Created at: 2026-10-07
A colleague at work had posted a picture of the Unity Books shop completely packed with people. Apparently, some big release was happening there. I didn't manage to go there and check out myself, apparently the place was so full that people were being turned away at the door. And of course, I am not up to the latest and greatest in terms of books and authors (especially alive ones), so suffice to say I was out of the loop on this one.
Nonetheless, I was curious and eventually watched the video of the event in retrospect. It was a book launch for Nicky Hager's new book, Dirty Work: The Taxpayers' Union and New Zealand's Hard Right.
I have never heard of Nicky Hager before, but that's to my detriment. I feel like I am constantly catching up with New Zealand's history, politics, and notable figures. I found out that Nicky Hager had written a book called "Dirty Politics" before which quickly became a reference on serious investigative journalism.
In today's world, having anything close to "investigative" in journalism is a rare and precious find. So my curiosity took the most of me, and a couple of days after the book release I went there and bought a copy.
The book is about the Taxpayer's Union (cheeky name), which claims to be a non-partisan organisation with focus on "holding the government to account" and "advocating for lower taxes" and cutting down "unnecessary government waste".
In reality, the Taxpayer's Union is a political organisation heavily aligned with the ACT, National, and New Zealand first parties. They had several ex and current members of the ACT/NZ first parties on their board, and have received money from a lot of questionable sources, including tobacco company lobby groups. Not surprisingly, they helped the tobacco lobby to fight against the government's anti-smoking policies. That's a sad state of affairs, especially considering that New Zealand's law to ban smoking for people born after 2008 had been ditched by the National Party-lead government in 2023. A move that has been incredibly polemic and full of ill-judgement and appalling political corruption by the ex-lobbist (and chair of TU's), turned politician, Casey Costello. She did continually got out of her way to promote the tobacco lobby's interests. Their tactics are all too simple: Race bait politics, fear mongering, and dog-whistle politics. They have been very successful in their campaigns, and have used social media to their advantage. They also managed to get into work stream media, with members of the TU being interviewed in TV disproportionately and under the label of "non-partisan" and "independent" political experts, when in reality, they were lobbying and receiving money, exclusively, from the right-wing parties.
The book is interesting and a good read into the political landscape of NZ. It is a good reminder that even in the country considered as one of the least corrupt in the world, there are still a lot of shady corruption, astroturfing, and fake facades masked as "independent" and "non-partisan". This is a good reminder to dig deep into who is behind these types of lobby groups, and suspect much more from the ones that have cute names such as "The Taxpayer's Union".