Garth George: Hager affair blown out of proportion

Garth George

And so it goes on ... and on ... and on - the kerfuffle over the big, fat, smelly red herring cast into the election campaign by Nicky Hager, that obsessive anti-establishment scribbler who seems to surface only when the chances of self-aggrandisement are at their highest.

The sudden and unheralded release of his book, Dirty Politics - and if there were ever a tautology, then that is it - has been blown up out of all proportion to its importance by the media - TV, radio and, unfortunately, newspapers - in an exhibition of tabloid journalism that brings them no credit whatsoever.

"How attack politics is poisoning New Zealand's political environment" is the subtitle to this document, as if none of us knew that our political environment has been slowly succumbing to the poison of personalities before principles for at least the past 30 years.

About the only thing we can say about it is that we're lucky that so far it hasn't become as poisonous as politics elsewhere, such as Australia, Britain, France and the Unites States.

Nevertheless, we seem to be catching up fast.

It has certainly become worse since we benightedly voted in the MMP system with its arcane alliances of disparate parties leading to all sorts of political shenanigans.

But as to Hager's interpretations of today's politics, former Act leader Rodney Hide summed them up beautifully in a Herald on Sunday column last weekend when he wrote: "I have tried really, really hard to read Nicky Hager's books ... But I have never been able to do it. They make my head hurt. They go 2 plus 2 is 17, the square root of 73 is 6, 12 times 12 is 50. And so on. Ta da!"

And Mr Hide comprehensively rebuts what some media called "one of the most explosive claims" in Hager's book, an allegation that Mr Hide was blackmailed into stepping down from the Act leadership.

What makes Hager's scribblings even more hypocritical is that they are based on hacked emails, yet are hypercritical of others who have allegedly hacked emails to get at political rivals.

In the middle of all this is the aptly-named Cameron Slater (slater is Kiwi colloquial for woodlouse) and his Whale Oil blog. Why anyone would bother to read Slater's far-right and often obnoxious ramblings I have no idea, but it seems he has a bit too much support from some people in government, particularly Justice Minister Judith Collins.

She is said to be on a "last chance" from Prime Minister John Key after various missteps and it is not surprising that she has gone to ground while this trivial controversy continues to rage.

Mr Key says Ms Collins is the subject of a left-wing smear campaign, yet it seems to me that our Minister of Justice has put so many feet wrong in the past couple of years that she has lost the confidence of the electorate.

I doubt whether she will last in the National regime; she has certainly blotted her copybook often enough to have lost any chance of ever being leader and thus prime minister.

For which we can all be thankful since she seems to stand slightly to the right of Ruth Richardson.

But the worst thing about the media obsession with the Hager nonsense is that it has taken the focus off the things that really matter in an election campaign - the economy, health, welfare, law and order, education, employment and so on.

Labour and the minor parties must be gritting their teeth that the Hager affair is constantly obscuring their policy announcements.

While the media pander to the Shock! Horror! Scandal! brigade, the rest of us are left wondering about their fixation with what is, in the eternal scheme of things, much ado about nothing.

garth.george@hotmail.com
¦Garth George is a veteran newspaper journalist, retired and living in Rotorua.