Thursday, 14 August 2014, 10:32 am
Column: Gordon Campbell
Gordon Campbell on Nicky Hager’s new
book
by Gordon
Campbell
According to Minister
of Everything Steven Joyce – whose duties now extend to
fielding questions about Nicky Hager’s new book
Dirty
Politics - Hager has got it all wrong, and the apparent
collusion recorded in its pages between the prime
minister’s office and blogger Cameron Slater is really no
more than business as usual between government on one hand,
and the journalists they brief as a matter of course on the
other. Nothing to see here, move on.
If that’s true, one
wonders why almost all the key players mentioned in the book
have gone to ground, and don’t seem to be available for
interview. To date, the other well-worn route of response
has been to cast aspersions about Hager’s motives and to
denigrate his modus operandi. Prime Minister John Key laid
out that line of defence yesterday – even before
Dirty
Politics was out of the box - by trying to write Hager
off as “a screaming left wing conspiracy theorist” who
didn’t really know what he was talking about. Methinks the
PM doth protest too much.
The simple antidote to all this
ad hominem abuse is to
read the book. I doubt that
many people who do read the book - and especially the emails
that provide the bulk of its narrative - will feel very
happy about how politics is being conducted in this country
right now. That’s the thing. Hager hasn’t needed to
clothe the content in a conspiracy theory: the emails speak
very eloquently for themselves. Just as in
The Hollow
Men, the damning material is right there in black and
white, in the contributions of Cameron Slater, Jason Ede,
Carrick Graham, Judith Collins etc. And that’s the real
problem for Key with this stuff; if he didn’t know about
the conniving that has been going on right under his nose,
he is incompetent. If he does know, he is
complicit.
By now, most of us know the
general thesis of the book and how it came to be written. As
Hager explained at the book launch last night, Cameron
Slater’s Whale Oil website got hacked and crashed in
January, in the wake of widespread outrage over a
particularly vile posting by Slater. Thousands of emails
were collected, and were eventually handed over to
Hager.
So what do the emails reveal? Primarily, they show
Slater to have been a major cog in the National Party’s
spin machine. It is a spin cycle that’s been designed to
allow Key to project a likeable public persona and deliver
the positive messages, while keeping himself at a plausible
distance from the “dirty tricks” techniques that are (a)
being outsourced to National’s flunkies in the blogosphere
and (b) then get beamed back into the mainstream media
coverage. It is kind of ironic that Kim Dotcom is being
accused of money laundering, among other sins. On the
evidence in Hager’s book, the government has become a dab
hand at laundering the seamier side of its own political
operations.
The government’s systematic use of the
blogosphere to outsource its negative campaign messages is
of such an extent as to introduce an ugly new dimension to
our political culture. It also runs counter to any notion of
healthy open government for the leader to be presenting a
carefully-constructed facade to the public, while his
underlings do the hatchetings of its opponents (and/or its
erstwhile friends) behind the arras. Hager’s book suggests
for example, that Rodney Hide was pressured into resigning
as Act Party leader by threats that Slater was about to
publish release inappropriate texts allegedly sent by Hide
to a young woman. There are many revelations in the email
trail that the book draws on extensively.
One’s level of
tolerance for this sort of thing will vary from reader to
reader, but on the evidence presented by Hager, Key’s
press officer Jason Ede played
some part in the
hacking and/or use of material hacked from the Labour
Party’s computer system in election year 2011. On a
regular basis, it also seems that Ede would contact Slater
when an OIA request was about to be released to the media or
to the Opposition parties; allegedly, Ede would invite
Slater to lodge a request for the same information and then
release it to Slater first, so that Slater could help to
nullify the story. On another occasion, Ede allegedly primed
Slater to request certain SIS secret documents, which were
then speedily de-classified on the understanding that Slater
would use them to humiliate Labour leader Phil Goff. Ede may
also have assisted Slater with the framing of OIA requests
in order to enable Slater to attack MFAT staff who were
opposed to Foreign Minister Murray McCully’s programme of
reforms at the Ministry. And so on.
