Is all politics dirty? Does voting change anything, and is it enough? If socialists view parliament as a part of capitalism, why do we engage in elections?

Monday | September 15th | 6pm | 19 Tory St

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This special, expanded election edition of Fightback magazine comes at what seems to be a turning point in the 2014 election. The shockwaves from Dirty Politics, Nicky Hager’s exposé of the possibly corrupt relations between National Party cabinet ministers and the tabloid attack blog “Whale Oil”, are still reverberating. Labour and the left opposition parties want answers; John Key is stonewalling, and even the conservative press seem to realise something has gone wrong.

Daphne Lawless’ contribution discusses this in terms of “anti-politics from above” in New Zealand – a neoliberal-inspired political strategy to use smear and negativity to demoralise activists and deliberately depress voting turnout. Ben Peterson takes on the same issue as an attempted undermining of democracy itself. National lost under Don Brash in 2005 because he allowed the naked, nasty face of neoliberalism to assert itself. The project goes much more smoothly under John Key, the “relaxed” and cheerful frontman, who plays at being an “ordinary bloke” who just happened to make $50 million in currency speculation. Meanwhile, big corporates dictate policy, and cronies and friends like Cameron Slater and Jason Ede play the politics of personal destruction.

Will Hager’s revelation of the naked face of attack politics behind National’s carefully bland façade damage their prospects for a third term? A lot depends on the other conservative parties. Cameron Slater is explicitly quoted in the book as saying that, if MMP stays and the small parties of the Right fall out of Parliament, “National is f**ked”. Byron Clark looks at the centre-right as a whole and examines its prospects.

What is the alternative, though? As Ian Anderson ably explains in his article, Labour offers a kinder, gentler face to the same old management of neo-liberalism. While Labour no longer shuns the Green Party, this can only be because the Greens themselves have moved inside the “big tent” of accepting neoliberal corporate politics – the left wing of the establishment, the party of comfortable but socially conscious small business and successful professionals.

So under what circumstances can a socialist organisation like Fightback – pushing for a fundamental transformation of relations of work, production and power throughout society – support an alliance of the tino rangatiratanga / broad left MANA movement with the upstart Internet Party, founded by a German millionaire with an outlandish personality? Fightback works within MANA because of its commitment to represent te pani me te rawakore [the poor and the dispossessed]. We are able to keep working because it is a democratic party – when the leadership is wrong, it is willing to listen to activists; and because no real change in Aotearoa-New Zealand is possible without the most intimate involvement of the tangata whenua.

But to some degree MANA represents “traditional” constituencies for the radical left. The Internet Party, in contrast, aims at the young and the wired. Although funded by Kim Dotcom, the party is led by activists of the traditional social-democratic Left such as leader Laila Harré, and kept moving by younger activists such as Miriam Pierard, who is interviewed extensively in this issue. While not attracted to a “traditional” socialist programme, these young people – according to Pierard – have a strong belief in civil liberties, social equality, freedom of information and an antipathy to corporate power. Traditional politics has had nothing to say to them until now.

It is precisely the Internet Party and MANA Movement’s constituencies which the strategy of Whale Oil and his co-thinkers want to keep out of politics altogether. They want electoral choice restricted to, at the extreme, the now rather tame Green Party. The Internet-MANA alliance aims at complementary audiences with the same vision seen from two perspectives. With current polls showing five MPs to be elected from this alliance, this is the best chance since the 1990s for those excluded from the “rock-star” neoliberal economy to vote for an alternative. Fightback encourages all readers to take that chance.

Fightback 2014 Issue #6

Fightback supports Internet MANA as an alliance between radical indigenous and progressive tau iwi forces, challenging the neoliberal consensus.

Party founder Kim Dotcom recently hinted that Julian Assange may be speaking at an upcoming Internet Party event on September 15^th. Assange is sought for questioning for rape.

Providing a platform for Assange, and other men with a misogynist history, discredits the movement against transnational exploitation and repression (as represented by the TPPA, Five Eyes, and the GCSB in Aotearoa/NZ). Only a movement which opposes gendered violence can unite the oppressed to fight for self-determination.

Fightback opposes any platform for Julian Assange.

See also:

• Rape myths and Julian Assange
• Dotcom scolded: “He’s a product of sexist culture”

Prime Minister John Key (centre) with bloggers David Farrar (left) and Cameron Slater (right)

by Daphne Lawless

As we go to press, the election campaign has been turned upside down by a new book by investigative journalist Nicky Hager. Dirty Politics is based mainly on a leak of 2 gigabytes of emails and Facebook messages from “Whale Oil”, the vicious right-wing scandal-mongering blog edited by Cameron Slater.

