Nicky Hager

Eye-opening stuff. In the 1990s state-owned enterprise Timberlands wanted to keep logging old-growth native forests on the West Coast. But most New Zealanders didn't want them to—even the West Coasters were happy for the forestry to stop, and the National government of the day would've spent tens of millions to compensate them for the couple of dozen lost jobs. Timberlands had other ideas though, and spent huge sums hiring three PR companies to discredit anti-logging environmental groups, and lobby politicians, public servants, and the general public to allow "sustainable" logging to continue. A massive document leak by disgruntled Timberlands employees exposed all this to the authors, who pitilessly document the shoddy affair: fake letters to the editor written by PR people, responding to every published bit of criticism; painting over anti-Timberlands graffiti in central Wellington; paying a VUW student, son of a Timberlands exec, $50 an hour to infiltrate the University environmental action group and report back (the student, swollen-headed with his exploits, bragged to a woman he was dating, who told her friend, who told the authors); thousands of dollars of community grants to the West Coast to improve locals' negative impressions of Timberlands; setting up a fake grassroots pro-logging group on the Coast to spout Timberlands talking points; cushy junkets for politicians with helicopter flyovers, wining and dining, and field trips to carefully picked bits of nice-looking logged forest; and currying influence with every supposedly-neutral civil servant who could give them insider info. An exposé of US-style lobbying, all done with taxpayer money to interfere with the political oversight of a taxpayer-owned company.… (més)