Moving right along,
some readers are likely to be appalled by the climate of
collusion between Judith Collins and Slater and their
apparent readiness (see pages 49-50) to use access to the
likes of ACC information to settle scores and go after
critics and suspected enemies. There are also revelations
that content was published under Slater’s name on Whale
Oil that was actually written and paid for (at a rate of
circa $6,500 a month) by lobbyist Carrick Graham who, like
Slater, hails from an old National Party family. These
ghosted postings would routinely target academics and others
critical of the tobacco and alcohol industries, or – in
another example – to attack and undermine campaigners
against the sugary drinks known to be linked to New
Zealand’s obesity epidemic.
Other chapters in
Dirty
Politics deal with Slater’s celebrated role in the
Len Brown sex scandal expose, and with the attacks made on
David Cunliffe and Kim Dotcom this year. The attack on
Winston Peters for what Key revealed as being three visits
to the Dotcom mansion – a triangulated release of
information that apparently involved Key, Slater and
NZ
Herald gossip columnist Rachel Glucina – is discussed
at pages 122-123. Hager sums it up in these terms:
Key
did not control Slater, but when it came to smearing the
reputations of their political opponents, they willingly
worked together. Key was not responsible for everything
Slater, [David] Farrar and colleagues did; but as leader of
the National Party and head of the prime minister’s
office, he was directly responsible when his staff and the
party worked with them. The bloggers were now a routine part
of John Key’s political management. The Winston Peters
three-visits hit had been a typical collaboration and there
were more to come.
The series of attacks on David
Cunliffe this year also seems to have involved Ede, who
appears to have been tasked with monitoring the Labour
leader’s every statement and action - including the
photographing of Cunliffe by Ede in Copperfields café at
Parliament - and then feeding a rolling series of negative
images and information to Slater. This strategy was in line
with techniques successfully deployed by the Republican
Party which (p126) had proved to be a key ingredient in the
successful campaign to defeat Senator George Allen. Hager,
again:
He lost, the [Republican] study suggested,
because ‘his opponent had a staffer whose sole job was to
record everything Allen said in public’ Any time he said
anything stupid, or anything that could be made to seem
stupid, it was ‘put on the Internet within 24 hours’ and
seen by large numbers of people at almost no cost to the
campaign.’ Someone appeared to be playing this role in New
Zealand, and feeding the results to the attack
blogs.
From there, the attack lines could feed back
into a mainstream media increasingly dependent on blog
analysis. Crucially, as Hager says (p 132) “the trick of
political management is not to get this or that press
release covered ; it is about framing how journalists
perceive issues.” In Cunliffe’s case, a series of small
mis-steps (and in one case, a trap sprung by the
government’s access to historical documents released with
suspicious speed to the media under the OIA) have seen
Cunliffe successively framed within the mainstream media in
terms of a narrative of bungling and distrust. In the
process, the negative perceptions of the Opposition
leadership have probably received more media attention this
year than the government’s own (lack of an) economic
strategy and its likely third term agenda. The two track
strategy – which has successfully insulated a popular
Prime Minister from the collusion of his office with the
attack blogs - has worked like a dream (until now) for the
National Party. It is working far less well for the health
of our small democracy. In summing up about the
government’s strategic love affair with negative
campaigning, Hager concludes by repeating at the outset, a
chilling quote from National Party strategist Simon
Lusk:
“There are a few basic propositions with
negative campaigning that are worth knowing about. It lowers
turnout, favours right more than left as the right continues
to turn out, and drives away the independents.’ In short,
many people stop participating in politics. If politicians
cannot be trusted, if politics looks like a petty or ugly
game, and if no one seems to be talking about the things
that matter, then what’s the point of bothering to
participate? Just leave them to it. There are innovations in
US Republican Party thinking on this point; election tactics
do not have to be just about winning votes; they can be
equally effective if groups of people in society just stop