The book lays out convincing evidence that leading figures in the National Government – including Justice Minister Judith Collins and staff in the office of Prime Minister John Key – have actively worked with Whale Oil and other right-wing blogs to conduct personal smear campaigns on Labour and other opposition parties, including Internet Party founder Kim Dotcom. Nicky Hager is himself presented as one of the targets – another right-wing blogger, according to the book, tried to pass on Hager’s personal details to angry Chinese billionaires.

But it’s crucial to identify the real problem. Hager is not saying there is anything wrong about the National Party feeding information to friendly blogs. Certainly, this is something “they all do”. The “dirt” in Dirty Politics is the reliance on personal attack, vilification and smear. When Cameron Slater declares that he wants evidence of “[opposition MPs] Andrew Williams or Winston Peters drunk… [Auckland mayor] Len Brown rooting in brothels”, he is in fact practising a kind of “anti-politics from above”.

“They’re all the same…” – really?

“Anti-politics” is a term which has been used for an attitude which has arisen in many protest movements. It’s summed up in the slogan from Argentina, ¡que se vayán todos! (Get rid of them all!) It’s cynicism that electoral politics can do any good; it’s the idea that all politicians lie, that all movements are corrupt, that the whole system of media and democracy is a fraud. Unfortunately, it often slides into “conspiracy theory” about aliens, Jews, or some other bogey being the “real enemy”.

But what we have in Dirty Politics is different from the justified disgust of a repeatedly disillusioned mass. Slater’s anti-politics is a deliberate strategy used by the Right to demobilise and demoralize opponents and potential opponents. Simon Lusk, a National Party strategist and a close collaborator of Slater, argues in a strategy document previously leaked but reprinted in the book that left-wing activists can be best “demoralised”, and their voters demotivated, by personal attacks on their leaders rather than dealing with their politics.

So the strategy is: get some mud to stick to an activist or politician in the news, get people believing “they’re all the same, politics is too dirty, best not to get involved”. And of course that’s what John Key is doing right now, repeating that Hager is a “screaming left-wing conspiracy theorist”, whether those words make any sense or not. And National have been doing this since before Whale Oil became a household name – for example, when cabinet Minister Paula Bennett released personal information to try to discredit protesting welfare beneficiaries.

Dirty Politics recounts Slater’s role in whipping up manufactured political controversies – like how many times various politicians visited Kim Dotcom’s mansion – which effectively distracted attention from policy debate or scrutiny on the Government. More recently, Slater has smeared Dotcom as a “Nazi” who hates John Key for being Jewish and Hollywood corporates for being “run by Jews”. If the purpose of attack-blog anti-politics is to make people quit and disengage from activism, then it makes sense that the German millionaire, who is attempting to rally a new constituency to electoral politics via the Internet Party, should be a major target.

Personal attack

Another target of attack blogging is to personally smear the leaders of opposition parties. Dirty Politics tells one farcical story of Slater desperately trying to get video footage of Winston Peters “drunk” in a Wellington bar. Meanwhile, Labour leader David Cunliffe has apparently been followed around by operatives who record his every word and action, and put anything vaguely embarrassing online for use against him. The book even describes associates of Whale Oil putting embarrassing information on Wikipedia about Labour MPs’ sex lives.

Slater’s buddies apparently gave him the admiring nickname of “The Rush Limbaugh of New Zealand politics”. But Limbaugh – an nasty right-wing radio host in the US – is perhaps a less appropriate parallel than Andrew Breitbart, the recently deceased founder of the Big Government blog and its associated websites.

Breitbart’s websites have become notorious for exactly the kind of personalised attacks based on misleading evidence which Slater is bringing into play in New Zealand. For example, in 2011 they forced the resignation of Shirley Sherrod, an African-American agriculture civil servant, after publishing a video of her deceptively edited to make it look like she was biased against whites. Sherrod is currently suing the Breitbart websites. But probably the people at fault in that case were the Obama Administration themselves, who dumped Sherrod without a proper investigation for fear of this Right-wing attack blogging.

The book also discusses how Slater turns his filth-cannon against enemies in the National Party – such as people who get in the way of Simon Lusk’s grand plan to get hard-right candidates selected for safe rural seats. Once this is done, Whale Oil publishes an “utu post” – more or less an explanation of how the victory was carried out, and advertising for political hopefuls to become “clients” of himself or Lusk.

