Election 2026: After nine years, Nicky Hager is publishing a book – could it change the election?

Hager’s book, Seeds of Distrust, dived into the unauthorised release of potentially genetically engineered corn and rocked the 2002 campaign, dented Labour’s polling and made it more challenging for Helen Clark to form a government after the election.

His next, The Hollow Men, in my view his best book, detailed the inner workings of Don Brash’s campaign to become National leader and later Prime Minister.

Published after the election, and after a temporarily successful attempt by Brash to stop publication, the book is the most complete picture of how power operates that we have - and, thanks to the advent of disappearing messages and fears of becoming the subject of a Hager sequel, this may be the best example we will ever have. Its trove of leaked emails is a relic of a time when people were foolish enough to write everything down in an easily transmittable medium.

His next influential book, Dirty Politics, upended the 2014 election campaign, revealing just how closely attack blogger Cameron Slater was connected to the Beehive.

It also charted the rise of Jordan Williams, now well-known for his work heading up the Taxpayers’ Union, alleging, among other things, that Williams had tried to pressure Rodney Hide into standing aside from the Act Party leadership to make way for Brash, who by that time had left National.

While the book upended the campaign, ultimately leading to the resignation of Judith Collins, it had a negligible impact on the result, which National won with a greater share of the vote than any party, save the Labour Party led by Jacinda Ardern in 2020, has achieved since.

The release of this book comes at a challenging time for Hager. He hasn’t published a book since 2017’s Hit and Run, published with Jon Stephenson, on a deadly raid carried out by the NZ Defence Force in Afghanistan and the attempts by the Defence Force and the then-Government to cover it up.

That book has a claim to being Hager’s most influential, sparking a long, detailed inquiry into the raid led by former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer and former Solicitor-General Sir Terence Arnold.

The inquiry took a mixed view of the book, saying it was “as much polemic as investigative account” and it “contains many errors besides the obvious ones relating to location” – the book had been criticised for mistaking the location of key set-pieces.

The inquiry even attacked the quality of the journalism.

“Some of these could have been avoided if common research techniques had been followed, for example, taking metadata from photographs,” the inquiry said.

But the inquiry balanced this by noting that “in important respects the book was right”.

Most importantly, the inquiry found it “likely” a child was killed in the raid and that civilians may have been injured. Equally as serious from a constitutional perspective, the inquiry found the Defence Force gave “erroneous information” to ministers and the public for “years”.

Attorney-General David Parker, who received the inquiry, noted the book contained “many errors” and impugned the professionalism of the Defence Force.

However, noting that large parts of the book were correct, he said it performed a “valuable public service”.

“Without the book, the findings of the report and its important recommendations would not have been possible,” he said.

Hager has been quiet since Hit and Run. He hasn’t published a book, instead focusing on articles for a range of outlets. He’s written critically of the now-axed Shelly Bay development, which lies across Wellington’s Evans Bay from his Roseneath address.

The stories, one of which led to a split decision in Hager’s favour from the Media Council, exemplified the extent to which Hager was no longer an easy fit in the world of progressive politics.

Once, it would have been seen as an important critique of rapacious developers; now, his NIMBY-ish anxieties read like the sort of anti-housing writing popular among conservatives which have contributed to the housing crisis.

The Media Council ultimately did not uphold the complaints against Hager, noting parts of the story had been corrected quickly enough to mitigate the harm, but the two dissenting voices argued the seriousness of Hager’s allegations should have gone to the subjects of the piece for right of reply.

It is common in journalism, when publishing stories that make allegations about someone else, to give them the right of reply to those allegations (the Herald gave Hager and his publisher right of reply to this piece, but they did not respond by deadline).

That right of reply is then included in the piece, allowing all sides of the story to exist within a single piece.

Hager has always been controversial for his tendency to not always seek right of reply prior to publication. He has his reasons – the main one being that going out for right of reply could lead to an injunction stopping him from publishing the book at all. New Zealand’s media law, bereft of a US-style First Amendment, makes it frighteningly easy for people to injunct reporting they don’t like.

Hager has been treated appallingly by those in power. His home was raided by police, who did not respect journalistic privilege and were later forced into an embarrassing, weak apology.

The more critical reading of Hager’s practice is the one decided on by the Burnham inquiry, which is that he is a polemicist. Right of reply would threaten to muddy the often one-sided portrait Hager draws of his subjects. Indeed, the joke about Hit and Run is that the Burnham Inquiry proved the title to be a more accurate descriptor of Hager’s journalism than the raid itself.

Critics of Hager have always noted his flair for self-promotion and self-publicity and the uneasy way this sits with the principles of journalism. Hager has defended this, arguing that his works take so much effort to produce he has an obligation to ensure they are so well read.

The critics would fight back, arguing Hager’s self-publicity is as much to do with exerting political influence as it is with selling books.

Most people who practise journalism eventually learn to live with the fact that for it to succeed, it must have a very broad definition, and must include those, like Hager, who eschew some of its most basic practices, like right of reply, and, as the Burnham Inquiry found, strenuous pre-publication fact-checking.

One of the most fascinating things about Hager’s practice is, in a James Bond-ish “we’re not so different, you and I” way it mirrors the work of his chief antagonists, like Slater and Williams (both rumoured to be the subjects of this book). Both use leaks to squeeze information into the public domain, much like Hager does.

As media have grown cold on reporting Williams’ incessant discoveries of public sector waste, Williams has turned the Taxpayers’ Union into something not dissimilar to a partisan wire service, firing out multiple releases a day to members and subscribers. Slater, in his Whale Oil heyday was even welcomed into the journalism fraternity, winning a 2014 Canon Media award for his blog which had investigated Auckland Mayor Len Brown’s affair.

The thing about the “not so different, you and I” critique (the quote actually comes from the Bond parody, Austin Powers, not Bond itself), is that the audience knows there is something different about Bond and his antagonists in the way that, despite their obvious similarities, there is something quite different about Hager and Slater, which is the sense that Hager ultimately tries to be on the side of right.

Jobbing reporters tend to stay away from these kind of judgments for the obvious reason that they lack the mandate or ability to each day determine the moral rightness of this or that issue - to the immense frustration of many of contemporary journalism’s critics. Hager has no such compunction.

There are plenty of questions hanging over today’s book, not least of which is what it is actually about. Will it be more accurate than Hit and Run? is an obvious one.

But the one everyone wants to know is whether it will have an impact on the election. Ultimately, Dirty Politics did not. Much of that campaign was whether you trusted John Key or Nicky Hager (or David Cunliffe, or Kim Dotcom ... the list goes on). Ultimately, voters stuck with Key, a man they liked and seemed to trust.

If there’s one thing the last three years have taught us about Christopher Luxon it is that he’s no John Key. On Monday, Luxon said he doesn’t know who Hager is.

He’s about to find out.