Nicky Hager's latest book is an instruction manual, not an exposé
Hundreds packed Unity Books on Tuesday night to watch Nicky Hager finish his trilogy. I went as a reader, a former political operative and a reluctant expert on the subject. The room told me as much as the book.
The top floor of the building that houses Unity Books on Willis Street used to be National Party headquarters. Paul East ran his electorate office there. Nobody mentioned it on Tuesday. Most wouldn’t have known.
When I attend a film premiere, I sit in the middle of the back row and watch the audience. When I worked in politics, I stood at the back for the same reason. On Tuesday I did something almost nobody else did. I worked the room.
This is what I saw there, what I found in the book the next morning, and what happened to the book before most people could buy it.
The question is not whether Dirty Work is true. It is whether anyone with power intends to do anything about it.
Contents
Working the room
The cameras were setting up when I arrived. So were the cliques.
One crowd formed around the hors d’oeuvres and hid them from view. Another settled on the free wine. The media had been shepherded to the front. Ben Thomas nestled himself amongst several Taxpayers' Union staffers (wearing loud suits) and, after a few glares from people who spotted them, Ben took a spot beside the counter, where he could buy early and watch the room from behind.
The suits talked among themselves. They drew glances from people wondering whether they were “the subject”. Current and former politicians, mostly Green, appeared after the speeches.
The Spinoff’s Lyric Waiwiri-Smith sorted the crowd into three types: Green staffers packed around Chlöe Swarbrick, young men with tote bags, and self-described “sad political tragics”. She also spotted the spies. Taxpayers’ Union and ACT people worked their way through the crowd and declined to chat. One wore a camouflage hat. Steve Braunias filed gonzo live updates for Newsroom. Literary event of the epoch, bombshell status pending.
I talked to a cook from a soup kitchen. I talked to a man I was admitted to the Bar alongside, who went back to university, finished a PhD and became a Treaty expert. I talked to a well-known actor, another author, an electoral lawyer, a student, the shop’s owner, and a friend from the film industry of almost thirty years. It was the best hour I have spent in Wellington this year.
But most people stood in their cliques and avoided each other. It was sad. Here was a launch for a book about how divisive our politics has become. The room was a live demonstration.
Hager read the preface from large-print pages. The shop had turned into a sauna. An injured hand ruled out signings. The book sold out in about twenty minutes. Then the media were led into a back storeroom for a huddle, with lawyers Felix Geiringer and Steven Price minding him and publisher Robbie Burton overseeing.
The scramble for the last copies ended with Burton and Hager giving away their own to RNZ journalists who arrived late. Whitcoulls on Lambton Quay sold out shortly after opening the next morning. I got mine at Cuba Mall.
A book launch about polarisation, attended by people who would not speak to each other.
A few days of news
The book led the six o’clock news. By the drive home it was already talkback.
Benedict Collins discussed it on Breakfast. Newstalk ZB brought on an ACT supporter, waved Hager away, floated banning lobbying altogether, then asked whether the PPTA, NZEI and the unions should be banned too. A handful of calls. That was it. A junior producer, The Spinoff reported, spent the night photocopying every page so Heather du Plessis-Allan could discuss it in Auckland.
By Wednesday the responses had found their grooves. David Fisher led the Herald with “pokie machine”. The Taxpayers’ Union told Julia Gabel the sexual harassment claim was entirely false. The Herald separately reported former staff describing constant discussion of women’s bodies in the office.
Jordan Williams said suing was “very tempting”, but he would not derail his pre-election mission. He had already told supporters the book was a full frontal attack. David Farrar had not read it. He told RNZ the claim that he used National’s database for the 2020 capital gains tax mailouts was “1000% wrong”. He called the polling chapter hilarious. He filed Hager under the hard left. Laurence Kubiak thought the donations claim was quite an assertion.
Henry Cooke asked in The Post whether the sequel would have the same bite). Sam Sachdeva at Newsroom went with spiderweb. The Spinoff’s Bulletin noted that Hager’s lawyers had said at the launch that nothing alleged was criminal. Pressed on his thesis, Hager could not say the Union operated in secret or hid its politics.
Some of the lines were written before the book was. The Taxpayers’ Union issued four pages of rebuttal in July 2023, to a book Hager said he had not started.
Whack-a-mole
The revenge began before breakfast.