Smears for sale

But Slater isn’t just a political activist – he makes his living by doing the same job for corporate PR merchants. Corporate lobbyists, including the son of a former National cabinet minister, have paid Slater thousands to publish, under his own name, personal attacks on their targets. So, activists for plain packaging tobacco are targeted by cigarette companies. An association of cleaning services who had signed a union contract were mercilessly attacked to break them up. Maritime Union leaders had their details leaked to Slater by Ports of Auckland; and anti-obesity campaigners are smeared and belittled by the Food and Grocery Council. By a staggering coincidence, the latter is also headed by a former National cabinet Minister.

The process of public vilification of those targeted by paying customers is helped by Whale Oil’s regular blog commentators. If Whale Oil is the National Party’s attack dog, then the comments section is Whale Oil’s private school of piranhas. Slater’s personal attacks do not usually extend to death threats and stalking – these come out of the comments boxes instead. Some of the blog’s regular denizens are revealed in the book to be corporate lobbyists under pseudonyms, commenting on the articles they themselves planted.

The last part of the formula is the aggressive and misogynist language used by Whale Oil and his fan club. This atmosphere of continuous rage has the effect of whipping up a lynch-mob atmosphere among readers and commentators, and repressing any tendencies towards reflection or nuance. Hateful language against health advocates as “troughers” sucking at the public teat, or environmentalists as “the green Taliban”, boils over into fanciful macho tough-talk about someone with “a big set… slapping Helen Kelly around the face [with them]”, or – worse – “a bullet in the head” of an MFAT public servant who was (wrongly) identified by Judith Collins as the source of some embarrassing leak.

Thus, Hager’s book lays out a well-thought-out scheme by Slater and other Right-wing bloggers to actually prevent substantive political debate; to drive voters away from all politics and activists away from fighting corporate malfeasance. Personalised attacks demoralise their targets (especially when the commenters add death threats) and evoke uncertainty among their supporters. No-one wants to deal with the “mad dogs” who inhabit the comments of Whale Oil or Kiwiblog on a daily basis. Slater and his mates want you to think that all politics and activism is dirty and everyone trying to change things is a venal scumbag. Then you won’t bother their mates and paymasters any more.

Pollies, journos and bloggers – you scratch my back…

The mainstream media have taken diametrically opposing attitudes so far. Some, like John Armstrong or Fran O’Sullivan – usually reliable National supporters – have declared themselves shocked by the information and firmly stated that John Key has questions to answer. Others, like Sean Plunket or Mike Hoskings, have sneeringly dismissed the idea that there’s “anything in” Hager’s book, and suggested that Hager himself is a “criminal” for using leaked information.

The latter attitude is very similar to the hypocrisy shown by Whale Oil itself. Cameron Slater is quoted in the book as making nastily sexualised comments about women to his National Party mates, but suddenly turns into a morals crusader when trying to force Len Brown out of office for adultery. The attitude, then, is: whatever crime it is, it’s okay when our side do it. This is the politics of total warfare.

But there’s also the problem of what Americans call “the Beltway”. Many of the commentators who are now saying “but we knew all this already” probably did know it already, although only now is the evidence in the public domain. But the general public does not know this. It has not been publicised or printed. It’s only been swapped as gossip among “political insiders”, press, PR flacks and party hacks, who think it’s normal because they make a good living from it.

Cameron Slater is successful because he has realised a simple truth, which is quoted elsewhere in the book as coming from the US Young Republicans: “Reporters are lazy and ill-informed.” Or – to put it kindly – reporters are under-resourced and under intense pressure from their employers to provide copy quickly and cheaply.

It’s much easier to chase up a “hint” from Whale Oil – or Kiwiblog – than it is to do investigative reporting. It’s fair to suggest that those journos who are dismissing Hager’s book enjoy having someone like Slater around to do the dirty work. They can then say they’re “just asking questions” – those questions having been fed to them by political or corporate bigwigs, via the attack blogs – as they make a good living cosying up to the powerful in the Beehive or in the boardrooms.

The media runs on Whale Oil

So what makes Whale Oil tick? Slater is – as anyone who has paid him attention in the past knows – a deeply unpleasant fellow. He is sexist, racist and openly contemptuous to those less fortunate. He has been open in the past about his clinical depression, which often expresses itself in rage. And his rage is directed not just at the Left or at the less fortunate, but at other insufficiently right-wing Nats, or the people who cost his father his job as National Party president (or who failed to get him a knighthood!)

But perhaps most importantly, Cameron Slater loves power. He describes himself in the third person as “the whale”, glories in his influence over MPs and journalists, and is never happier than when he “destroys someone”. When his campaigns succeed, he makes grandiose pronouncements like “I own the news!” or “I’m a one-man union wrecking machine!”

