What Nicky Hager’s Dirty Work alleges about the Taxpayers’ Union

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1. 0:06Speaker 1: Kia ora, I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is The Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. Nikki
2. 0:16Speaker 1: Haga is back with a new book taking aim at one of the country's most prominent lobby groups, the Taxpayers' Union.
3. 0:24Speaker 1: He alleges the organisation has played a key role in shifting New Zealand politics to the right, claiming they worked
4. 0:32Speaker 1: with the tobacco industry and focused on race-based campaigns. The NZTU's director, Jordan Williams, flatly denies the allegations and has
5. 0:41Speaker 1: said the book is full of inaccuracies. So what exactly is Haga claiming? What evidence does he have? And what does the book tell us about the political landscape heading
6. 0:51Speaker 1: into this election? Today on the front page, NZ Herald senior journalist David Fisher joins us to take us through
7. 0:57Speaker 1: the allegations and the broader picture around them. So, David, let's start with the big picture. What is Nicky Hager
8. 1:09Speaker 1: alleging in his book, Dirty Work?
9. 1:12Speaker 2: There's a lot of allegations, but strung together, the big picture of those is an ecosystem that stems from the taxpayers' unions,
10. 1:22Speaker 2: founded by Jordan Williams and noted and known pollster David Farrar back in 2013. And the big picture that Nikki
11. 1:32Speaker 2: Haga has drawn is of an organisation that has tentacles reaching into many places that most people would not expect
12. 1:42Speaker 2: or would not know about. those tentacles are tentacles of influence and that in the big picture what they are
13. 1:53Speaker 2: striving to do, Haga is saying, is to drive the political conversation to the right along the political spectrum and
14. 2:05Speaker 2: that the taxpayers' union and the myriad of different organisations, pressure groups and so on are engaged in that purpose.
15. 2:16Speaker 1: One of the big themes, and you kind of mentioned it there, the taxpayers' union's influence on New Zealand politics.
16. 2:23Speaker 3: As a whole.
17. 2:24Speaker 1: How does Haga say that they're doing this?
18. 2:28Speaker 3: A very good example, and I think probably the key example in the book, is.
19. 2:35Speaker 2: The way that Haga describes the taxpayers' union engaging in the Three Waters debate. So this was a very contentious
20. 2:44Speaker 2: debate and a debate that had incredible travel throughout New Zealand.
21. 2:49Speaker 2: And that in itself is quite a remarkable thing because what we were talking about was local government waterworks. And generally,
22. 2:58Speaker 2: as somebody that has had the blessing and good fortune to cover local government, including waterworks, at one stage, the
23. 3:08Speaker 2: Natia Drainage Subcommittee, these weird little quangos that do really, really important things in people's lives, but they're insufferably dull, and they're really just not that interesting.
24. 3:20Speaker 3: And yet, Three Waters took on a life of its own.
25. 3:22Speaker 2: Now, what Hager alleges around Three Waters was that it was known within the taxpayers' union that it wasn't their core business. Their core business is bring down taxes, bring
26. 3:32Speaker 2: down the size of government, smaller government, and a more prosperous nation will follow. And this was very much off-beam from what.
27. 3:43Speaker 3: Its usual positioning was.
28. 3:45Speaker 2: What Haga alleges is that at the point that the Taxpayers' Union realised that.
29. 3:52Speaker 3: When it tickled up.
30. 3:53Speaker 2: Co-governance or anti-Māori sentiment, the numbers of members that it had would increase increased significantly, as would the donations. And
31. 4:05Speaker 2: Hager describes in the book, through former taxpayer union staff, Jordan Williams, sitting with his laptop, refreshing it to watch
32. 4:15Speaker 2: the donation numbers rise ever, ever higher. The thing about that is that the taxpayers' union at this point had become a really sophisticated campaigning, marketing.
33. 4:26Speaker 3: Lobbying organisation.
34. 4:27Speaker 1: It had.
35. 4:30Speaker 3: Really good mechanisms for driving a debate.
