Am I the Martha Mitchell of New Zealand politics?
Watergate’s first whistleblower was held down, sedated and written off as a drunk. She was right. Fifty-four years on, the method used to silence her is still in service.
Five days after the Watergate break-in, Martha Mitchell rang a reporter from a California hotel room. She said she would leave her husband unless he got out of the “dirty business” of politics. Then the line went dead.
Her husband was John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s former Attorney-General, who was running the President’s re-election campaign. Martha had worked out where the burglary led long before anyone took her seriously. For her trouble she was drugged, discredited and, eventually, diagnosed. Psychologists still use her name for the mistake of treating the truth as a delusion.
Nicky Hager is New Zealand’s Woodward and Bernstein. On 22 September he launched Dirty Work, his book on the Taxpayers’ Union. I began naming the same network in September 2020. What happened to me in between followed Martha’s script with uncomfortable precision.
So, am I the Martha Mitchell of New Zealand politics? Test it against the record.
Martha was right. The only question was how long it would take anyone to say so.
Contents
The woman who called it first
Before Watergate, Martha Mitchell was a celebrity. After it, she was a problem.
She was the outspoken wife of the nation’s top law officer, famous for an evening drink followed by late-night calls to reporters with whatever she had overheard or found in her husband’s papers. Her favourite was Helen Thomas of UPI.
On 17 June 1972, five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee’s offices at the Watergate complex. One of them, James McCord, was the security chief of Nixon’s re-election committee, the committee her husband ran. John Mitchell denied any link.
He flew back to Washington and left Martha at the Newporter Inn in Newport Beach with a security agent, Steve King, supposedly to guard her. When she got hold of the papers, she rang Thomas with her ultimatum. Thomas heard her say “You just get away!” before the call abruptly ended.
She went on to become arguably the first prominent Republican to accuse the administration of complicity.
That made her, not the burglary, the problem to be managed.
Held down and written off
What happened next is a near-perfect demonstration of what I call the Ten Ds.
In Unleashed I set out the Ten Ds of opposition tactics: Deflect, Delay, Deny, Discount, Deceive, Divide, Dulcify, Discredit, Destroy, and Deal. Martha was put through most of them.
By her account, King ripped the phone out of the wall, threw her to the floor and kicked her. At one point five men held her down while a doctor injected her with a tranquilliser. She needed stitches in her hand. “I’m black and blue,” she told Thomas. She also told Thomas she was being held prisoner by her husband’s henchmen.
Then came the discrediting. Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, plotted to ruin her credibility. Aides told the press she had a “drinking problem”. She was widely believed to be deluded.
In 1988 the psychologist Brendan Maher named the pattern: the Martha Mitchell effect, when a person’s justified belief is mistaken for a delusion.
The guard who pulled the phone cord did fine. In 2017 Donald Trump made him ambassador to the Czech Republic.
Deny the facts. Discredit the witness. If that fails, diagnose her.
When the press caught up
Woodward and Bernstein were on the story within days. It still took two years, and an election, for Watergate to matter.
The Washington Post reported on 19 June 1972 that a Republican security aide was among the burglars. On 1 August it reported that a $25,000 cheque earmarked for Nixon’s campaign had landed in a burglar’s bank account. On 10 October Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported that the break-in stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of Nixon’s re-election.
Voters shrugged. On 7 November 1972 Nixon was re-elected with more than 60 per cent of the vote. The burglars’ trial was held over until after the election.
Then people started going to prison. G. Gordon Liddy and McCord were convicted in January 1973. In March, Judge John Sirica read McCord’s letter alleging a cover-up in open court. By 30 April Nixon’s two most senior aides had resigned and his counsel had been fired. Senate hearings, the White House tapes and a unanimous Supreme Court ruling followed. Nixon resigned on 9 August 1974.
In all, 69 people were charged and 48 convicted. John Mitchell became the first Attorney-General to serve time in a federal prison. Congress tightened campaign finance law, strengthened freedom of information and created an independent special prosecutor, and made senior officials disclose their finances.
In 1975 McCord confirmed Martha’s account of her treatment. She died of cancer in New York on 31 May 1976, aged 57. At her funeral in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, one floral tribute carried three words in white chrysanthemums. Nobody ever found out who sent it.
