PoliticsAugust 10, 2017

Dirty Politics turns three: where are Cam, Jason, Carrick and the rest now?

Contributing writer

Three years ago today Dirty Politics was published, lighting the fuse on an extraordinary election campaign. Hayden Donnell looks into what the cast of Nicky Hager’s book have been up to since.

It seems impossible, but there was a time when politics was even worse than it is now.

Today our most fractious political debate is around Metiria Turei confessing to mass murder historic benefit fraud. One of the Newshub political team may soon set themselves alight in Cuba Street in protest at the government’s refusal to execute the Green Party leader.

But if that seems intense, cast your mind back to this time last election cycle. The year was 2014. City-fringe Auckland houses still only cost $1.5 million. Jesse Peach was preparing to change New Zealand forever with this live cross. And Nicky Hager, a journalist then known primarily for lifting the lid on Hollow Men and corn, had just dragged 300 people to Unity Bookstore in Wellington and given birth to our national nervous breakdown: the 166-page text titled Dirty Politics.

Drawing on emails illegally hacked by the mysterious “Rawshark”, Hager’s book meticulously detailed how National Party officials had set up a back channel to funnel attacks on their critics through one of the worst blogs in the world, Whale Oil Beef Hooked. The scandal reached all the way to Prime Minister John Key, with the revelation one of his staffers, Jason Ede, was having regular Facebook Messenger chats with Whale Oil culprit Cameron Slater.

Everyone melted down. Media. Politicians. Twitter. Especially Twitter. Judith Collins resigned. Key even looked ruffled a few times. Glenn Greenwald was involved? For a while it seemed we’d never talk about anything else. Then the election happened, National won as usual, and it seemed like it was all for nothing. The consensus was that the book hadn’t achieved that much.

But is that true? Was Dirty Politics as ineffectual as some have said? Maybe it didn’t change the election, but it definitely changed a few people’s operating procedures. It’s time to do the unthinkable, dive right back into New Zealand’s Cameron Slater-shaped cistern, and find out where the key characters from the book have ended up. Welcome to Dirty Politics: Where Are They Now.

Jason Ede

Poor Jason Ede. All he ever wanted was for messy journalists to pick up their cigarette butts. Somehow he became one of the most recognisable and reviled figures in New Zealand politics for three turbulent months. He was the black ops man in the prime minister’s office. The human-shaped link between John Key and Whale Oil. A notoriously bad judge of golf venues.

PHOTO: STOLEN FROM FAIRFAX WHO STOLE IT FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE

Ede quit his job working for Key the day before the 2014 General Election. He was last reported to have got a new role working for telecommunications company TeamTalk. Is he still there? Honestly, who cares? Ede is like Luigi Wewege but without the virtue of an awesome name.

Cameron Slater

It’s now clear that Hager infused Dirty Politics with a powerful curse on Cameron Slater. Nothing short of black magic explains the liquidation of Slater’s life since the book was published. Here’s an abridged list of the terrible things that have befallen him:

Got knocked out in a Fight For Life by Jesse Ryder, causing him to suffer an extremely large number of abusive Stuff and YouTube comments and several bruises to any remaining pride.

Cameron Slater enters the ring before his fight against Jesse Ryder. Photo by Martin Hunter/Getty Images

Became such a toxic brand he got sidelined from his own blog, which is entirely based on being as toxic a brand as possible.
Got fined after being found to be in contempt of court.
Had a booklet of insults about him sent to more than a million homes by Colin Craig.
Became embroiled in a legal battle with Craig over the booklet of insults, prompting Steve Braunias to write a large number of stories about him.

It’s tempting to say no man deserves all this misfortune. But that’s not true. One man does deserve it, and that man is Cameron Slater.

Carrick Graham

Carrick Graham is less a man than a piece of performance art aimed at showing what would happen if someone did the most evil thing in almost any given situation. His life is seemingly bent around making the Earth a worse place, most significantly through his work lobbying on behalf of tobacco, alcohol, and sugar companies. Dirty Politics revealed he was paying Slater more than $6000 a month, presumably in exchange for the publication of attack pieces on his clients’ enemies.