36. 4:32Speaker 2: Through strong email lists, they can connect with its so-called membership, people that had signed up with their email address for
37. 4:41Speaker 2: points of interest in the past. and a range of other tools. Jordan Williams is a pretty sophisticated public relations
38. 4:50Speaker 2: operative with stunts like Porky the Pig, the costume that he'd wear to things that apparently showed taxpayer money being
39. 5:01Speaker 2: spent poorly. And so these skills, Haga alleges, were then turned towards this Three Waters issue, but pushing co-governance and
40. 5:10Speaker 2: anti-Maldi sentiment, which caused some discomfort within the taxpayers' union itself.
41. 5:20Speaker 2: What we saw then was the Three Waters project tipped over by that public sentiment, which may have been more
42. 5:29Speaker 2: about things that weren't really a factor, which was the co-governance issue or the Māori presence in the deal, and
43. 5:38Speaker 2: not so much about what the actual pipes and waterways were going to do When we look at, say, the last three years and how the political landscape has changed
44. 5:50Speaker 2: in terms of Te Ao Māori, I would say that there's a good argument to be made that the seeds
45. 5:58Speaker 2: were laid with that Three Waters campaign and Julian Batchelor's co-governance roadshow across the country, which itself was pumped full
46. 6:07Speaker 2: of misinformation. And that has seen... what in Te Ao
47. 6:15Speaker 2: Māori is perceived as regressive legislative steps and an environment
48. 6:23Speaker 2: where people feel that they have license to say things that they would previously not have said because they're racist.
49. 6:33Speaker 1: One of the most damning allegations, and actually one that I believe is actually illegal, is that Hager says that
50. 6:42Speaker 1: David Farrar used National Party voter data for a taxpayers' union campaign. Tell me about those allegations.
51. 6:50Speaker 2: So this is Hager's allegation that the National Party database
52. 7:01Speaker 2: showed where people of high wealth or the big donors were.
53. 7:06Speaker 2: And there's this phrase, blue-dotting, of the particular homes of individuals spread across the country that could be hit up
54. 7:18Speaker 2: for financial support for the taxpayers' union.
55. 7:21Speaker 3: The allegation is that.
56. 7:24Speaker 2: Farah had passed that information across to the taxpayers' union, Hager says, don't know whether or not the National Party
57. 7:33Speaker 2: knew that this had happened. Jordan Williams, on the other hand, is now saying that's.
58. 7:39Speaker 3: Flat out wrong.
59. 7:40Speaker 2: I've got an invoice to show that we paid for that information and that this is an example of one.
60. 7:48Speaker 3: Of many examples, says Williams, of Nikki Hager getting it wrong.
61. 7:59Speaker 4: Finally, some people might ask, why am I publishing a book leading up to an election? There are two good reasons.
62. 8:11Speaker 4: First and obviously, elections are exactly the time we should be thinking about and discussing politics. What better time? And also,
63. 8:22Speaker 4: the coalition ministers have tolerated and benefited from these unscrupulous groups.
64. 8:28Speaker 4: They should be held accountable by the public.
65. 8:32Speaker 1: So Jordan Williams obviously says that all of this is essentially garbage. He's come out and said that the allegations,
66. 8:40Speaker 1: serious allegations, weren't put to... him or the taxpayers' union.
67. 8:46Speaker 1: He said that instead he released his accusations at a carefully choreographed media event in the middle of an election campaign, knowing that headlines would be written before we could even
68. 8:56Speaker 1: obtain a copy of the book. Is it wrong that the claims weren't put to the taxpayers' union and Jordan Williams himself?
69. 9:04Speaker 2: Hager has done this in the past, and he has said that he has done this because he There was a book that he wrote in 2011, and I think
70. 9:15Speaker 2: probably his best book, called Other People's Wars, an intensely deep account of New Zealand's experience of Afghanistan.
71. 9:23Speaker 3: To that point. And it fell flat.
72. 9:28Speaker 2: It was launched with a press conference to the press gallery and never really travelled. Haga has said that his determination then was to launch the books to the public
73. 9:39Speaker 2: and direct to the public, which is what he's done with dirty politics and then with Hit and Run in 2017.
