1)
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Nick Mowbray has denied absolutely that he has ever donated to the Taxpayers’ Union or been inside their office – claims Hager reported as fact. The irony is that Mowbray has now donated to the Taxpayers Union as he is so outraged by the lies in Hager’s book about him. Hager may prove to be the best fundraiser the Taxpayers’s Union has ever had!
2) In the book Hager wrote:
The TU board has paid out money to deal with… at least one sexual harassment case against Williams.
So the book was crystal clear. The Board paid out money to settle a sexual harassment case against Williams.
The TU Chair has stated that she has consulted the two immediate past chairs and board members during the entire tenure of the organisation and that no one has any knowledge of any complaint, let alone a payment.
So what did Hager say on Ryan Bridge this morning:
I wouldn’t make an allegation like that, which is actually only one one line of a book. I wouldn’t make an allegation like that without having very solid information. In this case, it was two separate sources who knew about what had happened. They also knew that that had been very carefully hidden, hidden even from members of their own board, because they didn’t want the the settlement to be known about.
So the book claims the board paid out the money, and having had that refuted, he now claims it was a secret payout hidden from the board!!!
There is no capacity for a secret payout. A minimum of two directors are needed to authorise all payments from the bank account.
3) As I blogged earlier Hager claimed I broke the law and provided a National Party database to the TU for use in a direct mail campaign in 2020. I am outraged that such a serious allegation with no substance was included in the book. The TU has searched its records and found the invoice from the commercial company they purchased direct mail records from.
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How anyone can take the book seriously is beyond me.
David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders
6 comments:
Time to let it go David. The more the TPU gets involved with refutation the more oxygen Knackered Nicky gets. Let’s move on.
The problem isn’t merely that Hager may have got things wrong; it’s that the media created an aura of importance, demand and credibility around the book while conspicuously failing to supply the elementary numbers and verification that would let readers judge those things for themselves.
Sight unseen, the NZ MSM went in boots and all. Apparently Dirty Work was not merely a book launch but a cultural event of such magnitude that normal journalistic standards could safely be left at the door with the coats.
It began with the crowd. 1News gave us “Hundreds attend”. The Spinoff had a crowd that had “ballooned to hundreds” and a “feverish” reception. Politik declared it was “probably one of the biggest book launches Wellington has seen”. Probably? Based on what? A head count? A comparison with previous launches? Or simply the general impression that everyone in the room, exemplified by the noted tree hugger Steve Abel, and the megaphoneniac Chloe swarbrick, was terribly excited?
The trouble with that is that Politik’s own figure was “well over 100 supporters” inside Unity Books. Well over 100 is not hundreds. It is well over 100. There is a reason reporters have numbers available to them: they are supposed to stop adjectives doing the heavy lifting.
And the physical setting matters. Unity is a 500-square-metre bookshop, not the Cake Tin. The Spinoff tells us the crowd spilled into Willis Street and, rather helpfully, identifies Green parliamentary staffers clustered around Chloe, political obsessives, Taxpayers’ Union and ACT people and members of the media. So how many ordinary members of the public were actually there to hear Hager? Nobody knows, because nobody appears to have thought it worth finding out.
That might not matter much if the next claim weren’t presented as another measure of the book’s extraordinary public reception: it sold out in 20 minutes.
Well, hurrah. But sold out of what?
How many copies did Unity have? How many were actually put on sale? How many were held back for journalists? How many were complimentary copies? How many were actually bought by the public rather than being handed around the political and media ecosystem?
How many copies were printed in the first place?
Again, silence.
We are told the first print run sold out, which sounds marvellous until you ask the rather obvious question of how big the print run was. If it was 1,000 copies, that is one thing. If it was 10,000, it is quite another. Yet the MSM seems to have decided that “sold out” is a perfectly adequate substitute for a number, rather like “huge” is a substitute for measuring something.
The omissions become even more curious when you remember that the book is was presented as a significant commercial and political event.
Even the roughly $35 price is largely absent from the launch coverage, as is the fact that this grand 155-page exposé is not exactly War and Peace. These are hardly obscure details requiring a team of forensic accountants. They are the elementary facts of a book launch.
Which brings us neatly back to Politik’s “probably one of the biggest book launches Wellington has seen”.
Compared with what? Where is the context? Where are the figures for previous Unity launches?
And while the media were busy establishing the size and importance of the event vis loaded adjectives, the substance of Dirty Work is being challenged
David says three of Hagers headline assertions are fictitious.
That is a dispute over evidence, and the evidence --if any — should be examined.
Instead, the reader has been served an almost uninterrupted diet of Hager-as-event: hundreds, feverish, huge, sold out, one of the biggest.
And this is the irony. A book about political influence, manipulation and the manufacture of public perceptions arrives — and the people whose job it is to interrogate such things immediately begin manufacturing the perception that it is a huge public phenomenon — without bothering to establish the size of the phenomenon.
You really couldn’t make it up.
Except, apparently, the nz msm can.
Anon, 9.t2, well said. Yes the left have a fetish for stretching the truth.
Why isn't the TPU suing? Is it because they don’t really believe Hager is lying, or is it because they don’t think their reputation has been damaged? Or is it something else?
I suggest that any 'revenge' meted out by the TPU will be a dish best served cold as they must not be distracted from their main raison d'etre.
RNZ has spent inordinate time on the book. Paddy Gower considered thepublicity likely very beneficial to the TPU. Most commentators imply he TPU rabidly right wing which is patently absurd. any of their releases simply provide what the msm delibertaley avoids. Many curious prompted to sample will likely have found a source of balance..
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