This Peter Newport feature for North & South showed him defiant in the wake of the book’s publication, still bravely slugging it out with any scientists daring to call for people to be healthier and die less. However there have been some setbacks. A recent court case showed Graham up to his old tricks: helping organise attack stories on Whale Oil on behalf of an aggrieved woman trying to damage the reputation of her ex-husband. That may sound quite unethical, but on the other hand it’s also really gross.

The court case is under appeal.

Matthew Hooton

Matthew Hooton was more of a bit-part player in Dirty Politics, limiting his role to revealing Hager’s street name to Hong Kong lawyer Cathy Odgers after she (probably jokingly) implied there were Chinese men who might want to cut the author’s penis or possibly balls off. He’s continued to strike an interesting online/offline life balance since Dirty Politics. In the real world he moonlights as a respectable and very well-informed political commentator for Radio New Zealand’s Nine To Noon. But on the Internet he dabbles in retweeting terrible tweets and calling people “commo c***”.

Jordan Williams

Jordan Williams, co-founder of the Taxpayers’ Union, also played a smaller role in the book, but did provide some interesting passages – most memorably his bitter complaint to Slater after being sent on a fruitless late-night mission to find a drunk Winston Peters on Courtenay Place.

Williams’ unbreakable bond with Slater were further confirmed this year when he also got into a defamation case with Colin Craig. He was awarded $1.27 million in damages, which was quickly judged to be a miscarriage of justice. Hopefully the matter can be sorted soon so Williams can go back to doing what he’s passionate about: haranguing public servants alongside a frightening anthropomorphic pig-man.

Rawshark

Rawshark is gone but he is still here.

He does not speak but his voice echoes within us.

Rawshark is not a human.

He is a concept, and a concept can never die.

Rawshark remains free until the day our freedom is won.

David Farrier

David Farrier fronted the documentary Tickled, which did not receive an Oscar nomination.

Rachel Glucina

Rachel Glucina has spent the years since Dirty Politics was published slowly disappearing off the face of the Earth. First she left her job at the Herald to start the vacuum cleaning investigation blog Scout. When that venture folded, she evaporated into a pillar of steam, which reportedly melded back into Judith Collins’ lifeforce. No-one has seen her in more than a year.

Judith Collins

Judith Collins resigned as a minister following allegations she was involved in a smear campaign against former Serious Fraud Office boss Adam Feeley, but reinstated after an inquiry found no evidence to support that. There were other allegations in Dirty Politics that she had passed on private details about the public servant Simon Pleasants to Slater. She apparently suspected Pleasants had told media that Bill English was using a private trust to help him claim an accommodation supplement for the house where he lived in Wellington. English’s sins are now being brought up by in defence of Metiria Turei over her benefit fraud. It’s a current politics scandal crossover! Time is a flat circle!

Collins now spends most of her time getting angry about petrol prices and making guest appearances on Tom Sainsbury’s Snapchat.

Nicky Hager

Nicky Hager has spent every waking moment since Dirty Politics was published being raided or snooped on by the police, taking legal action against the police, or preparing legal action against the police.

Rawshark

Behind you.

The readers

All of us are in hell, again. Bring on election 2017.

Keep going!

PoliticsAugust 9, 2017

Labour surges, Greens slump, and media scrap over Turei’s scalp

Toby Manhire

Editor-at-large

Pollwatch: Under Jacinda Ardern, Labour has powered back to the future in the new Newshub poll, as an embattled Green party slides. But are National impermeable? And should we be talking about a disaster for NZ First, too? Toby Manhire weighs it all up.

There is something distasteful about fighting over a political corpse.

“We drove her to resign!” “No, we drove her to resign!” bawled Checkpoint and Newshub. The RNZ programme had put a number of questions to Metiria Turei about her living circumstances in the ’90s when she lied to Winz and “instead of answering them, she resigned”.

