HAMISH WALKER AND MICHELLE BOAG ADMITTED THEIR PARTS IN THE LEAK OF CONFIDENTIAL MEDICAL INFORMATION.

OPINIONPoliticsJuly 8, 2020

Boag and Walker have admitted a terrible privacy breach. And it won’t end there

Contributing writer

HAMISH WALKER AND MICHELLE BOAG ADMITTED THEIR PARTS IN THE LEAK OF CONFIDENTIAL MEDICAL INFORMATION.

The leak, we discovered last night, was the work of a first-term MP and a veteran National Party operator. What does it mean for the pair, and for the party, asks Ben Thomas.

The latest whodunit in New Zealand politics was solved last night in a flurry of releases, as National’s Clutha-Southland MP Hamish Walker and former party president Michelle Boag admitted their respective parts in a senseless and damaging privacy breach which saw Walker pass on details of 18 active Covid patients to media last week.

Walker said he supplied the details, which he had obtained from “a source” on to various media outlets (who refused to publish details), a privacy breach that sparked an inquiry by former Solicitor-General Mike Heron QC. National leader Todd Muller released his own statement, reprimanding Walker for his “error of judgment”. Minutes later, Boag admitted she had received the information legitimately as acting chief executive officer of the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust (which runs the Westpac Rescue Helicopter), and improperly passed it on to Walker.

The privacy breach is appalling. There is absolutely no public interest in knowing the names and details of people with Covid-19 who are taking all the correct steps in quarantine.

Walker claimed in his apology that he had intended to “to expose the government’s shortcomings so they would be rectified”, apparently referring to the lack of password protection on the data. But the privacy breach was not caused by the government, it was caused by Boag. If Walker wanted to prevent further breaches, he could have whistleblown on Boag to her own organisation.

This is the second – and by far most serious – headache Walker has caused his party. Last week he warned about hypothetical quarantine arrivals from “India, Pakistan and Korea” (apparently up to 11,000 of them) in the South Island, in a media release that was not signed off by National’s leader’s office and was understandably condemned as racist.

Walker has been stripped of his Forestry, Land Information and Associate Tourism portfolios. Boag announced she had resigned as interim chief executive officer of the ARHT. But that is unlikely to be the end of the matter.

Walker has twice now proven himself incapable of good or even normal judgment in the space of a week. Muller risks looking weak after Ardern and the Labour Party Council acted swiftly to cut a candidate for years-old Islamophobic tweets over the weekend. Expelling him from caucus would be messy since he has already been confirmed as National’s candidate in Clutha Southland for the election. The National Party board will face huge and legitimate pressure to reopen nominations for the seat and replace him as a candidate.

Boag remains on the board of the ARHT, where she will continue to receive confidential information from health authorities, a serious reputational and security risk for the trust. She is also a member of the National Party’s Auckland Central electorate committee, the marginal seat held by Nikki Kaye, and tolerating her remaining in this position risks tarnishing the National deputy leader. If she won’t resign, the board would be justified in acting to revoke her membership.

There will inevitably be questions about who else knew what, and when. They must be asked, although at this stage there is no obvious cause to doubt Muller when he says he was kept in the dark.

For Walker, this could yet be a career-ending misstep, with the added adrenaline of possible criminal charges. You wouldn’t trust a fall guy in the face of that to keep it quiet if their leadership were also involved. The leader of the opposition can’t offer a soft landing, via board appointments and cushy jobs, to buy agreeable silence the way a prime minister might.

It’s hard to imagine that National health spokesperson Michael Woodhouse was in the loop, either. He is an experienced enough politician to know the blowback from such a botched political hit. If they regarded it as a valuable scoop, a senior figure would have used the information.

Instead, it is more likely the garrulous and popular Walker, an assiduous networker around parliament’s press gallery and other media, saw an opportunity to improve his relationships with journalists and with a senior figure from the party (Boag). Like a school child trusted with a secret, his first instinct was to tell people he knew it.

Even worse, according to RNZ’s Jo Moir this morning, Walker initially approached media with the leak not to make any lofty point about data protection as claimed yesterday, but to try and support his earlier PR botch-up by supplying, essentially, “foreign-sounding names”.

Boag, meanwhile, has refused to be drawn on why she gave the information to Walker, claiming only that she had not intended for him to give it to the press. That motivation – and what political advantage she thought was to be gained – will remain a mystery, at least until she has to front up to Heron’s inquiry.

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Winston Peters. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

PoliticsJuly 7, 2020

Winston Peters takes exception to UK media report by issuing an angry diatribe – against The Spinoff

Justin Giovannetti

Contributing writer

Winston Peters. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

After the Spinoff recounted Leave.EU heads telling Britain’s Daily Telegraph they had ‘dispatched’ a team to Auckland to work with NZ First, the party leader issued a deeply curious statement.

The day began with news that the “bad boys of Brexit” were back and they were coming to New Zealand.

The Daily Telegraph, newspaper of choice for the British Conservative establishment, reported overnight that the New Zealand First Party had hired a crew of political operators from one of the most aggressive and controversial groups in the Brexit campaign to create “mischief, mayhem and guerrilla warfare” in the leadup to the September election.

The report came one week after The Spinoff revealed that Arron Banks, bankroller of Nigel Farage’s nationalist UK Independence Party as well as the unofficial and highly provocative Brexit group Leave.EU, had become an ardent champion of New Zealand First, effusively praising Winston Peters online. The UK-based group, created to advocate for Brexit, had posted numerous memes celebrating Peters over the past weeks. New Zealand First did not return 15 requests for comment on the nature of his relationship with Banks, but called him a “top bloke” in a tweet posted after the story was published.

