Nicky Hager’s Dirty Work is the third in his trilogy about the political right, following on from The Hollow Men and Dirty Politics. It’s the weakest of the three, and yet it’s still well worth reading for what it tells us about the organisations around Jordan Williams.
My first column about the book set out what it contains, and my second examined the fight over its facts, including Hager’s decision not to seek responses before publication. But the argument over errors, and over Three Waters, has crowded out what I think is the book’s most valuable contribution. Several organisations around Jordan Williams present themselves as grassroots movements, community campaigns, student groups or independent trusts. Hager traces their founders, staff, campaign suppliers and, in some cases, their money. Whether these bodies are what they appear to be deserves more sustained attention than it has received.
Hager doesn’t fully answer that question. He examines some organisations closely and others hardly at all, and at times he slides from scrutinising their independence to attacking their politics. But this is where the book is strongest, and it tells the public things that political insiders knew and most voters didn’t.
“Everyone does this”
Some of Hager’s most persuasive critics admire his earlier work. In the Listener, Danyl McLauchlan praises The Hollow Men but argues that much of Dirty Work describes “the routine practice of activism, fundraising and media campaigns”. “Everyone does this,” he writes, “but it’s all described as if there’s something novel and sinister going on.” He says Hager too readily treats “the ordinary, pedestrian work of politics as shocking crimes unique to his subjects”. Collecting email addresses, commissioning polls and soliciting small donations are familiar campaigning methods.
The Herald’s Thomas Coughlan identifies a related weakness. Earlier books allowed readers to inspect political operators’ own correspondence. Here, much depends on anonymous former staff “of unknown seniority whose remarks are often so vague it is unclear how close they were to the allegations they describe”.
Henry Cooke reports in The Post that Hager was pressed at the launch on “what exactly was wrong with a group that believed in right wing beliefs doing things to further those right wing beliefs”. As Cooke points out, Hager “could not, obviously, argue that the Taxpayers’ Union had been working in secret”.
On Newsroom’s Raw Politics podcast today, Tim Murphy and Sam Sachdeva have also questioned how far this instalment matches its predecessors. Both nevertheless saw material worth pursuing, with Sachdeva singling out the tobacco connections for further investigation.
Effective rightwing campaigning is a legitimate part of democratic politics. But “everyone does this” leaves the question of representation unanswered. Who commissions a campaign, who controls it, and what does the public understand about those arrangements?
Grass roots or astroturf?
At the book launch, Sam Sachdeva reports, Hager said Williams saw himself as setting up “a whole constellation of little groups” that “would appear to us silly public as being independent and having different points of view … but actually they were all part of his spider’s web”. That is essentially a claim of astroturfing, a term Hager uses in the book and defines as a situation “where an orchestrated political operation is disguised as a spontaneous grassroots movement”. He uses the term only five times in the main text, although the problem runs through much of the book. It is familiar territory for him. His 1999 book with Bob Burton, Secrets and Lies, was subtitled “The anatomy of an anti-environmental PR campaign”.
Chlöe Swarbrick, quoted in The Post, listed “the astroturfing” among the things that set the Union apart when the Greens pulled out of its debates, and the word is easily thrown around. Employing professional campaigners or running online petitions does not, in itself, make an organisation fake. McLauchlan is right that “Everyone does this”, but not everyone hides who is running a campaign. The astroturf question arises when a campaign’s public presentation disguises the sponsorship, direction or constituency behind it.
I’ve made a similar point before. When David Fisher profiled the Union for the Herald in 2015, I told him it was “disingenuous in the way it represents itself”, with “the appearance of standing for wider society”. I also called it “a legitimate part of the political scene”. That is still roughly my view.
The Union rejects Hager’s claim, as Stuff put it, that it is “a ‘fake’ organisation posing as a broad public movement”, and says about two-thirds of its donations come from grassroots donors. On Duncan Garner’s podcast, Ani O’Brien said yesterday that “If Jordan was trying to hide something, he wouldn’t have a website that is out there, and he wouldn’t be so public.” She has a point about the Union itself. But according to Hager, O’Brien also built the relaunched Sensible Sentencing Trust’s website at the Campaign Company, and that is a different story.
Hager’s early example is Williams’ 2011 Vote for Change campaign against MMP. He calls it “a classic example” of astroturfing, “essentially a three-person initiative” with Williams as spokesperson, Simon Lusk as campaign manager and Cameron Slater as online publicist, and “the model for establishing the TU two years later”.
For me, this is what makes the organisations around Williams worth investigating. We are being asked to listen to these groups because they speak for taxpayers, students or small businesses. That claim deserves checking.
The business behind the campaigns
Hager adds a lot to what was known about Williams’ Campaign Company, which I wrote about in April last year. Set up in 2021 and sharing the Union’s Auckland office, it follows what Hager calls the “United States astroturf model”, and “can organise a major political or issue campaign with just a few staff and a budget”.
It starts with a petition. People who sign one have their email addresses added to a campaign database. “At this point, these people are not really supporters,” Hager writes. Regular emails, memes and appeals for money then turn some of them into donors. One former staffer objected to the Union calling the people on its own list “subscribed supporters”: “These people have not subscribed. They just signed an online petition.” Williams has described taking a client that had plateaued at about 4,000 supporters to “nearly 70,000, achieving legislative victories”. Hager identifies the client as Hobson’s Pledge.
The same small team can also serve several apparently independent groups. The Campaign Company has worked for Hobson’s Pledge, Groundswell, the Sensible Sentencing Trust, the Free Speech Union and the Union itself.
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Big Tobacco and the dairy owners
The return of the Sensible Sentencing Trust
Real supporters and questions of control
When Hager argues with the politics
What insiders know and readers do not
A worthwhile third book