Corn crusade latest mission for activist

By SIMON COLLINS

Ever since he was old enough to think about such things, Nicky Hager has known that good people can get caught up in organisations that are not so good.

In the forward to his new book alleging a cover-up of an accidental release of genetically modified sweetcorn, Hager says most of those involved "were not acting unethically. They were just busily following instructions from their superiors."

It is a theme with deep roots. His father escaped from Austria as a teenager with his Jewish family just before World War II.

Relatives left behind died in Hitler's gas chambers.

In Levin, where Hager's father established a clothing factory, the family never forgot this.

"My father was a businessman. His friends had businesses.

"But they used to talk about issues of social justice that my father always said you would always find in refugees, because they understood that because someone was advantaged didn't mean it's their fault."

Hager (the name rhymes with lager) is 43, and has been politically active since he arrived in Wellington aged 17 in 1976.



At first, he picked up a series of odd jobs and devoted himself to the anti-nuclear campaign, finding boaties willing to sail and kayak into the Wellington southerlies to protest against five US warships in the next few years.

"The people involved called me the commodore of the peace squadrons because I organised a lot of the boats and the tactics on the water," he says.

As the nuclear-free campaign gradually blossomed from a fringe group into a popular movement he "learned about how ordinary people in the public can change policy".

Through the 1980s, Hager worked as a builder, initially with his brother-in-law and then on his own, and built his own house with recycled timber for $11,000.

He and his partner had a daughter in 1991. They separated before the child was born, but live next-door to each other and share parenting.

Eventually, Hager spent less time protesting and more time researching. He immersed himself in details of the US Navy to help the peace movement identify nuclear ships.

"I find research very stimulating and enjoyable," he says.

"It's the joy of having information which is not available, which is hidden within lots of other papers until you are able to put things together."

In the early 90s he turned to the intelligence agencies.

He obtained lists of military staff with and without the spies, and identified agents by subtracting one list from the other.

Then he asked around, found friends of friends who knew agents and picked those who might talk.

"My first try was a stunning success."

Gradually, he contacted others by "hearing about them, knowing what sort of people they were and how they felt about the world, and going and trying to establish trust with them".

"In every area of work, there are people who go to work because that is the job that they have stumbled into," he says.

"They didn't have the personality, perhaps, to be whistleblowers or make a big stand, but in their own ethical way they might be very worried about what was going on."

Paul Bensemann, a journalist now working for Green MP Jeanette Fitzsimons, helped with the research and says that for Hager it "completely took over his life".

He lodged more than 100 Official Information Act requests.

When Secret Power, the book the research produced, came out in 1996, it was a big story. But it died quickly.

Hager tried to interest TVNZ in a documentary, without success. Then he tried TV3's Wellington newsroom.

"The reporter who agreed to do it was John Campbell."

Secret Power has been translated into Italian and Japanese. Hager has written articles on intelligence for numerous overseas journals, including chapters in two recent books.

After his next book, Secrets and Lies, Hager started a project "about the interactions between business and government and influences on policy in New Zealand". That was how he got on to sweetcorn.

"While I was doing one of the interviews for that, it just came up as a chance mention that something had gone on that had been really tightly covered up," he says.

"By quite concertedly searching around for sources and information, I managed to find not only people who had been involved, but all the documentation."

Hager survives on the income from his books and journalism.

"He lives on the smell of an oily rag," says Bensemann.

"He grows vegetables and doesn't buy much, doesn't have a car."

To Hager, the significance of his new book is not the allegedly contaminated corn, but the cover-up.

"We live in a remarkably uncorrupt and reasonably open country," he says.

"But it is very easy for Governments to be secretive, and for people in high office to use public relations rather than honesty in their management of the public.

"Unless you have serious scrutiny of what people with power do, you get a tendency towards worse government, not better government.

"So you have to have vigilant people."

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