voting altogether. We should not assume that everyone thinks
low voter turnout is a bad idea. Sitting in the midst of the
negative politics was John Key…
So
far, the objections to what Hager has exposed – and how
he’s gone about it - seem trivial. Especially when set
alongside the ample evidence he provides on a variety of
related subjects – from political attack gambits to
systematic union bashing to tobacco and alcohol industry
pandering, to the evidence of Slater trawling for sex
scandal information from sex workers that he could use for
hits against the politicians and journalists he didn’t
like – that Hager has amassed. It is an ugly picture, in
toto. Briefly, let’s go through the usual
objections:
1. Hager either stole the emails or
was a receiver of stolen goods. Well, duh. If
people are manipulating the political and news agenda in
secret, chances are they won’t confess to doing so, and
won’t be volunteering the evidence. What Hager has done is
whistle blowing. The motive is to disinfect politics, and to
better inform the public about the nature of those people
standing for re-election to higher office. As one commenter
in the blogosphere has already pointed out, there is a
difference between the tactical use of taxpayer funded
intelligence services against one’s political opponents
– for which the book gives a disturbing example - and the
outing of that practice for the public good. In any case,
Slater can hardly complain. As the book shows, Slater began
his jihad against Labour by being complicit with how the
hacking of the Labour Party website was exploited. He has
now been exposed by much the same means. Some would see that
as karma.
2. Everyone is doing it.
Hardly. As mentioned, one of Slater’s early coups came via
the hacking of the Labour Party website and the subsequent
pressure put on Labour Party donors. There is no evidence of
the Clark administration doing likewise, on anything like
the scale portrayed in the pages of
Dirty Politics.
Moreover, many of the actions in question seem to have been
orchestrated from the ninth floor of the Beehive. This is
not simply a case of Bad Attitudes common to the Beltway. It
has involved abuses of power
by some of the most
powerful people in the country.
3. Cameron
Slater may be a nasty piece of work, but that doesn’t mean
John Key is to blame. True, there’s a lot in
Hager’s book to suggest that Cameron Slater is not a nice
person. Yet the book is not simply a case study in the
psychopathology of Cameron Slater. Ask yourself; if Key’s
hands are as clean as usually presented, why has the Prime
Minister been ringing this patently grubby guy on a regular
basis? (Such co-operation goes way beyond Helen Clark’s
occasional calls to members of the press gallery.) Can Jason
Ede - one of Key’s closest advisers on the ninth floor -
really have worked on an entirely rogue basis with Slater
for so long, without his leader’s knowledge and consent?
To swallow that, we’d have to believe that Key and Slater
didn’t mention Slater’s relationship with Ede during
their phone chats, and that Key and Ede in turn, didn’t
discuss what Slater was up to. That seems unlikely, on both
counts.
Finally, it would be tragic if
Dirty
Politics merely gave people more grounds for cynicism
and turned them off politics altogether. The reverse has
always been Hager’s intention. Ever since he published
Secret Power back in 1996, his aim has been to make
government more open, and to render the exercise of power
more transparent. This book is no exception.
There’s a
further moral to this story, on a somewhat smaller scale.
After the
Hollow Men debacle, you wouldn’t think
the National Party would need a second lesson that anything
you commit to the digital realm can be – and eventually
will be – exposed in public. Chortle and connive away
online at your peril, because inevitably it will become
public knowledge. From now on, surely no young, ambitious
bright spark around Parliament and no Cabinet Minister with
an eye for promotion will want to be seen dead collaborating
with Cameron Slater. If it does nothing else,
Dirty
Politics may succeed in turning Slater into a political
pariah: or at the very least, into a major election
liability for National.
Hopefully, a lot of voters will
read Hager’s book. They may reach the conclusion that
Slater has been only a tool. The real culprits – who
should suffer for it at the ballot box - are the people in
the Beehive that Slater has served so
assiduously.
RIP Jack Shallcrass
Word
overnight is that the great New Zealand educationalist,
writer and humanist Jack Shallcrass has died. This 1992
essay gives a lovely portrait of the man,
and
his view of the
world.
ENDS
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