With spring busy rioting around us and the island pristine and inviting, why have we taken to (slightly despairingly) reminding each other, over our mid-morning coffees, that this is Paradise?
It is election time, of course, and a political fixation on specious polling and utterly boring slander and vitriol is abroad – but it doesn’t explain the gloom we sink into the next minute.
Why are we being dragged back into blatant racism and misogyny, to charter schools and boot camps while real schools are at their wit’s end to resource a whole, disadvantaged generation?
Did the Taxpayers Union and its associated polling offshoot help National win the 2023 election?
What has the barrage of hard right legislation and political noise throughout the political term been about?
Is weekly polling a scam?
Just who is lobbying for Big Tobacco and Comalco at this point in history?
Just what did happen to television’s imminently likable, and female, political editor who resigned in June this year and why is our former, and high-performing, prime minister revered round the globe but strangely unmentionable here?
Last question: How can a juicy grievance at large throughout this uniquely -blessed country go viral and live on for years unchecked, inflaming family dinner parties, farmers, property speculators, misogynists and racists in turn or tandem?
The answer, according to investigative journalist Nicky Hager ONZM, is with a bot or substack or two, several-decades of indefatigable harvesting of personal data and an admix of spite, racism as a political tool and Big Tobacco.
Dirty Work: The Taxpayers Union and New Zealand’s Hard Right takes up where Hager’s 2014 Dirty Politics and the career of blogger Cameron Slater left off, returning to the scene of what the author calls “the most cynical people in New Zealand politics”.
“Dirty Work is about a section of our political system which is not the political parties and not the journalists and not the voting public, but professional manipulators who often have more influence over what the news is and what happens on issues than all the rest of us put together,” Hager said in one of his introductory interviews.
“One of the reasons it has so much effect is because it operates in private. It operates secretly, and many of us, including me on most issues at any given time, don’t know who’s pulling the strings and what’s going on,” Hager said.
“When you do what I’ve done, which is to go into the groups, get shown around the groups by people who work there, who are unhappy with what they’re doing, and investigate who’s doing what and the timetable of what they do and the tactics that they employ, suddenly, it makes more sense why some things become issues and other things don’t become issues, and we get a much clearer and more real view of what’s happening in our politics.”
No one would expect that level of intensity and brazenness but the monetising of fear and outrage is a big business.
A carefully-curated bot or substack would stir the pot of bile and outraged racism or political scapegoating and the Taxpayers Union’s bank account ticked up over $100,000 in a week when a promising issue hit a nerve in recipients culled from decades-long accumulations of personal data. Some from rich and powerful lobby donors but a surprising amount of it small scale donations from enflamed citizens.
Why is racism swilling round a country we no longer recognise?
It showed up in 2023 with Three Waters, Hager told The Spinoff,
“And so we went through one of those unhappy phases that you get in New Zealand politics sometimes, where there’s a kind of a madness, and where people are threatened by race, and race is suddenly the currency which can get you more votes, will get you more donations and more supporters, and that’s what the Taxpayers’ Union did.
“It’s probably the greatest achievement of its existence up till now – the way that they managed to turn something innocuous and useful like water supplies for a town into something where people were hating each other and saying the most hateful things on social media, and we’re being scared into sending more money to the Taxpayers’ Union, and into a cycle of unhealthy, irrelevant politics.”
At this stage of normalised Trumpism and global authoritarian fascism, my bookshelf is loaded with books like The Dictator’s Handbook – subtitled Why Bad Behavour is Almost Always Good Politics – by Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita; This is Fascism: Wake-up Call by Rosan Smits; and Bernie Sanders’ Fight Oligarchy.
New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote and an unprepossessing boy from Tuakau conquered Everest – New Zealanders haven’t been afraid to lead the world.
It may be a fierce fight to get back to decency, generosity and being a grown up country. Just knowing the enemy could make a healthy difference .
• Liz Waters