It’s not just about the personal issues of one man, though – David Farrar’s less abusive but cleverer Kiwiblog plays a similar role, as did the now defunct “Cactus Kate”. But it’s also about class. Cameron Slater is the son of a former National Party president, born into privilege, and his distinction is that he says openly what is usually muttered over a brandy in quiet rooms. The people he talks to in these communications – Simon Lusk, Jordan Williams, Aaron Bhatnagar, Judith Collins – never once challenge his assumptions about how the world works, or which human beings are of value.

Power without responsibility, said the British politician Stanley Baldwin, was a perogative misused by the press. But that’s even more so in the age of blogging. One weakness in Nicky Hager’s excellent book is his argument that bloggers – who openly mix “opinion and fact” – are unaccountable for what they do in a way that the mainstream media are not. But it’s the mainstream media, as we’ve argued above, who have lifted Slater from being “a jerk with a laptop” to someone who is relied on by the powerful and feared by their enemies.

The mainstream media do not abide by traditional standards of fact-checking and objectivity, to the extent that they ever have in commercialised journalism. They are under intense pressure to deliver clicks and advertising revenue with stories that grab the attention and are easy to tell. Cameron Slater only has power to the extent that he is used as the middle-man between, on one hand, political and corporate bosses with a story to feed to the public and the ability to pay (in money or prestige); and a news media who have gotten used to stories handed to them on a plate, who have found that telling the stories that the élite like to hear is the best way to make a living.

Learn 2 Internet

Slater is is a symptom, not a cause, of the sick culture of neoliberal ideology reproducing itself in the news media. But in the same way that Slater has run wings around the “old media” and old-fashioned ways of doing politics, so too has he been tripped up by even newer forces. When “anonymous” Internet forces crashed his website in January this year in revenge for his mocking a young man’s death in a car crash, the hard evidence of who asks him or pays him to do what job fell into the hands of those forces and was passed on to Nicky Hager.

Radical forces desperately need our own citizen journalism, supported by institutions who don’t have a vested interest in keeping the public demoralised, apathetic and angry. But to an extent, we already have a surfeit of engaged writers. What we need now is to extend the population of engaged readers. The book reveals that Slater’s attacks often begin as “concern trolling” – posing as a supporter of something who is “concerned” about some manufactured problem, in order to put doubts in the minds of real supporters.

Attack blogging tactics require secrecy and surprise – as Hager says, the victim often doesn’t even know there’s an orchestrated campaign against him until it’s too late. One problem of contemporary internet use is the tendency to believe any information which comes down the pipeline – this author herself has fallen prey to passing on misinformation because it “sounded real”. The Left must support skeptical reading and thinking, even about stories which we would like to be true. The day when we allow ourselves to tell lies because it promotes our cause, we become the equivalents of Whale Oil.

Slater’s supporters yell that “the Left does it too”. This is of course just anti-politics in itself. But if the Labour Party or any other party have also engaged in smears, personalized abuse and other “anti-politics” against their opponents as detailed in Dirty Politics, we should look forward to hearing all about it, as we should the dirt which Slater purportedly has on Dotcom. Progressive and radical forces have no interest in attack blogging, destroying activists or discouraging political participation. The systematic deceit practiced by Whale Oil, his clients and his pet journalists, benefits only the powerful and rich. Only a principled Left, standing with the majority and guided by a skeptical quest for truth, can undermine this strategy.

The Anonymous forces who gave Hager his material are owed our thanks – as is Nicky Hager himself, for putting it in a way that the mainstream media can dismiss, but cannot ignore. Hacktivists and left journalists, in exposing the abusive and deceitful way power maintains itself, are a necessary part of achieving true justice and democracy.

Heleyni Pratley is an organiser for Unite Union and a member of Fightback (Aotearoa/NZ).

In May, Heleyni attended the first global conference on fast food organising. Fightback writer Ian Anderson interviewed her.

FB: Can you tell us about Unite Union and how you first got involved?

HP: Sure, so I got involved with Unite Union because I was in the Workers Party [a predecessor of Fightback], a socialist group active on campus.

At the time I was active in the Students Association, and was also working many casualised jobs. So Unite was interesting, they’d just gotten rid of youth rates and had contracts with all the major fast food companies.

Unite focuses on organising young casualised workers. The traditional union movement saw these workers, especially in fast food, as being un-organisable. But Unite proved everybody wrong… It does involve constant recruitment because the turnover’s so high.

The workers that Unite organises are mainly in fast food and cinemas. Cinema workers and fast food workers are completely casualised, the only people who technically have full-time hours are the restaurant managers. They’ll often have large workforces; McDonald’s recommends that any store should have 70 employees at any one time. The model is Taylorism, basically keep everyone on their toes, worried that they could lose their job or hours at any time; hours are used as punishment.

