Feature
Seeds of unease
by Matt Nippert
Invasion of privacy or public interest? Nicky Hager has no doubts.
After The Hollow Men, are our inboxes safe? Nicky Hager’s book, based primarily on excruciatingly revealing emails from within the National Party, has raised substantial issues of privacy and confidentiality. Even the author acknowledges the disquiet. “Nobody wants there to be wholesale invasions of privacy and not knowing whether your emails are going to be revealed the next day in the papers. Society couldn’t function like that.”
Don Brash certainly believed he couldn’t function as leader of the Opposition, giving that as his reason to the courts in seeking an injunction. That legal action quickly became irrelevant and Brash has since resigned, so debate is now focused on the balance between the public interest and the right to privacy.
Hager believes the material he printed passes this test. “There wouldn’t have been a book without the insider sources,” he says. “There would have been very little light. And without these leaks, the National Party would still be saying they knew nothing about the Exclusive Brethren.”
National’s insistence that he is in possession of “stolen property” is defensive public relations, says Hager. “When someone has an extremely embarrassing leak, I think you’ll find that words like ‘stolen’ and ‘theft’ are used regularly. It’s used when you’re trying to paint yourself as a victim after you’ve been found out.”
Hager is unperturbed by police interest in the case, saying authorities haven’t talked to him about his sources, and even if they did he would refuse to disclose them.
High-profile private investigator Trevor Morley and four legal and privacy experts discussed Hager’s book at a National Press Club lunch, he says, and “Five out of five came out and said: ‘This is nothing to do with crime, nothing to do with theft. It’s high public interest.’”
The “leaked” or “stolen” debate is not exclusive to this country. In the US, two former employees of a pro-Israel lobby group are being prosecuted for procuring classified information and passing it on to a reporter. The journalists who used the documents are also facing criminal charges.
However comforting this case might be for advocates of confidentiality and privacy, it muddies the journalistic waters. As Bob Garfield, host of On the Media (the US equivalent of National Radio’s Mediawatch), puts it: “By definition, all leaked material is stolen property. The quintessential example is the Pentagon Papers.”
The test of whether stolen or leaked material should be published also lacks definition, says Jim Tully, head of journalism at Canterbury University’s political science and communications department. “Invoking words like theft and stolen might make them feel better,” he says, “but it doesn’t change the reality. The journalist doesn’t want to be party to a criminal act, but on the other hand if the information is of public interest it ought to be disclosed.”
But when to disclose? Hager’s previous books were published during election campaigns, yet he waited 12 months before publishing The Hollow Men.
“The only reason you write books is for them to be read,” he explains, pointing out that details can be lost in the turbulence of the campaign trail.
In any case, he wasn’t entirely inactive during the last campaign: “I was sitting on some important information that was relevant to the election, and so I gave it to some of my mates at the Sunday Star-Times.” He didn’t attach his name to those stories, he says, because the subsequent attention would have made his research “impossible”.
Another reason for holding back The Hollow Men was the mud-slinging over 2002’s Seeds of Distrust (the “Corngate” book). “It was very unpleasant,” Hager recalls, “and it took me some time to get over. I decided not to do that again.”
Still, he hasn’t escaped personal criticism this time. Dominion Post columnist Michael Bassett, outed in The Hollow Men for his cosy relationship with Brash, has called Hager “a blowfly on the body politic”, saying he violated a fundamental journalistic principle by failing to seek comment from those he had quoted and indicted.
Hager feels strongly about this point. “If I didn’t have genuine, strong documentation of what Michael Bassett was saying, of course I should have asked his opinion – but I did. Being insulted by Michael Bassett is kind of a compliment. Whenever I finish writing something, my heart always sinks because New Zealand does tend to do politics quite a lot by personal attacks.
“On that scale,” he says of his earlier experiences, “I’m very happy with this book, and I don’t feel bruised at all.”
