Nicky Hager and Dirty Work, 24 hours on

We asked the author of the book to respond to the responses.

After a flurry of speculation, Nicky Hager last night launched Dirty Work: The Taxpayers’ Union and the New Zealand Hard Right. The book, revealed to hundreds of people packed into Unity Books in central Wellington, was, as many had suspected, a sequel of sorts to 2014’s Dirty Politics. Or rather, said Hager, it was the third in a trilogy that began with The Hollow Men in 2006.

Dirty Work returns to the scene of what Hager calls “the most cynical people in New Zealand politics”, with chapters that span the operating style and network of campaign groups in which Taxpayers’ Union founder Jordan Williams is involved, the 2023 campaign opposing Three Waters and co-governance, and the funding of the organisation. 

Hager did not approach those he wrote about for comment, in keeping with what he called his “operational approach”, saying that books are “uniquely vulnerable” to tactics to prevent publication. It did not take long, however, for those who are featured in the book to challenge the veracity of its contents, as well as the methodology. 

In an email to supporters last night, Jordan Williams, decried a “full frontal attack”, charging that Hager had “ignored the most basic principles of fair journalism: put serious allegations to the people accused and give them a reasonable opportunity to respond”.

In a new episode of the Spinoff podcast At Large with Toby Manhire, we spoke to Hager about the book and the case it makes, and sought his response to the rebuttals. 

For those who have been living under a rock for the last 24 hours or so, what is Dirty Work about? How would you sum up its central thesis?

Dirty Work is about a section of our political system which is not the political parties and not the journalists and not the voting public, but professional manipulators who often have more influence over what the news is and what happens on issues than all the rest of us put together. 

And one of the reasons it has so much effect is because it operates in private. It operates secretly, and many of us, including me on most issues at any given time, don’t know who’s pulling the strings and what’s going on. That sounds all very mysterious, but when you when you boil it down, when you do what I’ve done, which is to to go into the groups, get shown around the groups by people who work there, who are unhappy with what they’re doing, and investigate who’s doing what and the timetable of what they do and the the tactics that they employ, suddenly, it makes more sense why some things become issues and other things don’t become issues, and we get a much clearer and more real view of what’s happening in our politics.

One of the examples that you emphasise in the book is the Taxpayers’ Union’s 2023 campaign against Three Waters, in which the co-governance element was amplified particularly. But we knew that at the time, didn’t we? Is part of the problem, arguably, that the response from the other side at the time didn’t point out the sorts of things that were apparent to many?

I think maybe political people understood some of what was going on. I think ordinary people would have just been baffled about why something to do with water supplies in towns and sewerage was suddenly this huge and contended, even biggest, issue of the election? 

And the reason it was was not because there was something fundamentally wrong with our water – although there is something fundamentally wrong with our pipes. But this was all about a secret ingredient that was being fed in for another purpose. The Taxpayers’ Union was turning it into an issue about fear and criticism of Māori and the threat of Māori taking something of yours and using using the idea of unknown outside others, who are actually the the people who we spend our lives with and we know and love, turned into an enemy. 

And so we we went through one of those unhappy phases that you get in New Zealand politics sometimes, where there’s a kind of a madness, and where people are threatened by race, and race is suddenly the currency which can get you more votes, will get you more donations and more supporters, and that’s what the Taxpayers’ Union did. It’s probably the greatest achievement of its existence up till now – the way that they managed to turn something innocuous and useful like water supplies for a town into something where people were hating each other and saying the most hateful things on social media, and we’re being scared into sending more money to the Taxpayers’ Union, and into a cycle of unhealthy, irrelevant politics.

The source material for this book is a departure from the other books in what you’ve described as the trilogy, The Hollow Men and then Dirty Politics. In Dirty Work, there isn’t that trove of communications. This hinges on human sources, people that you’ve spoken to who used to work in these organisations? 

That’s right. I would have loved to have a trove of papers, but they don’t grow on trees. And it was not just me going out, as I normally do, and looking for people to talk to on a subject, but being actively pursued and invited to take information from people who had worked inside the Taxpayers’ Union and the constellation of related groups with different names, but more or less the same personnel. 

I was invited in there to find out what they were doing, and so I spent the best part of three years having long, long meetings and and talking about what what they did and how their campaigns worked, and building up a picture for anyone who reads it of a much more real, genuine idea of how things work and that kind of politics. I think any person who reads the book, and hears the disgruntled National Party affiliated Taxpayers’ Union staff’s own voices, suddenly, a whole lot of politics is going to come into focus and make more sense.

If I were writing about this, I would feel an obligation to seek the view of the people about whom I was writing, and certainly my editor would feel that I should feel an obligation to go and seek their views. What is different about this book?

This is the standard criticism that’s been used at times like this. What I’ll say for starters, when I write an article, an article of 1,000 words or 2,000 words or 3,000 words, like anyone else, I always go for comments. Of course I go for comment. Everyone does. You go to comments because it’s a fair thing to do, and so, 100% of the time, I go for comment. 