There was silence until the Telegraph reported early today that a six-person team from Banks’ Leave.EU has been “dispatched to Auckland” to work on New Zealand First’s campaign. According to The Telegraph’s chief political correspondent, Christopher Hope, the team had been instructed to double the party’s count of MPs to 20.

The story directly quoted Banks and Andy Wigmore, one of his main lieutenants. Wigmore told the newspaper: “I’m going to be on ground in New Zealand causing trouble – mischief, mayhem and guerrilla warfare in the New Zealand election – the bad boys are back.”

The Spinoff in turn reported the developments from the UK this morning. Both Banks and Wigmore retweeted The Spinoff’s story.

Peters, who is New Zealand’s deputy prime minister, then chose to respond. In a statement he snubbed the venerable British broadsheet the Daily Telegraph (established 1855), however, choosing instead to focus on the New Zealand site The Spinoff (established 2014) in a statement issued this afternoon.

“The clickbait journos can’t help themselves,” he said, describing the story as “rubbish”.

“Not only have I not hired such a crew but it is impossible to see how they would even gain entry into the country,” added Peters.

Minister of immigration Iain Lees-Galloway had earlier confirmed as much, telling The Spinoff that no exemption to New Zealand’s strict border controls exist for self-styled “bad boys of Brexit” or political strategists.

“Immigration New Zealand considers applications based on the border exceptions criteria. There are no criteria that would fit this situation,” said Less-Galloway.

Banks spent the first five months of 2020 in Auckland, arriving in the country before Covid-19 travel restrictions came into effect and only returning to the UK a few weeks ago. Both he and New Zealand First have declined or ignored numerous requests from The Spinoff to describe their work together.

Speaking to the Telegraph, however, Banks claimed that the Brexit group’s “top social media team and data experts” would be sent to do creative work, while he and Wigmore would provide Peters with “strategic advice”.

According to Peters, he and Banks have known each other since the 2016 Brexit campaign. “We have been happily sharing thoughts and ideas on international matters ever since,” the NZ First leader said in a tweet last week.

Banks told the British newspaper that prime minister Jacinda Ardern, whom he called “Jacinderella” was being groomed for a job at a supra-national body such as the World Health Organisation.

Arron Banks, left, threw millions behind both Nigel Farage’s political party Ukip and the Brexit campaign. Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Ardern told reporters at an event in Auckland on Tuesday that she has no plans to leave her current job. Police minister Stuart Nash interjected with “I hope not.”

The prime minister said her deputy’s choice of who to hire for his party campaign was entirely up to him. “Ultimately we’ll all campaign in our own way. I wouldn’t necessarily make an assumption that someone offshore who’s touting for work is ultimately to do what they claim,” she said.

Gerry Brownlee, a National MP and the chair of the party’s campaign, said the Leave.EU claim about sending operatives to New Zealand is hard to believe.

“The bad boys are back? Who do they think they are?” he said. Brownlee added that it would be ironic were a nationalist party like New Zealand First to bring in foreigners to run their social media campaign.

“There’s a real cowboy flavour to the way this guy is representing himself. With those childish quotes we wouldn’t be concerned, but it would be something the voter would need to put up with,” he said.

Peters has also had praise in the past from the former head of UKIP, Nigel Farage. The two men bonded over cricket and a political platform built on opposition to immigration. They also share a relationship with Banks, who helped underwrite much of Farage’s career.

Banks made his money through his ownership of insurance companies. He also owns African diamond mines. In 2017, Britain’s Sunday Times said he was worth about NZ $480 million. His donations to the pro-Brexit camp are considered the largest contributions to a political campaign by an individual in British history.

Leave.EU, through its use of social media and attention-grabbing campaigns, was central to turning the Brexit vote into a question where British voters could express a grievance with the way the country was changing. Opponents saw it as a way of expressing xenophobia through the ballot box.

Banks and Peters appeal to a similar demographic, said University of Otago law professor Andrew Geddis, but that doesn’t mean Banks should be invited into New Zealand’s political system.

“The form of politics that led to the Brexit vote, which Arron Banks was involved with, was typified by rampant misinformation and appealing to naked prejudice in the electorate. My view is that importing that type of politics into New Zealand would be detrimental to our democracy,” said Geddis.

Banks, whom Farage has described as “pugnacious”, wrote in his book The Bad Boys of Brexit that political campaigns should be blunt, edgy and controversial to create media attention and garner free publicity.

In the first Spinoff article on the subject last week, I noted that a combative press release from Peters in June, in which he decried the “woke generation” after the statue of John Hamilton was winched from the central square of Hamilton was “blunt, edgy and controversial”.

Peters also asked in that release after the statue’s removal: “Why do some woke New Zealanders feel the need to mimic mindless actions imported from overseas.” In his parting words, Peters said the woke generation need to: “Deal with it, grow up and read a book.”

In his idiosyncratic statement today, Peters said that the original story from The Spinoff had left “a very disappointed NZF staffer” who felt that their statement had been attributed to Banks’ influence when they “wrote that press release, all on their own”.

It was never The Spinoff’s intention to attribute that writer’s work to Banks, not least because the now disappointed writer manifestly wanted their work attributed to Peters.