74. 9:46Speaker 2: There's another element to that, which is that if you tell people that you're doing a book about them and they know that they're going to feel very uncomfortable about it,
75. 9:57Speaker 2: you may well face an injunction and it can be very hard to get that book into publication. So there's a couple of things going on there. Look, for my part,
76. 10:08Speaker 2: I have a great deal of difficulty reconciling allegations of the seriousness that are made without giving another party a the chance to respond to those allegations. Having said that,
77. 10:21Speaker 2: the journalism that I do and the place that I do it requires that. Nicky Haga, he does journalism, he does it in a different way and he does it
78. 10:33Speaker 2: in a different space to a different audience.
79. 10:36Speaker 3: To an extent, he can make his own rules around that.
80. 10:41Speaker 2: Absolutely, the people that are at the sharp end of allegations are going to feel very wounded, but I would think that they would feel very wounded anyway.
81. 10:52Speaker 3: One of the.
82. 10:52Speaker 2: Things that does tend to follow Hager's books and the
83. 10:58Speaker 2: surprise launch is is people running through what they call always the litany.
84. 11:06Speaker 3: Of errors in the book. You know, there's an example that Jordan Williams has talked about.
85. 11:12Speaker 2: A reference to a campaign that apparently the Taxpayers' Union ran in 2012. Of course, it wasn't set up until 2013.
86. 11:20Speaker 2: I'd be inclined to think that that's a typo. I've made typos of the sort of the past that have just filled me with... such frustration and stupid mistake. But
87. 11:32Speaker 2: a lot of these claims of, oh, it's filled with errors, it's riddled with inaccuracies, they tend to be distractions, which is not to say that Hager always gets everything right.
88. 11:44Speaker 2: He's certainly made mistakes with books he's done in the past.
89. 11:48Speaker 2: They tend not to be significant ones. Hit and Run,
90. 11:53Speaker 2: that was put through the scrutiny of a public inquiry and that was found wanting. in some regards, but in the end point that it got to, it wasn't. It
91. 12:03Speaker 2: was upheld. Yeah, so it's not the conventional sort of
92. 12:11Speaker 2: presentation of a story, if you like, but the sorts of stories that Haga presents aren't generally conventional.
93. 12:18Speaker 1: Now, he talks about this creation of a stable of groups aiming to change the government through lobbying and campaigns and the like, and you mentioned that before as well.
94. 12:28Speaker 1: You know, the likes of Taxpayers' Union and Hobson's Pledge, Free Speech Union, groundswell when it comes to the Three Waters campaign. What is troubling about that?
95. 12:40Speaker 2: When many hands are moving at once without an understanding that they're connected to the same body, it creates the
96. 12:49Speaker 2: illusion of an awful lot of people moving in a coordinated way when that may not be what's actually happening. And, you know, one of the, Jordan Williams has built a
97. 13:01Speaker 2: remarkable network network and organisation over the last 13 years since the Taxpayers Union came into being. And a lot
98. 13:12Speaker 2: of the broad brush things that Nikki Haga has written about in this book are known in a very beltway sense.
99. 13:22Speaker 2: That's within those that are political geeks and nerds. And
100. 13:28Speaker 2: In a sense, those people, and I count myself among them, have had a bit of a frog in the boiling water type experience, right, where it has grown over time
101. 13:38Speaker 2: and we've been conscious of it growing over time and aware of it growing over time.
102. 13:43Speaker 3: But I don't necessarily think the public would have been.
103. 13:46Speaker 2: I think that the large percentage of the population that may be subject to the influence of one of these groups or a number of these groups are.
104. 13:55Speaker 3: Would not necessarily have been aware of that.
105. 13:58Speaker 2: And to have some sort of a time marker that says this is what has happened and these are all the places that are doing it and actually they're all connected,
106. 14:09Speaker 2: even though you don't appreciate that fact, but they are all connected. I think that's a really important story to be told and I think it's a really important marker to have been put in place. And to be honest,
107. 14:21Speaker 2: it's one that the media should have done itself before dirty work came out. And that's the story that really could have been told one way or another, certainly over
108. 14:33Speaker 2: the last half a dozen years, as the taxpayers' union has grown and expanded to the extent that it has.