First thing on Wednesday, PDF copies of Dirty Work were circulating on blogs and in chat rooms. Administrators were playing whack-a-mole, deleting one link as the next appeared.
Wellington’s bookshops had sold out the night before. The rest of the country could not buy a copy until Thursday. For most of Wednesday, the only copies outside the capital were stolen ones.
Whoever scanned it did not do it for the love of reading. Potton & Burton is an independent Nelson publisher. A $34.99 paperback with a print run sized for a New Zealand political audience cannot absorb a free edition on launch day. Hager spent three years on the book.
Organised or opportunistic, the effect was the same. It attacked the author’s and the publisher’s ability to earn from their work, in the hours before most readers had the chance to pay for it.
It is also exactly the behaviour the book describes. In 2013, when Hager worked on the offshore tax-haven leaks, his home address was published on Whale Oil. In 2014 the answer to Dirty Politics was a ten-hour police raid on his house. In 2026 the answer was a legal letter before publication, a public musing about suing, and a pirated PDF the morning after.
Nobody needs to issue a directive for that reflex to run. The book’s own account of the Taxpayers’ Union is of a movement fuelled by anger. Angry supporters do not need to be told to share a stolen file.
They could not stop the book. So they stopped him being paid for it.
What the book actually says
This is not the book Hager’s readers were expecting, and he says so.
There are no leaks. There are no hacks. I would imagine Jordan Williams learned the hard way in 2014 about putting anything in a direct message. Dirty Work rests on interviews with disgruntled former staff, the judgments in Williams v Craig, the Slater–Williams Facebook messages from the 2014 trove, and the Union’s own tenth-anniversary book. Almost every substantive endnote reads “confidential source”. That method took the fizz out of it.
Eight short chapters. 155 pages. $34.99.
Chapter one is Williams’ apprenticeship under Brash, Lusk, Slater and Franks. It includes Facebook messages on the morning of the Christchurch earthquake about which public spending could be cut to pay for the rebuild.
Chapter two retells the Colin Craig operation from the judgments. It adds the claim that the Union’s board has paid out on several employment disputes, at least one alleging sexual harassment, with Williams represented by an HR firm run by his mother and sister.
Chapter three is Stop Three Waters as race-baiting, the surge in donations it produced, and an internal fight over whether the Union was in the business of tax or race.
Chapter four is the “stable”. The Campaign Company, incorporated in November 2021. Hobson’s Pledge paying it $60,000 a month in election year. Groundswell paying $20,000 a month. The Free Speech Union run from the same office. And the origin of the Union–Curia poll: a donor approached Williams in late 2021, one or two donors cover the cost, Farrar does it at cost, the Union releases first, and Williams rings party leaders before each release.
Chapter five is Ani O’Brien. The Sensible Sentencing Trust relaunched in 2024 as a Williams vehicle. The Tamatha Paul billboards. And the Maiki Sherman operation, with O’Brien’s Substack republished on the Free Speech Union’s letterhead three days later.
Chapter six is British American Tobacco executives giving instructions to Union staff. Money routed from BAT to the Union to the Campaign Company for Save Kiwi Dairies, Save Our Stores and No Vape Ban.
Chapter seven is the money. $7.27 million raised in 2021–23, more than the Greens, New Zealand First and Te Pāti Māori combined. Talley’s seed funding. Jenny Gibbs. Jim Grenon pitching a media company and asking for a board seat. And, buried on page 102, the Union’s late-2025 conversion from an incorporated society into a limited liability company with no obligation to publish accounts.
The last chapter is a portrait of the Union’s supporters. Older, male and angry.
The book is strongest where its sources were in the room. It is weakest everywhere else.
The chair who isn't in it
Start with an error that matters.
The book dates the Union’s board fight to 2022. It has Ashley Church resigning as chair and Laurence Kubiak replacing him.
Church chaired for five months in 2021. By Williams’ own account he resigned over the decision to take on Three Waters. The Union’s own announcement of Kubiak’s appointment, in July 2022, says Casey Costello had been acting chair since the launch of the Stop Three Waters campaign. Williams later credited her with setting the organisation up for that campaign’s success.
So the person who chaired the Taxpayers’ Union from the launch of Stop Three Waters until July 2022 — the campaign’s peak — is now a Cabinet minister. The book mentions her on four pages. Never in that role. It calls her possibly the tobacco industry’s greatest-ever insider asset. It misses that she ran the shop.
