Dirty Work

Twelve years after they were exposed and discredited in the book Dirty Politics, some of the most cynical people in New Zealand politics are back. The epitome is Jordan Williams, with his abysmal attitudes to women, morality-free fundraising as a lobbyist for the tobacco industry and – worst and most destructive in New Zealand’s recent history – him and his close allies reinventing themselves as experts in using race-baiting as a political tool, unleashing a wave of racist politics. Much of this doesn’t start with the politicians, but instead comes from secretive and well-funded hard-right groups with innocuous-sounding names like the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union. We need to understand what is going on to be able to oppose it. This is the book we have been waiting for.

‘Jordan had a spiel he’d give,’ one of the former Taxpayers’ Union staff members recalled, where, depending on who he was talking to, he would say ‘We’ve got the people who don’t want to pay tax, we’ve got the racists, we’ve got the country hicks, we’ve got the culture war TERFs;’ he’d list them off in this way. ‘And these,’ he would conclude, ‘are the things we’re going to use to change the government!’