DIRTY WORK: SHINING A LIGHT ON THE MACHINERY OF CONSERVATIVE POLITICS

 

The strength of Dirty Work is that it pulls back the curtain to reveal those who prefer to operate in the shadows. And now they're scrambling to turn off the lights again.

THE FEROCITY with which sections of the New Zealand right have moved to discredit Nicky Hager’s new book Dirty Work before even turning a page tells its own story. It is the same reflexive hostility that has greeted every major investigation Hager has produced over the past three decades: a rush to delegitimise, to sneer, to dismiss, all before the evidence has been examined. 

But this time the haste has been almost comical. Within hours of the book’s release, Newstalk ZB’s Tim Beveridge—who could not possibly have read it—declared it 'junk' and banned callers from discussing it on his overnight show. Beveridge’s contempt was not grounded in analysis; it was a strike against uncomfortable truths. His close association with Jordan Williams of the Taxpayers’ Union, a regular guest on Beveridge’s Saturday afternoon show, only underscores how tightly woven these networks of mutual reinforcement have become. When a book threatens the legitimacy of that ecosystem, the ecosystem responds like a single organism.

National Party MP and former minister Chris Penk, too, performed the same ritual denunciation. In a column for Stuff, he admitted he had not read Dirty Work — then proceeded to attack it anyway. Penk reduced Hager’s investigation to a caricature: 'a person with left-wing views disagrees with people with right-wing views.'  Penk’s dismissal was not an argument; it was another conservative signal that the book should be treated as illegitimate and unworthy of engagement.

But more revealing still was the intervention of Dane Giraud, a member of the Free Speech Union and a committed Zionist defender of Israel’s genocidal assault Gaza. According to Giraud, those who take Hager seriously belong to an 'elite intelligentsia' suffering from something he calls 'Free Speech Union derangement.'  This 'elite (liberal) intelligentsia' is apparently inherently hostile to an organisation like the FSU because it is an authentic grassroots movement representing everyday working-class people.

This is a thoroughly dishonest portrayal of the FSU. It is not a working-class organisation that has emerged organically from within the workplace. It is a rebranded conservative lobby group, born out of the Taxpayers’ Union in 2018 and co-founded by corporate and political operatives including Jordan Williams. Its board includes several committed Zionists, and its campaigns consistently align with the interests of the political right.

To describe such an organisation as 'grassroots' is not merely dishonest; it is an appropriation of working-class language for elite political ends. Traditional unions are democratic institutions funded and governed by workers themselves. They exist to bargain collectively, to protect wages, to improve safety, to build solidarity. The FSU, by contrast, operates as a top-down lobby group focused on legal interventions, media pressure campaigns, and cultural warfare. It is structurally indistinguishable from the constellation of conservative advocacy outfits that have proliferated over the past decade—groups that claim to defend 'free speech' while consistently mobilising against progressive movements, academic institutions, and public broadcasters.

Giraud’s rhetorical manoeuvre—painting critics as elitist while presenting the FSU as authentically proletarian—is a classic deflection. It shifts attention away from the organisation’s funding sources, political alliances, and ideological commitments. It reframes scrutiny as snobbery. But Hager’s work has never been about cultural disdain; it has been about mapping the hidden architecture of influence. Dirty Politics exposed how attack blogs, political strategists, and wealthy donors coordinated smear campaigns. Dirty Work continues that tradition by tracing how lobby groups like the Taxpayers’ Union and their offshoots shape public debate while presenting themselves as neutral civic actors. To investigate such structures is not 'derangement.' It is democratic hygiene.

The right’s panic over Dirty Work is therefore unsurprising. Hager’s investigations threaten the mythology that groups like the FSU and the Taxpayers Union depend on: the myth of independence, the myth of grassroots authenticity, the myth of representing 'ordinary New Zealanders' rather than well-connected political networks. When those myths are punctured, the public can see these organisations for what they are—professionalised advocacy machines that weaponise culture-war grievances to advance conservative interests.

From a left-wing perspective, Dirty Work is invaluable precisely because it illuminates the machinery of contemporary conservative politics. It shows how consent is manufactured, how outrage is cultivated, how media ecosystems are manipulated, and how lobby groups coordinate narratives across platforms. It reveals the connective tissue linking talkback hosts, political operatives, advocacy groups, and sympathetic MPs. Furthermore, it does not claim that these actors are engaged in a grand conspiracy; rather, it shows how shared interests, ideological alignment, and personal networks create a shadow infrastructure of influence that operates largely out of public view.

If the book has a limitation, it is that it stops short of connecting these dynamics to the deeper failures of capitalism itself—the structural incentives that reward polarisation, the economic interests that benefit from deregulation and austerity, the corporate funding streams that sustain lobby groups committed to shrinking the public sphere. But even without that broader analysis, Dirty Work arms progressives with the factual ammunition needed to challenge the narratives that dominate New Zealand’s political discourse. It exposes the machinery behind the manufactured outrage, the faux-populism, and the relentless attacks on public institutions.

The right’s rush to bury the book before reading it is not a sign of confidence. It is a sign of fear. Hager has once again pulled back the curtain, and those who prefer to operate in the shadows are scrambling to turn off the lights.