If that’s what he thinks he’s proved, he shouldn’t have bothered going to the printers with the manuscript.
If the National Party is hard right, I’m the tooth fairy.
This is a party that plans to break up a privately owned supermarket co-operative.
Its leader, Christopher Luxon, has been literally saluted by the Green Party for this and then called “comrade”. Its finance minister is annually spending more than Grant Robertson ever spent in any of his Budgets, and he was already the biggest spender the country had ever seen.
To be generous to Hager – which is required in large doses while reading his book – he’s probably primarily referring to National’s race relations policy when he describes the party as hard right. He spends a fair chunk of the book focused on that.
His contention is that the Taxpayers’ Union accidentally stumbled on racist sentiment when it raised concerns about Labour’s Three Waters policy. It was surprised but decided to pursue it. It brought in huge levels of donations.
The Taxpayers’ Union then launched a campaign attacking the policy’s author, Nanaia Mahuta, because she had a moko kauae, and that was so successful that National had to adopt the same position.
But Hager’s version of history completely ignores the context. By the time Mahuta’s Three Waters policy was being debated, the then-Labour government had already forced a huge amount of race-related change.
It had removed ratepayers’ ability to have a say on establishing Māori wards on their councils. It had instructed government agencies to give 5% of all contracts to Māori-owned businesses. It had established a separate Māori health authority.
And yet Labour hadn’t campaigned on all of it. For some of the most contentious policies, it had no mandate. It was entirely fair and predictable that some voters would be furious.
Maybe what the Taxpayers’ Union stumbled on was racism, like Hager believes. Or maybe it was a reaction to the race-related changes, including co-governance, that Labour never asked voters’ permission to make.
Hager alleges that Taxpayers’ Union executive director Jordan Williams is an astroturfer: he creates movements and events that seem organic but are actually orchestrated. Woop-dee-do. Everyone in politics already knows this. Williams runs the Campaign Company. He is the boss of the Taxpayers’ Union. That has offshoots like the Auckland Ratepayers’ Alliance. It is also connected to the Free Speech Union. There are further connections to the Sensible Sentencing Trust and the newly formed Parents’ Alliance and also Curia Polling.
You didn’t have to read Hager’s book to learn that. You could have done a quick AI search.
Hager also claims there was a “classic dirty politics hit” on former TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman without explaining who commissioned the hit or who was involved. The only person he fingers is the person who went public with the allegations about what Sherman said. Again, hardly a revelation. Ani O’Brien’s name was literally on the blog post.
That’s not to say the Taxpayers’ Union and Williams have escaped unscathed. For readers as naive as Hager, it may be a surprise to discover how modern political campaigns work. And to be fair, it’s never that appealing to see how the sausage is actually made.
For Williams especially, having some of the worst parts of your conduct laid bare in one book is wounding.
But Hager has also done his own credibility damage by building up so much expectation and then failing to deliver very much at all.
At best, he’s naive. At worst, he’s doing exactly what he accuses the Taxpayers’ Union of: trying to influence politics.