So Unite has unionised workers in those sectors and won collective agreements through struggle.

FB: Can you tell me about the recent fast food workers’ conference in New York?

HP: Sure, so the conference that I attended involved delegations of fast food workers and unionists from 26 countries all over the world.

We heard about struggles happening for example in Thailand, where workers are actually offered large sums of money to not join the union. For some of the workers it was actually very risky to attend the conference.

It was organised by the International Labour Organisation. It was the first ever global conference on fast food organising.

FB: Why was it important for Unite to send a delegation?

HP: Unite has been at the global forefront of this organising.

The way that McDonalds operates, and other fast food chains like KFC, is the same globally. While that’s a strength in terms of their business model and global exploitation, it’s a weakness in terms of us relaying what we’ve learnt, so other workers and other unions can draw from those lessons in fighting these companies.

FB: What was your main takeaway from the conference discussion?

HP: What I learnt was, we’re in New York – it’s the heart of the beast, the heart of the empire – and the problems are the same.

The workers are paying workers in the US, like everywhere else, the minimum they can get away with. Workers at McDonald’s in the US are actually on food stamps, even though they’re employed, so similar to New Zealand where we have employed people on Accommodation Supplements.

So the similarities were more than what I thought they would be initially, and I think that now more than ever, global workers’ solidarity is important.

FB: What was your understanding of the fast food workers’ campaign in the US?

HP: The Fast Food Forward campaign in the US seems to have come out of the Occupy movement, which is a really positive aspect.

A lot of people have said that Occupy failed, but I disagree with that because Occupy was successful at raising consciousness, and it’s been heartening to see that’s fed into more concrete, long-term ways of engaging in struggle. That fightback is really needed in the US. McDonald’s workers are on $7.25, and that’s the non-tipped minimum wage, so if you’re on a tipped minimum wage it’s actually from $2.15 upwards.

So my understanding of the fast food campaign in the US is that it’s come out of Occupy, it’s community-led, and unions are also playing a role. I think that community involvement is where the campaign’s success lies. That’s what we’ve seen in Unite as well, that you have to have the wider community involved.

FB: What actions were you involved with?

HP: I participated in the delivery of a letter to McDonald’s, to explain that there would be global actions, on the 15^th of May, including workers’ going on strike. There was a press conference in New York where workers from all over the world spoke, and then we delivered the letter.

Of course we weren’t allowed into the restaurant, you know there was a little bit of pushing and shoving. In the end the letter was pinned to the wall.

I also went to Boston and helped a community group, who were getting workers at a restaurant prepared to take a strike action on the 15^th, and what I saw from these workers was a real desperation. In a lot of worksites there’s fear around taking strike action, and we see that definitely in New Zealand too.

But in the US, as soon as we said that in New Zealand the minimum wage is $14.25, you could see how people were hopeful – and pissed off!

FB: What are some of the differences and similarities internationally?

HP: In fast food, there are more similarities than differences. So workers are treated exactly the same way. Hours are used as punishment. Hours aren’t guaranteed. Everyone at McDonald’s is on minimum wage, everyone is completely casualised.

Which means things that have worked for Unite in NZ, will work at other restaurants around the world, and I’m sure that we can learn a lot from what they’re doing.

The left has clearly been smashed in the US, just as it has been in NZ. The left is weak, and this is reflected in the trade union movement. So we need to be thinking seriously about rebuilding, and how we rebuild.

But similarly there is strength in a conviction, and a desire, to change our situation, to make sure McJobs are not our future. There seems to be an understanding that if we don’t stand up, things will get worse.

So I think complacency is changing. In the ‘90s and early 2000s there was a certain sense that there’s nothing we can do about neoliberalism, but things like Occupy show a global shift.

We see Russell Brand talking about revolution, and whatever you think of Russell Brand, these things are now in the popular discourse.

FB: Now that the struggle against casualization is getting globally organised, what do you think the next steps are?

HP: We established links, which is fantastic, we need to build on those and maintain those.

For example, I met people who are organising the factories where McDonald’s burgers are made. That is just awesome. I think any Marxist is like, that is the point of production! I don’t want to fetishise that too much, but I think these global networks need to increase. It’s inspirational because it’s another way for us to realise our power as workers.

And our power is by coming together and taking action, so coming together globally is something workers can feed off, I don’t think that can be underestimated.

FB: What are the next steps locally, for Unite?

HP: Unite is committed currently to changing the government, so we’re running the Get Out The Vote Campaign. After that we’re looking into launching a campaign against Zero Hour contracts.