It is a truth universally acknowledged that, in business and elsewhere, culture eats strategy for lunch.

Nicky Hager’s latest book Dirty Politics (which I haven’t read, but here’s Danyl’s summary) seems certain to cause a strategic shift in the electoral landscape. It should give credence to some of the left’s claims about the National party, and turn public and élite scrutiny on the character and activities of the Prime Minister and his closest aides, including his apparently-extensive irregular corps of bin men, turd-mongers and panty-sniffers. To do so is probably its primary purpose, and the timing and cleverly-built hype around the book reflects this.

But what I hope is that it also produces a cultural shift in New Zealand politics — weakening, or at least rendering more transparent, the intrigue and back-room, or back-door, dealing that characterises this sort of politics.

The book apparently alleges that the Prime Minister’s office is at the heart of a broad network of nefarious intelligence and blackmail, where they collect and hold a lien over the career or private life of everyone close to power. Nobody is their own person; everyone is owned, to some extent, by the machine. Patrick Gower wrote before the 2011 election that John Key owns the ACT party, and Hager’s book seems to substantiate this, detailing how they forced Hide’s resignation, in favour of Don Brash.

That is culture, not strategy, and it exerts considerable influence on those over whom the lien is held.

Immediately upon the book’s release, Cameron Slater noted that some journalists, and some Labour and Green MPs, would be getting nervous. Well, good. If there has emerged some sort of mutual-assured destruction pact to manage this culture, ending it could be Nicky Hager’s lasting contribution to New Zealand. Let the comfortable and the cozy live in fear for a bit. This includes Kim Dotcom, who claims to hold such intrigue against the Prime Minister, and is the target of a similar campaign, though it remains in abeyance.

This is a phony war about preserving the position of political élites on both sides of the ideological divide, to the general detriment of the sort of politics we actually need as a nation. Unlike the original MAD pact, we don’t risk the end of the world if this all blows up — we just might get our political and media systems cleaned out.

At least that’s the theory. I’m not very optimistic — cultural systems are sticky and resilient, and clearly many people have much invested in them. As we have seen with bank bailouts and phone hacking, the system can’t be destroyed from outside, and the influence wielded applies also to anyone who might be called upon to investigate.

The final point is about intelligence and security. The book alleges that the Prime Minister’s office released information from the Security Intelligence Service to these people, and that National staffers illicitly accessed Labour’s computers. The documents that form Hager’s source material also were apparently illicitly obtained from Cameron Slater’s website during an outage. That’s probably the most serious cultural indicator: sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. We are well beyond due for a serious discussion about the acceptable bounds of espionage, leakage and spying, and if Nicky Hager’s book generates this debate, he will have done Aotearoa a great service.

L