109. 14:39Speaker 3: How is it different?
110. 14:40Speaker 1: I mean, what differentiates this kind of right-leaning cluster of lobbyists and lobby groups, taxpayers union, etc. What differentiates them
111. 14:50Speaker 1: from the likes of say, Council of Trade Unions and PSA?
112. 14:55Speaker 1: You know, PSA have come out with a campaign this year, literally called Change the Government. Is the difference here between, you know, they're kind of out and proud, yes, these
113. 15:06Speaker 1: are our values, whereas the right-leaning kind of brigade are a bit sneaky and kind of come off as non-partisan?
114. 15:16Speaker 3: Do you know, I.
115. 15:17Speaker 2: Think in a way it's because Jordan Williams is better at it, but there's more to it than that. The reason he can be better at it is because that
116. 15:27Speaker 2: is all that they do. We don't really understand who their membership is. And the taxpayers' union doesn't really have to do service to its membership other than bang the
117. 15:38Speaker 2: drums that it tells them that it's going to bang.
118. 15:40Speaker 2: It's not doing like unions do employment meetings or helping union members go to employment court or.
119. 15:50Speaker 3: Anything like that.
120. 15:51Speaker 2: It is purely focused on its, I suppose, marketing slash lobbying pursuit. Um, uh, and so that gives it the
121. 16:00Speaker 2: opportunity to be better at doing that than say trade unions, for example. Um, look, the left can be just as
122. 16:09Speaker 2: nasty as the right. There's people in each and every, you know, in all of these organizations and, um, uh, we all have the same character failings. Uh, but, um,
123. 16:21Speaker 2: you know, one of the things that, that I think is really striking about the Jordan Williams was mentioned quite a bit in the last book that Haga did in
124. 16:31Speaker 2: the series, which was Dirty Politics. And Cameron Slater was a key figure in Dirty Politics. I interviewed Cameron Slater at the time and he had said to me, I
125. 16:42Speaker 2: think it wound up either being nominated for or was Quote of the Year, I treat politics like rugby and my job is to smash your face into the ground.
126. 16:52Speaker 2: In a large way, that's the kind of kaupapa that The taxpayers' union has taken on, they might use a
127. 17:00Speaker 2: different phrase than kaupapa, but that is the position that the taxpayers' union has taken with its lobbying. It looks
128. 17:09Speaker 2: to target individuals. It uses its public relations reach in a really effective way. but for the individuals that are targeted,
129. 17:20Speaker 2: a very punishing way. You know, if you look at the depictions of Nanaia Mahuta in the Taxpayers' Union output
130. 17:29Speaker 2: when it was heavily campaigning on Three Waters, that was deeply, deeply personal towards Nanaia Mahuta. The photographs they chose to use, the way that they chose to portray those photographs.
131. 17:42Speaker 3: That didn't need to be the case, right? It was deliberate.
132. 17:47Speaker 2: Well, that's what Haga is alleging, right? And certainly I've spoken to Nanaia Mahuta about this. She felt that very personally.
133. 17:55Speaker 2: And the messaging that went with that, which wasn't about the pipes in the ground or how you get your
134. 18:04Speaker 2: water or how you get rid of your sewage, it was about Māori and it was about co-governance, led to Nanaia Mahuta being out in public and being assailed by people,
135. 18:14Speaker 2: not physically but verbally, and on social media in a really, really ugly way. That's a consequence of the delivery mechanism
136. 18:25Speaker 2: that the Taxpayers Union has grown to be. And those roots, I think, do go back to dirty politics and do make me think of Cameron Slater and his way.
137. 18:33Speaker 3: Of framing politics.
138. 18:36Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, David.
139. 18:37Speaker 3: Thanks very much.
140. 18:42Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
141. 18:49Speaker 1: at nzherald.co.nz. The Front Page is hosted and produced by me, Chelsea Daniels. Kane Dickey is our studio operator, Richard Martin,
142. 18:59Speaker 1: our producer and editor, and our executive producer is Jane Yee.
143. 19:03Speaker 1: Follow The Front Page on the iHeart app or wherever you get your podcasts and join us next time for another look beyond the headlines.