A spectacular exposé alleging prime minister John Key and his National party colleagues were involved in dirty tricks campaigns has created the most significant political maelstrom in nearly six years in office and blown the government’s re-election strategy dramatically off course, writes Toby Manhire

At the beginning of the month, the New Zealand National party looked all but unassailable. The centre-right party, led by the enormously popular trader-turned-politician John Key, seemed firmly in control as they approached a September election, helped by an opposition in disarray. If a third term was not yet guaranteed – New Zealand’s proportional electoral system makes landslide victories improbable – it was clear it would take some remarkable turn of events to shift the momentum.

What a difference a book makes. Investigative journalist Nicky Hager’s “Dirty Politics: How attack politics is poisoning New Zealand’s political environment” has blown the National party strategy dramatically off course, propelling the campaign into uncharted territory. Its allegations have dominated news bulletins for the 10 days since its publication, as accusations of dirty tricks, smear campaigns and conspiracy sally in every direction.

Many predicted Hager’s book, details of which remained a secret until launch to forestall any injunction, would return to the subject of an earlier work, New Zealand’s role in the Five Eyes spying network. But instead of leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Hager had something which, in domestic political terms at least, would prove even more explosive: a cache of correspondence from the computer of Cameron Slater, a vigorous, venomous rightwing blogger better known by his site’s title, Whale Oil.

Dirty Politics by Nicky Hager. Photograph: PR

The fallout spreads

The great risk for Key is that his sparkling reputation becomes contaminated by association with Slater’s toxic style.

Hager draws on thousands of hacked emails and Facebook private messages, which reveal Slater’s links to Jason Ede, then a senior press adviser and so-called “black ops” co-ordinator in the prime minister’s office, as well as to senior cabinet minister Judith “Crusher” Collins and others. Taken together, Hager claims in the book, the material exposes “the covert attack machine run by the National party and its allies” and “a new kind of attack politics … rapidly changing the political environment”.

The allegations have thoroughly sucked the oxygen out of a National campaign carefully crafted – as its official hashtag, #TeamKey, implies – around a hugely liked leader. As one political editor put it this week: “Nothing short of discovering the cure for cancer will divert the conversation from Dirty Politics.”



In an unlikely convergence of old and new media, the acts described in the book have been supported by the drip feed of source documents online, via an anonymous Twitter account, @Whaledump, almost certainly controlled by the same individual who handed the documents to Hager. In a wink to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Whaledump lists as its contact address “Flat 3b, 3 Hans Crescent”, site of the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Investigative journalist Nicky Hager. Photograph: Nicky Hager/Wikimedia

The National party has scrambled to explain correspondence suggesting Collins, the justice minister and an avowed close friend of Slater, had fed him with information about a public servant so that he could attack him on his blog, which led to death threats in the comments. Key, who earlier this year acknowledged that he regularly spoke with Slater “to see what he’s got on his site and mind”, this week described Collins’s action as “unwise” but refused to ask for her resignation, despite having given her a “last chance” after she was at the centre of political controversy earlier in the year.

The prime minister, facing by far the most sustained political maelstrom in nearly six years in office, has been accused of making contradictory statements about his knowledge of the process by which Slater had been handed material from the domestic spy agency, SIS, that would embarrass the Labour leader in the leadup to the 2011 election. Slater’s Official Information Act request, which Hager says was encouraged by one of the PM’s staff, had been almost immediately fulfilled, while similar requests from other media were denied. It was, Slater boasted in a message, “expedited, in the public interest. It is devastating for [Labour leader Phil] Goff, I am told”.

Key strongly rejects claims he was briefed on the matter and it is now the subject of an inquiry by the spy watchdog, the inspector general of intelligence and security.

Blogger Cameron Slater in 2012. Photograph: Truth Newspaper/NZN Image

Smear campaigns and conspiracy theories

Ede, meanwhile, is shown in correspondence reproduced by Hager to have allegedly colluded in probing a Labour party website that had been left insecure. Other published exchanges allegedly show Slater and his associate, political consultant Simon Lusk, discussing smear campaigns to help a client win a National candidate selection, the blackmail of a sitting MP (it never happened, the MP has since insisted) and the description of those forced from their homes after the Christchurch earthquake as “scum”. The book also alleges Slater routinely posted associates’ contributions under his own name and took thousands of dollars from tobacco companies, a claim he denies.

As far as possible, senior National figures have refused to engage with the detail in the book, dismissing it as an exercise in “joining dots that shouldn’t be joined” and based on stolen material. Even before the subject of the book was revealed, Hager was characterised by Key as a “screaming leftwing conspiracy theorist”. On Thursday, having spent most of the day fending off allegations relating to the SIS issue, Key told media: “I think there’s a real risk that a hacker, and people with a leftwing agenda, are trying to take an election off New Zealanders.”

While Ede, Lusk and Collins have avoided talking to media, Slater, the son of a former National party president, has gone on the offensive. Talk of a “vast conspiracy” between him and the PM’s office with Ede as “ringmaster” was nonsense, he told the New Zealand Herald. His critics were guilty of “hypocrisy and sanctimony”. Ede, he added, had proved himself “squeamish and gutless” by going to ground, adding: “I play politics like Fijians play rugby. My role is smashing your face into the ground. Politics is a nasty despicable game and it’s played by nasty despicable people. Where’s the surprise in this?”