Nixon later told David Frost that if it hadn’t been for Martha Mitchell, there would have been no Watergate.
Watergate didn’t become serious when it was reported. It became serious when people went to prison.
The early warnings
Martha talked before the press listened. So did I, and my warnings are dated.
It started in Rodney. When Beth Houlbrooke, then ACT’s deputy leader and a Rodney Local Board member, turned on me, I fought back in print. People inside ACT, National and the aligned lobby groups kept me in the loop. Woodward had Deep Throat. I had a growing list of my own.
On 29 September 2020 I published Astroturfs: Act Three of Dirty Politics. It traced how ACT used apparently independent groups (the Sensible Sentencing Trust, then the Taxpayers’ Union, then Hobson’s Pledge) to break ground the party could then occupy. It mapped the staff pipeline between ACT and the Union, and set the Union’s budget, $831,848 by 2019, against ACT’s rising polls.
No mainstream outlet touched it before the election, when ACT went from one MP to ten. In April 2021 RNZ’s Ruth Hill put my thesis to air, and 1News, Stuff and Newshub shared it. Asked in writing whether ACT used or created groups like the Union to generate support, David Seymour answered: “no”. The Sensible Sentencing Trust’s founder, Garth McVicar, told RNZ it had always been a genuine grassroots organisation.
In 2022 I wrote to Police Commissioner Andrew Coster asking him to shut the Mahurangi community police station in Snells Beach, which I said volunteers were using as a weapon to harass locals. The area commander dismissed my complaint. In September 2024, after I obtained the official information, 1News reported that police had shut the station’s front counter that February. A senior sergeant was “a little aghast”. The Police Minister hadn’t been told. A volunteer told 1News the group simply provided a community service.
In September 2023, before election night, I warned that an overhang would leave Christopher Luxon needing Winston Peters. He did. In April, The overhang trap showed how National could win dozens of electorates on 30 per cent of the party vote, elect no list MPs and leave Peters choosing the government: queenmaker again, as in 2017. Richard Prebble ran the same numbers in the Herald in August. This week the split-your-vote campaign of Don Brash and the Mowbrays made the overhang mainstream, and Liam Hehir called it a fool’s errand.
None of it was hidden. It was published, dated and free to read.
The plumbers
Nixon’s dirty work was done by a unit nicknamed the plumbers. Their job was to plug leaks.
The White House Special Investigations Unit was set up in July 1971 after the Pentagon Papers leak. Its operatives broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, looking for material to discredit him. Nixon’s press secretary dismissed Watergate as a “third-rate burglary”.
My plumbers were amateurs too. When RNZ aired my thesis, Louis Houlbrooke, then the Taxpayers’ Union’s campaign manager and Beth’s son, called it “tantalising journalism”. Local MP Chris Penk called it “weird and ridiculous”. Days later a baseless complaint about me went to the Law Society. It was ignored.
My site analytics showed who was reading. What followed convinced me that people around ACT and the Taxpayers’ Union were working to silence me. On two nights in a Warkworth bar, I believe, there was an attempt to provoke me into a confrontation that would land me in the cells for the weekend. After the second, Beth Houlbrooke shouted:
“The police will believe me! I’m Beth Houlbrooke!”
An independent witness has sworn to it. On 2 July 2021 I applied for a restraining order; she was served on 6 July. Two days later the same Law Society complainant tried again, and this time the Society wrote to me.
On 21 July Houlbrooke emailed two local police officers. Police redacted her seven paragraphs, but not the names of the attachments: “Stuart Wilson re Grant MacLachlan.pdf”, and a file about an incident on my last day of high school, in 1993. Wilson went on to run ACT’s 2023 campaign.
Council officials, meanwhile, received her emails calling me a hacker, a liar and a bully. By July 2024 Auckland Council’s systems held 11,558 hits mentioning me. Houlbrooke’s line, then and since, is that she was the one being bullied.
Like the Watergate burglars, my plumbers left a paper trail.
The Martha Mitchell effect
Martha was cast as a drunk. I was cast as brain-damaged.
