I see your Chris Trotter and raise you a Tim Selwyn, Matt Blomfield and Professor Wayne Hope

Former mentor of the Left and freedom fighter turned Culture War Boomer GameKeeper (who once ran with the Marx but now hunts for the rednecks), Chris Trotter, has opined on Nicky Hager’s latest book and it’s gone down about as well as Donald Trump and a Feminist Jazz festival…

The Left’s Frail Prophet.
“Dirty Work”, Nicky Hager’s latest low-voltage thunderbolt, fails to impress.

THE BEST WAY to understand Nicky Hager’s latest “exposé” is not to start at the beginning but at the end. It is only in this slim volume’s final chapters that Hager fully reveals his reasons for writing and releasing what is far-and-away his worst book ever.

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What we discover there is a man who cannot reconcile himself to the facts of his cherished ideology’s impotence. Jordan William’s and the Taxpayers’ Union’s unforgiveable sin is their effectiveness. What they do works. The number of New Zealanders who respond positively to Jordan’s carefully-crafted messages is vastly greater than the number of Aotearoans who hang on Hager’s every word.

This is not the way it is supposed to be. Hager is one of those who shares the faith of Dr Martin Luther King that: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That the contrary might be true, or even worse, that the universe might be utterly indifferent to the just and the unjust, would render Hager’s life-long crusade for a better world meaningless.

For those who subscribe to the idea of a “moral” universe, studying closely the operations of any successful lobbying operation can be an extremely risky business. Whatever is claimed in the Aims and Objectives sections of Greenpeace’s, Amnesty International’s, or the Taxpayers’ Union’s websites, the actual operations of those organisations are driven by exactly the same set of practical considerations. Attracting attention. Igniting powerful emotions. Proffering solutions. Inviting participation. Asking for money.

Yes, of course, there are some people who arrive at the point of “doing something” by other means. The readers of books and magazines; the attendees of documentary film festivals. The participants in interminable discussions in boutique pubs and cafés. The people who fall in love with political activists. All worthy and exciting ways of “getting motivated”, but your average lobbyist would shake his head and say: “Not the most promising pool in which to go fishing for dial-shifting dollars.”

But it is Hager’s pool: the milieu in which he has moved and shaken for most of his life; and even in this very small pool he is an odd fish.

Chris Trotter

 

…for Trotter to dump on an investigative journalist that he once celebrated because Chris (like so many boomers) went down the NZF culture war rabbit hole during Covid is a sad indictment on the loneliness epidemic while being an amazing g example of the woke’s ability to alienate.

Now Chis has become an Alt-Right folk singer for Hobsons’ Pledge subscribers, his worldview is as narrow as a gumboot.

I’ll see your Chris Trotter and raise you a Tim Selwyn...

Hager addresses the media bias issue and does a lot to undermine his statements about institutional sanctity. He puts the boot deeper into dear old RNZ than I did, but still can’t see that this is the rule now not the exception. His five recommendations are mostly cute stuff about the media rather than lobbying reform, or overthrowing the corrupt state.

Overall I was not disappointed, because I knew what to expect. The lack of emails in this book however does mean it is a little light. Has it done its job in wrecking Williams and the TU? Yes, it has. Was it interesting and revealing? Yes, and also entertaining. I confess the gossip parts are my favorite parts.

We need these books and we need Nicky Hager, like we need RNZ. They don’t have to be strictly neutral to be appreciated for their contribution to our collective consciousness. Thank you, Nicky.

 

…I’ll see your Chris Trotter and raise you a Matt Blomfield...

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.

 

…I’ll see your Chris Trotter and raise you a Professor Wayne Hope…

Dirty Work contains no real surprises beyond Hager’s previous investigations, but his case studies are disturbing. Most nauseous is the story behind the resignation of TVNZ political editor Maike Sherman in April this year. I won’t recount details except to say that the Free Speech Union lacks ethical consistency.

Weaponising dirty politics has never been easier. What has changed since Hollow Menand Dirty Politics is the media environment. In 2004-2005, Don Brash was spin doctored for press and television. After 2008, under John Key, the blogosphere had become a primary source for news stories—a circumstance ruthlessly exploited by Cameron Slater, David Farrar, Jason Ede and Judith Collins. In 2026, the year of Dirty Work, social media platforms and dark web sites are conjoined to millions of personal smartphones. Far Right and racist networks pump out industrial quantities of interpersonal bile, disinformation and conspiracy material.