But when you’re writing a book, and you’re investing years of work in it, against writing about people who don’t have a sense of goodwill, who want to try to close down and make it invisible, to stop you getting the information out there, then the normal responsibility and wish to to go and talk to people and show them what you’ve got and to check that you’re right doesn’t apply any more because actually they’ve got the potential to stop you from from being able to publish at all. 

So, although it would be nice to be able to show all the work I did on the Taxpayers’ Union to the Taxpayers’ Union people, all that would have happened would have been that I gave them the opportunity to think up every trick that they could to undermine and to hurt what I’d spent all that time working on.

I went back and looked at that Taxpayers’ Union press release, which you mentioned in launching the book as being a sort of inciting factor in the sources coming forward, and they said we will not injunct you. They did offer that undertaking, didn’t they?

Yeah, but I’m not talking about injunctions. I’m talking about spin and manipulation, and diverting the public from what’s important and what’s not important. It’s just going to offer a whole lot of free hits to people who are professional manipulators, propagandists.

In terms of what’s come out in the immediate aftermath of the book, which you will have expected, people who weren’t spoken to for the book, but they have subsequently read it and responded. There’s been a lot of rebuttal. The Taxpayers’ Union has come out very strongly in rejecting the claims of sexual harassment. Its co-founder and advisory board member David Farrar rejects that he argued for the TPU to emphasise race issues, saying if anything he argued the other way. And he categorically denied the suggestion he shared National Party member data for a campaign at Taxpayers’ Union, saying it was “totally 1,000% wrong, absolutely wrong”. Is there not part of you that thinks this would be a fairer book, even a better book, if it included those responses in the pages itself?

No, I stand by what I’m saying. I don’t trust them, and actually it’s a standard operating procedure. When you’re found to have done really rotten things, what they’re doing, and what you’re repeating from them is a series of things which may or may not be partly right, or may or may not be things they can put a different interpretation on, the purpose is to say: look over here. These are the issues which matter. Don’t look over there at all the other stuff that you’ve written and all the other things that you’ve found out and the other things that our staff have wanted you to know and to tell the public. 

So I take that with a grain of salt. It’s tactical. Its whole purpose is to divert – it is not trying to find a better, more honest, truer world because they’ve checked out my work.

[Hager has since issued a statement inviting the Taxpayers’ Union to waive confidentiality relating to former employees.]

The other criticism that you’ve faced is that while you are charging people with interfering in our politics, in an election, you’ve produced a book with just a matter of weeks before the election. Are you not simply doing the same?

Yes, it’s an easy criticism. What the Taxpayers’ Union was doing in the 2023 election was they spent literally $7 million more than any of the political parties, apart from National, on pouring out memes and advertisements and things attacking the Green Party, attacking Labour. Let’s compare that with what I did, which was taking information from National Party people who were worried about their own party and worried about the effect on democracy of people like the Taxpayers’ Union, and giving information to people to look at it. One of them is a democratic activity through and through, and the other one risks not being democratic because of the inequality of resources and the unstated tactics.

When we think back to Dirty Politics, there was a kind of a virtual rope ladder coming out of the ninth floor of the Beehive, down to attack bloggers, in some ways laundering information into the mainstream media. In this example, it’s not quite a rope ladder, is it? Because when I think of Christopher Luxon, I don’t think he likes the TPU much. Nicola Willis appears to viscerally loathe the Taxpayers’ Union, so it’s not quite the same linkages.

No. It is not the same tactics as I was laying out. One was planting information for scandal and for hurt. What the Taxpayers’ Union does is it manufactures campaigns. It manufactures public discussion and debates on the issues and the way they want it to happen. Protests which aren’t really protests. It’s a different tactic, but I wouldn’t say that it’s one that the National Party disagrees with, because otherwise Christopher Luxon wouldn’t have complimented the Taxpayers’ Union on its hard work on on the Three Waters campaign, which was, as I say, the most despicable campaign of its career, and and in many ways of some of our lifetimes.

When you look back on the trilogy as you’ve laid it out, what would you want people to bear in mind in an election period, or more broadly? You have criticisms of the media, for example. But in terms of people arming themselves to, I guess, be cynical in terms of what they see playing out?

I think maybe cynicism is the last thing I want people to take away.

Scepticism?

What I think is, if you look, look into the hearts of many people in politics who care about things – they don’t like people living on the streets, of course, they don’t. They don’t like destruction of the environment. What I find with them is it’s not cynicism; it’s just demoralisation. It’s a sense that what they do isn’t going to make any difference. That a few noisy, well resourced people seem to fill up the space and get given all the speaking time, like what happens a lot with the Taxpayers’ Union. 

And so what I see as one of the major purposes of this book is for anyone who reads not to think there’s no room for me in politics. But to think I have to be involved in politics because I can’t leave it to the small number of tricky people who are happy to use up all the space and all the speaking time on the issues. We’ve all got the right to be there.

This transcript has been lightly abridged and edited for clarity.