The rumour that circulated about me (liar, hacker, bully, violent idiot, damaged brain) did the same job. A man with a damaged brain can’t be trusted to remember what happened to him. His word is worthless before he opens his mouth.
David Seymour set the tone in October 2020. When I noted that the Herald had declined my column on ACT’s list days before Houlbrooke was demoted from second to 13th, he replied on Twitter: “Total coincidence. We all think you’re an idiot.”
Then it turned into Basic Instinct, in which the killings follow the plot of a novel so suspicion falls on the novelist. The template was bespoke: find a raw nerve and replay it until the fingers point at the author. The bar was one attempt. The next ran through my daily walk with my dog. A council dog ranger led a network of local vigilantes to believe that if my dog was caught off-leash three times, there would be dire consequences.
The day after I published a second excerpt from my book, the mother of a police sergeant untied my dog from the fence I had tied it to. When I went to photograph her, she attacked me with her camera and broke my nose. In her 111 call, a coordinator of volunteers at the local police station can be heard coaching her. I was charged with assault and robbery: in effect, with breaking a weapon with my nose. Police pushed for a trial date after the 2023 election.
At my trial in February 2024, Judge Singh recorded in a minute that the complainant’s support person had been caught whispering to her during cross-examination. I was offered a mistrial twice. I wanted a verdict. The jury saw my four photographs and acquitted me. Within a fortnight, police closed the station’s front counter.
Martha got a sedative. I got a charge sheet. Both were meant to make sure nobody believed the witness.
What Dirty Work says
Hager calls the Taxpayers’ Union the “latest front for New Zealand’s hard right”. I called it Act Three of Dirty Politics, in 2020.
Dirty Work alleges that the Union’s Stop Three Waters campaign delivered a surge in supporters and donations and pivoted it to Maori and co-governance politics; that British American Tobacco executives met Union staff privately and directed work; that the Union raised $7.27 million in 2021–23; and that late last year it became a company with no obligation to publish accounts. It describes a web of aligned groups, from Hobson’s Pledge to the Sensible Sentencing Trust, and argues that once the Union showed the race card could be played and rewarded, ACT wanted in on it too.
The Union rejects the allegations. Jordan Williams says the book relies on “smears, innuendo and private material”. David Farrar called one claim “1000 percent wrong”, having told RNZ he had not read the book.
Set that beside what I published six years earlier: Hobson’s Pledge as a Brash–Ansell astroturf; the Sensible Sentencing Trust as an early ACT one; a Williams–Farrar Union that attacked every party except ACT; and the Houlbrooke pipeline from ACT to the Union. That pipeline has only lengthened. Louis Houlbrooke is now ACT’s communications manager, and his successor at the Union, Callum Purves, has followed him to ACT.
When RNZ put my thesis to Hager in 2021, he called the Union’s housing campaign a textbook example of astroturfing. His book still has gaps that matter: no local government layer, no Rodney, and neither Stuart Wilson nor Mark Mitchell in the index.
Dirty Work isn’t news to anyone who read me in 2020. It is news only to those who chose not to.
Borrowed homework
I know when the press gallery reads my work. My analytics tell me.
The visits come in. Days later a column appears with my research, my framing, sometimes my graphics, and no link. Prebble’s overhang arithmetic arrived four months after mine. Plenty of commentators now treat the Taxpayers’ Union’s stable as Hager’s discovery. None of them reported it when I did.
When I was the target, the commentariat looked away. Some joined in. Three days after Seymour’s tweet, commentator Ben Thomas volunteered that I was an idiot too. Thomas is a director of the lobbying firm Capital, which last year hired Stuart Wilson. Last week he filed a column on Dirty Work that ran through four of the Ten Ds.
Then came the verdicts. Farrar delivered his without reading the book. Ani O’Brien, who gets a chapter of it to herself, called it a “poisonous novella” and suggested almost nobody had read it. The Prime Minister said New Zealanders “do not care”. Seymour said Hager does this every three years.
There are honourable exceptions. Bryce Edwards’ Democracy Project credited my 2021 reporting the day after the launch. It took five years and a Hager book.
They dismissed Dirty Work as old news. It is old news. They just never reported it.
