media, and found his defences of truth and honest opinion had no proper basis. Slater came back for another go at Manukau, this time applying for security for costs against me, with Franks Ogilvie instructing. That failed too. I’ve looked, and I’m not aware of another example of Jordan Williams appearing in a courtroom for a client. He’s spent plenty of time in courtrooms since, but on those occasions he was representing himself.

I kept that courthouse picture in my head for years without knowing quite what to do with it. Then I read Dirty Work. I won’t rehearse what Nicky writes about Williams, buy the book and read it yourself, but I will say this: nothing in it surprised me. The person on those pages was recognisably the person I watched at Manukau more than a decade ago. Some people grow up. Some just find bigger playgrounds.

So no, I’m not a neutral reviewer, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

What I can tell you about is the man. Nicky and I live in different worlds. He’s a Wellington investigative journalist; I spend my days in business development, insolvency and commercial disputes in Auckland. On paper we should have nothing in common. In practice we joke that we are far more alike than anyone would believe. We see the same things when we look at how power behaves when it thinks nobody’s watching. He’s careful, patient, and relatively unbothered by the abuse that comes with the work. He’s had his house raided by police for doing his job, and the police ended up apologising and paying damages. He keeps going anyway. In my experience the people who shout loudest about Nicky Hager have usually never met him, and the picture they paint bears no resemblance to the person.

Nicky is one end of a spectrum of people I’m lucky to call friends. The others sit everywhere along it: lawyers and accountants, liquidators, journalists and tradespeople, even a couple of rich listers, people of the left and people of the right, some of whom would struggle to share a lift, let alone a dinner table. I wouldn’t change any of it for the world. That breadth isn’t an accident and it’s not a compromise. It’s where my understanding of how the world works comes from. If everyone you know agrees with you, you don’t have friends, you have a mirror. The people who dismiss Nicky Hager without meeting him, and the people who dismiss his critics without hearing them, are making the same mistake from opposite ends of the room.

As for the book itself: I read it this weekend, cover to cover. That already puts me ahead of a good number of Nicky’s loudest critics, who have a habit of reviewing his work without opening it. If you haven’t read the book, I’m not sure why anyone should listen to your opinion of it.

The Prime Minister says New Zealanders don’t care about this topic. He said it in the book’s first week, while I was counting the coverage: twenty separate stories across the Herald, RNZ, Stuff, The Post, The Spinoff, Newstalk ZB and the Listener in the first thirty-six hours, and I stopped counting at thirty. The launch crowd spilled out of Unity Books onto Willis Street, the book sold out in twenty minutes, and Labour and the Greens pulled out of Taxpayers’ Union debates because of it. For context, the winner of this country’s richest literary prize, a book the judges called “outrageously good”, attracted about a dozen stories all year, and Nicky’s book passed that before lunchtime on day one. When a Prime Minister looks at all of that and announces nobody cares, it’s fair to wonder who he’s been asking.

I thought it was a good read, I found it interesting, and I learned some things I didn’t know. It does what his books do. It takes something operating largely out of view, this time the funding and tactics of the Taxpayers’ Union and its network, and puts it where voters can see it before they vote. Whether you agree with his conclusions is up to you. That’s rather the point of publishing them.

And for old time’s sake, some further reading:

www.whaleoil.co.nz

 

 

 

Matt Blomfield was a target of Cameron Slater, he ended up being the one to take Slater down.