Newshub was having none of that. Turei was gone, and “it has been a Newshub poll tonight which has forced her out”, was the introduction to Patrick Gower’s report. The poll, the first since New Zealand politics entered the mirror maze of the last 10 days, was awaited by some of us with an eagerness bordering on frenzy. It delivered a “catastrophic, disastrous result” for the Green Party, said Newshub’s political editor. For the Greens, “losing one third of their support in one week [is] an absolute political nightmare, and that is what has obviously forced Metiria Turei to go – she learned of the result just hours before she resigned”.

Boom time for the New Zealand scalp collection industry. While it’s unseemly at the best of times, there’s an added layer of unpleasantness when the scalp belongs to someone whose sins are, in the scheme of political scandals, kind of piffling. The chances are that they were both a bit right: that the poll numbers, combined with the tide of questions being asked by RNZ and others, broke Turei’s previous steadfastness. Her explanation: that the scrutiny on family had become unbearable. That “the reality of my life and people’s fallacies about my life are just becoming intermingled”. And that “the swirling story had begun to damage the kaupapa of the party”.

I don’t agree with those that say Turei should not have faced questions about the account she gave at the Greens’ AGM. It was right and defensible to investigate details around an episode she chose to publicise. She expected to face scrutiny. The decision to speak out about her own law-breaking was, as the Green leaders have said repeatedly, taken knowing it was seriously risky. They were foolish, as Turei has in effect conceded, not to proactively reimburse the public purse before going public.

But, in the context of reporting polling data, going all Bring Me the Head of Alfredo García is too much.

“If Metiria Turei hadn’t resigned just before we came to air,” said Gower, “we would be calling for her to go now, given that disastrous result.” Isn’t this the kind of thing that Gower – a brilliant journalist, I reckon – was reflecting on as deeply problematic after his return from covering the US election?

Anyway, anyway, anyway. Whether or not it triggered Turei’s exit, there is a heap to digest in tonight’s extraordinary Reid Research poll for Newshub, which was surveyed through the tumult of the six days up to yesterday. Everyone was expecting a Labour surge with the beatification of Jacinda Ardern after Andrew Little’s resignation (and what a contrast with Turei’s that was); the question was by how much and, critically, at whose expense?

Here’s the skinny:

A nine-point lift to 33% is unquestionably good news for Labour. They’ve dramatically closed the gap on National. Their problem is that it’s barely at National’s expense. English and co won’t like the direction of travel – while there is nothing remotely statistically significant about a fall of 0.8%, it is their third consecutive drop in Reid polling – but on the whole it shows just how stable their support is. Solid as a rock, you might even say.

Or to put it another way, the combined vote of Labour, the Greens and NZ First, remains essentially unchanged. That possible tripartite coalition has grown by a wholly inconsequential 0.5%. Whatever else that means, this is clear: Winston Peters and New Zealand First, despite having dropped 3.8% in this poll, are still sitting pretty as kingmaker.

That NZ First result, really, is the least predictable – certainly the least predicted – finding. The Greens have been hurt by continuing layers of confession and internal mayhem, that seems clear enough. They could yet drop further. But a good chunk, if not the majority, of their poll fall can surely be attributed to the fact a plausible and popular leader suddenly popped up in the red corner. Doesn’t this result, when you think about it, point to the Ardern Effect being a considerably more powerful force than the Turei Effect?

No such scandal in the NZ First Party, yet they’ve dropped by 3.8 points. That does mean they now rank as the third most popular party in the poll, but that’s nevertheless a disappointment: it’s not a lot less that the Greens’ 4.7 slide. Just where does the line for “catastrophic, disastrous result” lie?

There is, however, something of an old-school feel to the result, with National and Labour comfortably out in front. The preferred prime minister stakes, more than anything, deliver a bold vindication of the 11th-hour change in leader. And you can judge how important leadership is by the insistence from National’s top MPs that leadership is not that important.

As we all rubberneck at the political pile-ups, it’s fair to ask what about all the policy. On that score, the Spinoff has something super exciting to reveal next week. Hang on, voter. Help is on its way.

Gorge yourself on the Spinoff’s election coverage here.

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