Business as usual
After Watergate, America rewrote its laws. After Dirty Politics, New Zealand rewrote nothing.
Dirty Politics was published on 13 August 2014. Judith Collins resigned as a minister over a separate leaked email; an inquiry later cleared her. National was re-elected on 20 September. Police raided Hager’s home, not Slater’s, and in 2018 apologised and paid substantial damages.
Labour governed from 2017 to 2023 without creating an anti-corruption commission or a lobbyists’ register. This government put a voluntary lobbying code on hold.
The media’s attention span was no better. The book lasted about two news cycles. At the launch, Newsroom’s Steve Braunias logged the press pack looking “bored stiff”.
Watergate ended with 48 convictions. Dirty Politics ended with the police apologising to the journalist.
The left-winger
Labour and the Greens walked out of the Taxpayers’ Union’s debates over dirty politics. The Union didn’t have to look far for a left-winger.
Both parties pulled out of the Union’s election debates, run with NZME as media partner, after Dirty Work was published. Te Pati Maori followed. The Greens have at least proposed a $30,000 donation cap, a ban on corporate donations and a lobbyists’ register. Boycotting a debate is not a policy.
The debates went on. Co-hosting them with libertarian Damien Grant, as the voice of the left, is former Labour MP Anna Lorck. She told the Herald she was there to be the “left winger”, and that the allegations against the Union wouldn’t stop her.
I know where Lorck comes from. She works in PR in Havelock North, and she published The Profit, a magazine that ran puff pieces for local business people. When I was a campaign director for National, I handed over the reins to Simon Lusk. Lorck sat on the same campaign committee.
Lusk is one of the key figures in Dirty Politics. Hager has called the Taxpayers’ Union’s co-founder, Jordan Williams, “Lusk and Slater’s apprentice”. In 2014 Newshub reported that Lusk’s name was “poison in Labour circles”. Lorck defected to Labour all the same. When she first stood for the party that year, the Herald’s headline was “I’m no Nat”. She won Tukituki on her third attempt and held it from 2020 to 2023.
When the Herald asked about Hager’s account of the Union’s campaign against her former colleague Nanaia Mahuta over Three Waters, Lorck said she hadn’t read the book but didn’t agree with everything the Union had done. She is staying on.
Labour walked out over dirty politics. The Union’s left-winger once sat on a campaign committee with Simon Lusk.
It shouldn’t take a judge
Watergate was broken open in a courtroom, not a newsroom.
Woodward and Bernstein kept the story alive, but it was Judge Sirica, reading McCord’s letter aloud, who cracked the cover-up. Hager’s vindication over the raid came from the courts. Mine came from a judge’s minute and a jury.
The Watergate burglary was a crime committed for the benefit of particular politicians, and the cover-up ran from the White House. In my view, what happened to me was worse. Nixon’s plumbers had to break in. Mine had the run of the place: a council that filed the slurs, a police station staffed from the same network, and politicians who, the day after one of my complaints was fobbed off, refilled local police officers’ glasses at a function in their honour. Since my acquittal, every information request my lawyers have lodged with police has been handled by the Police Minister’s staff, and police are still obstructing the release of the Wilson file.
America’s institutions eventually did their jobs: a judge, a Senate committee, a special prosecutor and a Supreme Court. New Zealand’s watchdogs each hold a fragment of the jurisdiction, and none is resourced to assemble it. The bills I drafted for an Independent Crime and Corruption Commission sit unused on politicians’ desks.
So, am I the Martha Mitchell of New Zealand politics? She warned first, was silenced by her own side, was written off as unstable, and was vindicated only when people went to prison. I warned first, was attacked by people I once worked alongside, was written off as brain-damaged, and have been vindicated, so far, by a jury and a book that arrived six years late.
Watergate’s press pack shrugged through Martha’s warnings and through an election. Most of it took the story seriously only once a judge started asking questions. It shouldn’t take a judge to wake up the fourth estate, and with the election five weeks away, it shouldn’t take another book either.
Martha’s vindication arrived in white chrysanthemums, at her funeral. If judges here start asking the questions I’ve been asking since 2020, will New Zealand’s journalists finally take the story seriously — or wait to send flowers?
