Nicky Hager’s Dirty Work raises questions of whether money has too much political power.
Have you noticed that a publication like the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Update generates a lot of commentary in the days after it is published and then disappears from the public’s view, except for boring specialists? Much the same thing happened with Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Work. Rather than looking for economic and fiscal scandals, the commentariat sought political and personal ones. Not much emerged, so the book soon dropped from the front pages.
Intriguingly, it continues to sell. Sure, there will be the boring political specialists scouring it, but apparently there is a section of the public who think the book is still worth reading even if it is bereft of scandals.
They are right. It has little for front pages, but the book casts light onto a murky part of our political process – the activities of political lobbies. A democracy cannot avoid them. It is best we understand them. By focusing upon one of the most prominent – the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union (TPU), described by one of its founders as ‘the most effective political group outside of Parliament’ – Hager’s book does the public a service. A couple of years ago, the TPU published their own account, The Mission: The Taxpayers Union at 10, inviting a critical response.
Intriguingly, Dirty Work is based on interviews of inside sources from the centre right, a reminder that the right is a coalition of factions just like the left, perhaps better organised and certainly better funded. (The Coalition Government is a very public portrayal of the fragmentation in the right.)
The Taxpayers’ Union is an odd organisation. It cheekily calls itself a ‘union’, but the right would normally be highly critical of the way it operates. In fact, it is a nonprofit company, much less transparent than a conventional union. It is a part of an ecology of hard right lobbying organisations including the Free Speech Union and a couple of ratepayers’ unions. But it also has connections with Hobson’s Pledge and it hooks up with other campaigns when their interests are near aligned. (It is very involved in the just set up Parents’ Alliance. The energy the Right exhibits compared to the Left is extraordinary.)
More murky is its relationship with The Campaign Company, a business entity which handles digital and administrative campaign work for various political and lobby groups, with which it also shares office space. Its chief executive officer is Jordan Williams, who is also executive director and a founder of the TPU.
The Campaign Company lobbies on behalf of commercial interests without involving the TPU membership and, presumably, providing a useful source of finance. Hager devotes a chapter to the lobbying of Big Tobacco, observing that Casey Costello, the current minister for tobacco policy, has been a chair of the TPU, while another current cabinet minister, Chris Bishop, the son of its founding chair, John Bishop, was once employed lobbying on behalf of Big Tobacco. Dirty Work’s nine pages on the lobby’s activities are well worth the read as an example of how corporations can lobby. *
The book describes other campaigns, including the one against the Ardern-Hipkins Government’s Three Waters proposals. I happen to think they involved over-centralisation, as did much of the population. The TPU was a part of the redirection of the concern towards co-governance. I am uneasy with that notion, it being so badly thought through. Chris Hipkins said nobody knew what co-governance meant. He was wrong. Everybody knew what it meant – it just meant totally different things to different people. Many saw it as kowtowing to Māori.
Dirty Work argues that the TPU deliberately highlighted the anti-governance element of the opposition to the Three Waters proposals. The TPU could hardly believe the amount of support in membership and donations that flooded in when it took a stand against the policy. (Interestingly, Hager says the TPU membership base is older men. I suspect I was not alone in believing it was essentially a young man’s – and the odd woman’s – club; it aint.)
Is the core program of the TPU racist? ‘Racism’ is a term I am uneasy with. It tends to be applied to anyone who holds different views about the place of Māori and other ethnic groups from the speaker. People may hold views different from mine but in many cases I respect their views. After all, the views of people of goodwill have changed over time. It would be presentism – the belief that the future does not evolve – to assume their currently held views will be the same in the future.
While I am not eager to call the TPU ‘racist’, the book demonstrates it is opportunistic, willing to use dog whistles to get other groups to pursue its ends. I wonder whether all those older members it has recruited would agree with all the TPU’s five manifesto bottom lines for this election. They may well agree with the general sentiments like cutting waste and balancing the books, but cringe at its implementation. Almost certainly it would leave them paying more for their healthcare with a less generous New Zealand Superannuation, while others would benefit from the tax cuts.
We have here the very phenomenon that Quin Slobodian explored in Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right. For the neoliberals to pursue their agenda they have to recruit others with a populist agenda. This has happened with ACT; it appears to have also happened with the TPU. It is a slippery slope. The Nazis were initially not as antisemitic as they proved to be later. This illustration is not to argue that the TPU is proto-fascist; populists on the left might reflect on the lesson too.
Meanwhile we should all reflect on whether the current lobbying in New Zealand, with its heavy bias towards those who can afford it and its lack of transparency, is enhancing our democracy. Hager’s Dirty Work is a good place to start.
* I have worked for the anti-tobacco lobby, aware that limiting tobacco use has led to the biggest improvements in the public health that we can measure. Although the gains are associated in the public’s mind with cancer reduction, smoking also exacerbates cardiac conditions. Having said this, I suspect the anti-tobacco lobby’s current approach needs to change to reflect a new situation with vaping and black marketing, a point that the pro-tobacco lobby also makes, but with solutions more in the interests of the Big Tobacco than the public health.
I note the recent death (at 91) of Dr Murray Laugeson whose anti-tobacco lobbying probably saved many more lives than any single surgeon.