Warnings of possible overseas interference in our election haven’t made many headlines but UK-based journalist Peter Geoghegan says our media should be wary of 'dark money' and think tanks pushing issues onto the political agenda via the media.
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Peter Geoghegan Photo: supplied
Last weekend, Stuff’s election podcast Tick Tick took a look at possible offshore influences on our election - something the GCSB and NZSIS have both flagged as a concern this year.
Data analyst David Hood told Tick Tick there was nothing much from offshore actually targeting New Zealanders and our politics but University of Otago international relations professor Robert Patman reckoned New Zealand could well be “a tempting target” for “foreign actors.”
Two that worried him were the self-described ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ - British multimillionaires Andy Wigmore and Arron Banks.
They have told the media they want to give us “Winston on steroids” during the election - and that NZ First was keen for their help in the campaign.
Last month Prof Patman told the Otago Daily Times that arrangement was “simultaneously amusing and ominous.”
As news editor of UK-based online news service Open Democracy, Peter Geoghegan has been keeping tabs on Banks and Wigmore for some time.
Open Democracy revealed recently that Arron Banks influenced politics in Lesotho before he got involved with the Brexit campaign.
But if the ‘Bad Boys’ really wanted to interfere in New Zealand politics, wouldn’t they be better off working in the background instead giving boastful TV interviews about it?
“Arron Banks has been good at working with small political organisations to change the political weather. He became the biggest single donor to a political campaign in British history. His Leave.EU campaign was very successful and he played a big role in pushing the (UK) Conservative Party to the right. Arron Banks helped to shape the world we are living in now,“ he said.
Photo: supplied
In his book Democracy For Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics Peter Geoghegan says there are dozens of well-funded think tanks and institutions in the UK pushing ideas and causes in the media and in politics - and they use the media to do it.
“A little bit of money goes a long way. If you are willing to put a quarter of a million into a think tank, you can get a lot of bang for your buck,” a former UK Conservative MP, Guto Bebb, told Geoghegan.
Some in the media are raising alarm over this.
‘One avenue which has proven inordinately successful is to establish a libertarian think tank and bankroll what is essentially a paid-for lobbying operation disguised as a research institution thanks to the veneer of academic credibility,” The Scotsman newspaper warned recently.
But think tanks are not new. The Institute of Economic Affairs - credited with helping Margaret Thatcher reshape the UK economy in the 1980s - has been around since the late 1950s.
But while political parties are well known to the public, Democracy for Sale says only a tiny fraction of Britons could name any of these institutions.
And yet they can be strikingly successful in getting ideas aired in public.
One proposal barely discussed here but promoted heavily via the media overseas is ‘CANZUK’ - a Post-Brexit alliance of the UK and former colonies Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
‘Canzuk International’ has an office in Canada promoting the alliance and think tanks including the UK-based Adam Smith Institute and the Henry Jackson Foundation have backed this post-Brexit idea.
Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch’s paper The Australian published a piece by the conservative British historian, Andrew Roberts.
“A second Anglospheric superpower would mean that the political values we share will be better defended and promoted - and a flourishing CANZUK would be a fine neighbour and trading and defence partner for the US,” Roberts wrote.
“This idea is almost part of the Brexit process. Some of the same people in these right-wing think tanks push this idea," Peter Geoghegan told Mediawatch.
"One of the main people talking about it in Britain is Andrew Lillico who used to work at the Institute of Economic Affairs. But the media is really important with this because even though the idea doesn’t have much traction in everyday discussions in Britain, it does in the pages of newspapers and among people who consume the policy papers of think tanks,” said Peter Geoghegan.
Geoghegan says third-party campaigners are ’collectively spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on and pushing messages out into the political ecosystem “and traditional media are really important for amplifying them,“ he said.
“You can use social media and create ‘astroturf’ groups and they can get ideas into traditional media. But a lot of these funders want to see the message not just on social media - they want to see it on traditional media,” he said.
The UK weekly The Spectator is influential in Conservative politics. The UK’s current PM and Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson was its editor from 1999 to 2005.
Earlier this month published an article headlined A divided nation: the true cost of New Zealand’s lockdown.
The author was freelance journalist Matt Drake, who appears not to have a great deal of expertise in NZ issues or Covid 19. (Most of his journalism online seems to be short news pieces about British events and stories like the recent: Man stabbed flatmate to death over row about new haircut).
One week later, a piece by the same author headlined Jacinda is no saint described the PM as “the wokest leader in the Anglosphere” - and a "peddlar of crude propaganda."
This was published by UK news website Spiked which grew out of a UK Revolutionary Communist Party magazine Living Marxism.
That closed down after it was sued for libel by news organisation ITN nearly 20 years ago, and it re-emerged online as Spiked with a pro-free speech agenda and later adopted a pro-Brexit stance. RCP members also set up a think tank called the Academy of Ideas.
In 2018 it was revealed Spiked had been getting money from the foundation of US billionaire Charles Koch, one of the biggest donors to the Republican Party in the US.
In his book Democracy For Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics, Peter Geoghegan describes Spiked as “a fixture in Britain’s culture war.”
“Over the last 20 years they have morphed into this organisation which is like professional contrarianism,” he said.
“Like the think tanks, they have taken advantage of the boom in 24/7 news and the need for controversial personalities on radio and television,” he said.
“It shows how a very small number of very purposeful people and purposeful groups are able to change the political conversation. With a little bit of 'dark money' and knowledge of how the system works, these actors are able to get political cut-through, he said.
"A mix of the digital age and money and lobbying allowed formerly fringe groups to take over a lot of political conversation in a way that’s hard for people on the outside to understand,” he said.
How should media respond to all this? “The first thing you could do is not have people on political programmes unless we know who their funders are,” said Peter Geoghegan.
“Shows on radio and TV often have debate which is too shrill, with diametrically-opposed political positions. And in that world, this kind of influence works really well. If you get people who are willing to argue almost any position - like the people from Spiked - you will never struggle for media gigs and exposure,” he said.
“There is an onus on journalists to try and pull away from that. Slowly this is starting to happen but it’s been very belated,” said Peter Geoghegan.
Peter Geoghegan’s UK-based online news service Open Democracy also backed by the Open Society Foundation, the philanthropic instrument of billionaire George Soros, who is a lightning rod for those who believe democracy is being skewed by his money.
“Open Democracy’s funders are a mix of large philanthropic organisations and individuals - and they are listed on our website. There is no reason why the same kind of rules could apply to all think tanks,“ he said.