Kim Dotcom

Slater alleges that the hack of his computer was orchestrated by Kim Dotcom, the New Zealand-based internet entrepreneur who is being sought for extradition by the US to face copyright and money laundering charges. Slater has run scores of posts attacking the German, increasing in frequency and ferocity since Dotcom’s founding of the Internet party. The party, which Dotcom has bankrolled to the tune of $3m, has formed an alliance with the leftwing Mana Movement, giving it an easier route to parliament under the rules of the electoral system.

Dotcom denies any involvement with the hack or the book. Hager, meanwhile, says he would have “run a mile” had Dotcom played any role in accessing the material.

“When a source is anonymous, like this person is, it’s possible to imagine all sorts of creepy things about them,” says Hager. “But it is an intelligent, thoughtful person, I’m pleased to say – a non-partisan person who I’m very comfortable working with.”

Hager says the source, whom he met through “contacts in the IT and geek world”, had been motivated by disgust at Slater’s blogging, in particular a post that described the innocent victim of a car crash as a “feral” who had “done the world a favour” by dying.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kim Dotcom. Several commentators have alleged he was involved in the leak but Hager rules out the possibility. Photograph: Action Press/REX

The hacker, who swiped only a small fraction of Slater’s private correspondence before the intrusion was detected, originally intended to publish the material online “in all directions to everybody”. Hager persuaded him to provide “all the political information that you’ve found ... I was saying: rather than just dumping this out in the world, like hackers tend to do, could I have it, and try to use it for something really worthwhile?”

The scale of the response has surprised Hager. “It has obviously hit a current of feeling ... There’s something about the way politics has been, or the nastiness of some of the politics.” While pundits have not agreed on its significance – “The fact is most New Zealanders don’t even know about this book,” said one talkback radio host, albeit on the fifth straight day discussing it – the coverage has been vast.

Hager says: “I think it’s kind of resonated because it seems there are a lot of journalists who felt they were being manipulated or played, or shut out of information by the political management that was being run by the government.”

Hager denies suggestions the book was designed as an election bombshell. He was provided the hacked material in March, he says, and while he was determined that it should be published before the election from a public interest point of view, “it was actually just the practicalities of how fast I could get it out”.

As to the claims of a leftwing conspiracy, Hager says he’s seen and heard it all before. “Whenever I do work which confronts powerful people they tend to attack the messenger rather than debate the issues,” he says. “I’ve got a long record of work which criticises the left and the right ... When I once before had a book before an election [Seeds of Distrust], 12 years ago, the National party called it a fine work of investigative journalism, and the Labour party was mad at me, and now when I write about the National party before an election, those roles reverse ... I know there are going to be personal insults. I know there are going to be evasions. And so accepting all that I’ve been really pleased at the uptake of real stuff, and the real discussion, the real response it’s got.”

Stonewalling and the poll reaction

The accusations in Dirty Politics mix the old and the new, says Colin James, a commentator who has covered New Zealand politics for four decades. “Attacking opponents, including below the belt, is part of politics. The means are different now, including the means to be found out.”

The Nationals’ stonewalling response has looked at times clumsy, says James. “The story could have been dampened by applying the three Fs of public relations: the second two Fs are ‘front up’ and ‘fess up’. Instead Key flailed all round the paddock and was forced to retreat centimetre by centimetre.” The controversy leaves a picture of “loose governance of his office ... and of his cabinet” as well as “bad judgment in talking to Whale Oil”, he says. “I listened in disbelief when he first said he talked to him as a matter of course at a post-cabinet press conference earlier this year or late last year.”

New Zealand prime minister John Key claiming victory in 2011. Photograph: Marty Melville/AFP/Getty

In the first poll conducted after the book’s release, there is little sign of any collapse in support for the Nationals. The NZ Herald/Digipoll shows the party losing five points but they still tally 50%, roughly where they were a few months earlier. The likely opposition coalition partners, Labour and the Greens, remain some distance behind, at 25% and 14%. Key’s preferred PM rating has fallen by 8.5 percentage points, but with his support still at 64.8% it is hardly the stuff of crisis.

What is unknown is whether this decline will continue; whether, crucially, Key will suffer reputational damage or whether the dirty politics story will, in the prime minister’s words, “burn out”. As it stands the Nationals have lost all control of the shape of the campaign. But as National strategists prepare for their formal campaign launch in Auckland on Sunday they may be relieved to note Whaledump’s tweet saying the leak at lunchtime on Friday was the “last political post”.

And there’s one more date in the calendar that will be circled. On 15 September, five days before the end of an already extraordinary election campaign, Kim Dotcom is hosting an evening at the Auckland Town Hall with Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who has become synonymous with Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks, as the guest of honour.

The flamboyant mogul turned political incendiary has boasted that the event, announced long before the Hager book was published, will include accusations that will embarrass the prime minister and which could change the path of the election. He is calling it “The Moment of Truth”.