With the spread of artificial intelligence, deep-fake attack videos abound. In general, distrust of media, journalists and politicians increases. Young people avoid news and form parasocial relationships with chatbots rather than reporters. Overall, shared reality among people is starting to break down as extremist echo chambers prevail. A dystopian account perhaps but a potential utopia for the likes of John Ansell, Peter Keenan, Simon Lusk, Ruth Richardson, Cameron Slater, David Farrar and Cathy Odgers, Ani O’Brien and … Jordan Williams. Confronting such people and their noxious practices will require a strengthening of public media and journalism, radical reform of campaign financing rules and a shared commitment to civility as an ethical value. All of these recommendations are detailed at length in Hager’s compelling trilogy. It is a testament to the struggle of memory against forgetting.

 

…the current attempt by the Right Wing Trolls is that Nicky’s book is a fizzier.

Failed National Party Cabinet Minister Chris Penk wrote a review of Hager’s book WITHOUT ACTUALLY READING THE BOOK!

The Prime Minister even claimed he had never heard of Nicky Hager FFS!

Nicky is one of our best known investigative journalists, this is his 8th book…

Secret Power: NZs role in te international spy network.

Secrets and Lies: the anatomy of an anti-environmental PR

Seeds of Distrust: The Story of a GE Cover-Up  

The Hollow Men: A study in the politics of deception

Other People’s Wars: NZ in Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror

Dirty Politics: How attack politics is poisoning NZs political environment 

Hit and Run: The NZ SAS in Afghanistan and the meaning of honour.

Dirty Work: The Taxpayers’ Union and the New Zealand Hard Right

…his work and reputation is beyond reproach.

What Dirty Work highlights is how the Taxpayers’ Union weaponised racism for grift.

The book uncovers the real triggers behind the influence. They received so much money in donations when they promoted racist stereotyping over 3 Waters that they became addicted to the funding and the influence it created and generated.

The Taxpayers’ Union found that when they legitimised the bigotry of old white men, the money came gushing in.

That’s not a story merely about the Right influencing politics, it’s a story about an organisation that had zero traction gaining wealth and power by playing to the most racist urges of our community.

That should be condemned not celebrated.

This matters!

What Hager has done is lift the lid on what was driving the Taxpayers’ Union. It wasn’t the common good, it was out and out racism.

Reading the book reminded me of Louis Theroux’s “Inside the Manosphere” doco that was released this year, where the manosphere operates less like an ideological movement and more like a predatory capitalist enterprise.

Many of the influencers run what amount to online Ponzi schemes, the algorithms of big-tech corporations intentionally amplify misogyny and outrage because it maximizes engagement and corporate.

That’s what the Taxpayers’ Union has found with anti-Māori, anti-Treaty rhetoric.

Simon Wilson over at his new Hopetown Substack makes the case…

Dirty work and the disinfecting sunshine it deserves

The central allegation of Nicky Hager’s new book Dirty Work is that the Taxpayers’ Union (TU), at the instigation of its executive director Jordan Williams, deliberately created a campaign of racial hatred against Māori, as a way to ensure the National Party won the 2023 election.

Hager reveals that the TU turned a relatively obscure argument in 2021 about how water utilities are managed into a major social conflict. The provocation: that Māori were getting something they did not deserve, at the expense of other New Zealanders.

Three Waters. The supposed plot by which “the public would lose control of water” and, because of “co-governance”, Māori would gain “ownership or control”, leading to a “cash-flow to Māori”. It wasn’t true but that didn’t matter. As the TU campaign gathered steam, donations flowed and the political parties of the right – National, Act and NZ First – all jumped aboard.

Much of the campaign was run through other groups, like Hobson’s Pledge and the farm lobby Groundswell, but Williams and the TU stood behind them, coordinating it all.

The outcome has been devastating. Once in government, those three parties of the right turned formerly fringe racist ideas into a central policy platform, infecting everything from the name of the transport agency to school curriculums, from effective healthcare programmes to fruitful partnerships in local government, and so much more. And in our wider society, among a small but busy group of people, a kind of relentless fury has been unleashed.

 

…Malicious Corporate influencers changed social policy using racist grift and here’s the icing on this shitcake, YOU ARE ALL PAYING MORE FOR WATER THAN YOU WOULD HAVE UNDER 3 WATERS!

We have allowed the Taxpayers’ Union to plumb the darkest parts of NZs racism for money and influence which saw 3 Waters killed off and is now costing us all more!

You allow your petty bigotries to be manipulated by people who do not have your interests at heart.

That’s why Nicky’s book matters.

Read the Book.

Get enrolled. 

 

 

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