Drinking Liberally: Nicky Hager

Went along to Drinking Liberally on Thursday night, a packed house (including a couple of MPs) for NZ’s great investigative journalist Nicky Hager. Cal and I were both pretty under the weather so we didn’t stick around afterwards, but it was good to hear him talk.
Hager talked for a while about how he is frustrated by people who say the public is apathetic about politics, saying his experience is that people everywhere, at all levels of society, are interested and have opinions that go beyond pure self-interest. He blames the political process for making people feel excluded and helpless. Crosby-Textor, the “evil agency” employed by National to help with their campaign, were paradigmatic examples of this. They are carefully structuring National’s campaign to shut down anything that is interesting, so people experience the substance of politics as boring and have to focus on personality. The strict insistence on repeating the same statements over and over is rendering the political conversation empty, and that is the cause of perceived public apathy
He spoke mostly about the National opposition and its many sins, because it was a liberal crowd, but made a point of Labour’s failures and wrongdoing as well – he identified Labour’s years of shutting down debate, and (most damningly) its failure to build up a credible liberal community in New Zealand. It held on to power too closely and as a result, now that the wind is coming out of its sails, there’s no support ready to come to its aid.
He made a bunch of other interesting points (noting how fundamentally right-wing NZ is was one of them that struck home to me), but reserved most of his ire for the media, whose reactive press-release driven mode of operation clearly drives him to distraction. While careful not to attack them too overtly (“I have to work in that world”, he said) it was clear that he places huge accountability on the news media for the sad state of political conversation here (and presumably overseas as well). Why, he asked, had no media representative asked John Key if he was employing Crosby Textor? It had been a major issue for his predecessor in the role – and yet not one Kiwi journalist fronted up to Key and asked him if he was taking a different course.
That is why Nicky Hager is so valuable. He’s a legend, in my book. Kudos.
(I’m going to see the movie of his revelatory book on the last National campaign, The Hollow Men, in the film fest. Should be fun. Really should read the book, seeing as I’ve seen Hager talk about it, seen the play of the book, and will shortly see the film of the book…)
Side note: it does puzzle me why the DomPost, among other papers, happily publish ridiculous letters to the editor like today’s asking for Hager to be prosecuted for being in possession of leaked emails. Surely the capital city newspaper doesn’t think reporting on leaked documents is a crime? Why, then, do they allow such attacks to get into print at all? It surprises me.