The Hollow Men (Barry, 2008)
As a small nation at the bottom of the world, it would be easy to think of New Zealand as having a benign political environment, characterised by fair play and the easy acceptance of democratic norms.
An author who has worked doggedly over decades to give the lie to that naïve perspective is the activist/journalist Nicky Hager1. In 2006 he published The Hollow Men, a detailed examination of the dirty tricks undertaken by the New Zealand National Party during the election of the year before.
The leader of the party at the time was Don Brash, a former governor of the Reserve Bank — his signature was on all our bank notes — and an economically dry, culturally right wing and fundamentally libertarian, non-politician. Troves of stolen emails that were given to Hager showed Brash to be an unsophisticated political actor (and a poor liar) at the head of a party that was desperate to unseat a left-of-centre Labour Party after an absolute flogging in the prior 2002 election. Labour looked vulnerable, as parties often do at the end of their second term, and National’s shady tactics came very close to unseating them.
New Zealand film’s equivalent of Hager is the producer/director Alister Barry. He turned Hager’s book into another of his meticulously researched documentaries in 2008 — no one knows their way around the New Zealand television archives like Al — and I reviewed it for the Capital Times here:
Alister Barry is one of Wellington’s living treasures. His meticulously researched documentaries (including Someone Else’s Country and In a Land of Plenty) have successfully shone a light on the political and economic changes in New Zealand since the ‘new right’ transformation of the mid-80s in a way that nobody in the mainstream media has even attempted. His new film is based on Nicky Hager’s explosive exposé of shoddy National Party campaigning, The Hollow Men, and it’s interesting to me that the real-life footage of Don Brash presents a considerably less sympathetic portrait of the man than Stephen Papps’ excellent performance in the stage version at BATS2. The leaked emails from Hager’s book revealed so many shenanigans that it’s hard to keep the story straight but Barry does a good job of emphasising that it is essentially the same team running National this time around.
I’d like to say that Hager’s book was the political end for Brash but he still hangs around like the proverbial bad smell, heading the Hobson’s Pledge organisation that uses a similar shady funding and lack of commitment to truth and accuracy as 2005 to argue against fair treatment for Māori. Not just a ‘hollow man’ but ‘yesterday’s man’, too.
Also reviewed in that busy week in late September 2008: Pixar masterpiece WALL•E; Brandan Fraser still in his action hero period in Journey to the Centre of the Earth 3D; BBC nature documentary Earth; the very funny Ferrell/Reilly comedy Step Brothers; Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging and a completely different kind of masterpiece than WALL•E – the Romanian Palme d’Or winner, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days3.
Where to watch The Hollow Men
Worldwide: Streaming for free on Alister Barry’s YouTube channel
Aotearoa: Streaming on Beamafilm4
Australia: Streaming on Beamafilm
Back in the late 1980s, when I was still a student, I went on a protest with Hager and some other peaceniks to the GCSB centre at Tangimoana about a 100 kms north of Wellington. Hager knew that it was processing electronically intercepted intelligence on behalf of the U.S. government (pre‑5 Eyes), intercepts that were being made at the more well-known base of Waihopai in Marlborough. On arrival, I was given a notebook and a pencil and told that if I was arrested (!) I was to say I was a student journalist. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before security people came out to ask us to move along and I seem to recall the police were called but didn’t have to arrest us. All in all, a grand day out.
Yes, The Hollow Men was turned into a stage play and bloody good it was, too.
Not currently available online anywhere which is scandalous.
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