For someone who has written so much about politics, it is remarkable how naive Nicky Hager seems to be.
He claims his latest book Dirty Work exposes how the Taxpayers’ Union has dragged “the National Party to hard right”.

Here comes a surprise.
Heather du Plessis-Allan, the ZB Talkhost who is to the Right of Caligula, doesn’t think National, ACT and NZF are ‘Hard Right’.
You heard me…
Nicky Hager’s Dirty Work attack on Taxpayers’ Union ‘naive’ – Heather du Plessis-Allan
For someone who has written so much about politics, it is remarkable how naive Nicky Hager seems to be.
He claims his latest book Dirty Work exposes how the Taxpayers’ Union has dragged “the National Party to hard right”.
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.
NZME
…Heather’s attack on Hager’s book is based on the assumption that because Nicky considers this Government ‘Hard Righ’t, his book mustn’t be critically analysed.
This Government with its anti-Māori, anti-Treaty, anti-worker, anti-Union, anti-environment, anti-beneficiary, anti-disabled and anti-renter agenda has been the most ideologically extreme at promoting culture war revenge fantasies as social policy we’ve seen since Douglas and Ruth Richardson!
Heather is balking at ‘Hard Right’ and using that to discredit Hager is so flimsy it’s barely a straw man.
She’s writing this opinion for a media company own ed by an Alt-Right Canadian Culture War Billionaire who has a penchant for recreationally paying the legal bills of racists and anti-vaxxers FFS.
The never ending war on the environment, the strangling of the common good for their donors interests, the way big polluters are copy and pasted into law, the draconian punishments meted out to beneficiaries, the never ending gravy train of corporate welfare, the abdication of responsibility for state housing, arresting the homeless after manufacturing more, the Pay Parity betrayal almost starting a race war – ALL of this is ‘Soft Right’ according to Heather which makes you wonder if she was weaned on the empty and shrunken breast of Ayn Rand’s corpse during formative years because if that’s all ‘Soft Right’, I’m literally terrified of what she thinks can be done during martial law.
Nicky’s book matters because it shows how incentivised the Taxpayers’ Union stable of clients becomes when fanning racism.
He has built this book from interviews with former staff members who were horrified by what they saw inside there.
Jordan Williams refreshing the bank account every few minutes as the cash rushed in from increasingly racially charged rhetoric and imagery over 3 Waters shouldn’t be celebrated, it should be outed and shunned!
They grifted off the worst angels of our nature, you can’t tolerate that kind of symbiotic relationship.
Gaining influence and power by playing to racism and pretending you aren’t racist is crypto-fascism.
Simon Wilson over at his new Hopetown Substack makes the case…
Dirty work and the disinfecting sunshine it deserves
The central allegation of Nicky Hager’s new book Dirty Work is that the Taxpayers’ Union (TU), at the instigation of its executive director Jordan Williams, deliberately created a campaign of racial hatred against Māori, as a way to ensure the National Party won the 2023 election.
Hager reveals that the TU turned a relatively obscure argument in 2021 about how water utilities are managed into a major social conflict. The provocation: that Māori were getting something they did not deserve, at the expense of other New Zealanders.
Three Waters. The supposed plot by which “the public would lose control of water” and, because of “co-governance”, Māori would gain “ownership or control”, leading to a “cash-flow to Māori”. It wasn’t true but that didn’t matter. As the TU campaign gathered steam, donations flowed and the political parties of the right – National, Act and NZ First – all jumped aboard.
Much of the campaign was run through other groups, like Hobson’s Pledge and the farm lobby Groundswell, but Williams and the TU stood behind them, coordinating it all.
The outcome has been devastating. Once in government, those three parties of the right turned formerly fringe racist ideas into a central policy platform, infecting everything from the name of the transport agency to school curriculums, from effective healthcare programmes to fruitful partnerships in local government, and so much more. And in our wider society, among a small but busy group of people, a kind of relentless fury has been unleashed.
…Malicious Corporate influencers changed social policy using racist grift and here’s the icing on this shitcake, YOU ARE ALL PAYING MORE FOR WATER THAN YOU WOULD HAVE UNDER 3 WATERS!
You. Stupid. Dumb. Rednecks.
We have allowed the Taxpayers’ Union to plumb the darkest parts of NZs racism for money and influence which saw 3 Waters killed off and is now costing us all more!
You allow your petty bigotries to be manipulated by people who do not have your interests at heart.
That’s why Nicky’s book matters.
Heather claims he is naive for being shocked at how wilfully malicious the Taxpayers’ Union was being, as if political rat fucking is a perfectly honourable thing to do in this day and age.
Read the Book.
Nicky will be appearing on The Bradbury Group this Tuesday, 8pm.


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