The minister who chaired the Taxpayers’ Union through Stop Three Waters is in the book four times. Never as chair.
What's missing
Then the gaps.
There is no local government layer. No Rodney. No account of how the Auckland Ratepayers’ Alliance graded council candidates while Williams’ firm ran some of their campaigns.
There is nothing on the timing of Curia releases against other pollsters’ fieldwork. I set that out in Unleashed and again this month.
Mark Mitchell, the subject of a whole chapter of Dirty Politics, is not in the index. Neither are Stuart Wilson or Andrew Ketels. Martyn Bradbury, who moderated the Union’s 2023 election debates after calling Williams a venomous spider, is absent. So is the NZME amplification chain that turned O’Brien’s Substack into front-page news.
The pipeline from lobby group to Parliament stops at the Union’s three campaign managers and Costello. McKee, Hoggard and the press gallery’s own revolving door do not feature.
And the architecture is not new. I called it Act Three of Dirty Politics in September 2020. That piece set out the ACT-to-Union personnel pipeline, the astroturf model, and the correlation between the Union’s budget and ACT’s polling. RNZ put the thesis to Hager in 2021. He called the Campaign for Affordable Housing a textbook example of astroturfing.
The book is now marketed as the third part of a trilogy.
Readers can draw their own conclusions about who got there first.
Is it news?
Some of it.
The BAT instructions are new. So are the donor behind the poll, the dollar figures, the harassment payout and the company restructure. The last of these means the public trail on the Union’s money ends at its 2024 accounts.
The rest has been on the record for years, including on this site. The Taxpayers’ Union, Hobson’s Pledge, the Free Speech Union, Groundswell and the Sensible Sentencing Trust are one machine with one operator. That was never a secret. It was just not reported.
Waiwiri-Smith asked the right question. In a year when the foreign minister tells a Chinese-born MP to go back where he came from, what still counts as dirty work? What is bad enough to make heads roll?
On the evidence of the last twelve years, the answer is nothing.
Why nothing will happen
The subjects of Hager’s books have never faced consequences. Not once.
After Dirty Politics, the police raided Hager’s house, not Slater’s. Judith Collins resigned over a different leak. Jason Ede left quietly. Nobody was charged. The only people who paid damages were the police and the SIS — to Hager.
The Electoral Commission, the Police, the SFO, the Ombudsman, the IPCA, the Auditor-General and the Privacy Commissioner each hold a fragment of the jurisdiction. None is resourced to assemble it. None is inclined to. A hollowed-out media applies no pressure to make them.
If New Zealand had an Australian-style anti-corruption commission, a number of the people in Dirty Politics would have faced it. Instead the book got a few days of headlines. The public grew a little more numb. The operators read it as a manual.
That is not a metaphor. The three-strikes technique Slater and Lusk used against Mitchell’s rivals in 2011 was used against a wahine Māori political editor in 2026. I set out the architecture in May.
Hager’s afterword concedes the point. He names the enablers: the journalists who interview Farrar and Williams as independent experts, and the RNZ producers who have had Farrar on about 600 times since 2007. He names the National politicians who shared in the benefits. His five remedies are sensible. None will be adopted by a government whose Prime Minister told the Taxpayers’ Union to be louder.
Farrar’s response is the tell. A couple of disgruntled ex-staffers, he says, are not newsworthy. Every organisation has them. This is typical politics. He is right that it is typical. That is the problem.
Williams says suing is tempting, but he has a mission to complete before November. He will complete it. The book will be reviewed, quoted at the odd candidates’ meeting, and shelved.
Exposure without consequence is not accountability. It is a training course.
What would actually work
On the day of the launch, the Greens proposed a donation cap, a ban on corporate donations and a public register of lobbyists.
It is a start. It is not enough.
The two bills I published in March (which I drafted almost a decade ago) would create an Independent Crime and Corruption Commission with the powers of New South Wales’ ICAC. They would criminalise fabricated polling and the coordinated suppression of information for release during the restricted period. They would force third-party promoters into the light.
Until something like that exists, a book is not accountability. Not even a good one. Not even a legalled one. It is a record of what people got away with.
Nicky Hager has written the third volume of a case file nobody in authority intends to open. The people in it know that. That is why they were in the room.
