Brings upfront dirt
Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics has created a firestorm of controversy, mainly because of what it contains, but also because of how Hager obtained the information.
Most of the email evidence in Dirty Politics was hacked in January from the Whale Oil website run by the blogger Cameron Slater. As Hager says, the test he has always applied in his work is whether the public good over-rides the normal concerns about privacy, and secrecy.
There are precedents for that line of argument.
Time and again, whistleblowers have obtained documents, emails and videos and released them publicly, for the greater good.
Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know a lot about the current systems of global surveillance. Thanks to Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks, we’ve learned a great deal about how the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been conducted, and how diplomats have tried to manipulate public opinion.
Thanks to Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, the American public learned how they had been systematically misled about the causes and likely course of the Vietnam War. Thanks to the Winebox papers, we learned about the corporate tax dodges that flourished here in the 1990s.
In each case, the public learned that the official version was not painting a true picture of what was going on.
Similarly, what Dirty Politics illustrates – with any number of examples – is that a two-track system of politicking has seemingly been run out of the ninth floor of the Beehive.
On one hand, Prime Minister John Key has been encouraged to project a likeable public persona and to deliver positive messages. Yet, simultaneously, a series of dirty tricks have been outsourced by some of his staff, working in tandem with Cameron Slater and National’s other allies in the blogosphere.
The techniques involved were developed in the US, by the Republican Party. In essence, the leader gets to present a carefully constructed facade to the public, while his underlings do the hatchet jobs on the Government’s opponents (and in some cases on supposed friends, such as Rodney Hide) behind the scenes.
Not surprisingly, the vitriol directed at Hager’s book has been intended to deter as many voters as possible from reading it before the election.
Obviously, Dirty Politics has the potential to do considerable harm to the Government’s re-election effort, in which the personal integrity and likeability of John Key is its main trump card.
For all that, many National Party members would probably feel alarmed, for example, by the book’s revelations about the methods used in the Rodney elec- torate by Slater and political consultant Simon Lusk to damage and deter candidates favoured by the party hierarchy, and to successfully install their man, Mark Mitchell, as the Rodney candidate. It is hardly a pretty picture of National’s selection processes.
Will Hager’s book affect the election? ‘‘To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook,’’ White House aide Bob Haldeman told President Richard Nixon 40 years ago, about the Pentagon Papers leaks. ‘‘ But out of the gobbledygook,’’ Haldeman continued, ‘‘comes a very clear thing. It shows that people do things that the president wants them to do, even though it’s wrong – and [it shows them] that the president can be wrong.’’
Today, Haldeman’s verdict could serve as a useful capsule review of Hager’s book.