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Kiwiblog's David Farrar stands by the blog post in which he argues OUSA President Ruby Sycamore-Smith is implicitly condoning rape in her support of Tom Scott’s @Peace song “Kill the PM.”

On 1 September, Sycamore-Smith published a column in Critic in which she praised Tom Scott for his effort towards encouraging New Zealand’s youth to vote. The Southern Region Young National Party took issue with this, calling for an apology and asserting, “any other act will be seen as an endorsement of the threat to kill Mr. Key and to rape his 20-year-old daughter.”

Farrar picked up on their criticism, noting “all the young women at Otago University might want to reflect on the fact their student president thinks a song expressing a desire to kill the Prime Minister and implicitly rape his daughter is just a bit naughty.”

Sycamore-Smith responded to Farrar’s post in her subsequent column, published 8 September, stating her initial column was “taken completely out of context, and there is no reference to rape in the song.” Sycamore-Smith has noted her disappointment in Farrar’s blog post.

Farrar has not changed his mind. When approached by Critic he commented, “I do have sympathy for Ruby, which is why I almost immediately deleted the worst abusive comments, but it is [a] pity she is unable to imagine what it would be like to have a song written by a guy who hates you[r] father expressing a desire to fuck you, to piss off your father.”

“If Ruby had shown some empathy and sympathy for what it would be like to be Steffi Key, then she may have chosen her words more carefully, and we wouldn't have had this exchange.”

The broader context that this exchange plays into is Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics, which criticises Farrar’s involvement as part of the National Party’s “attack politics machinery.” Accused of playing into a number of smear campaigns instigated by Whale Oil’s Cameron Slater and the National Party’s Jason Ede, Farrar has since pledged to make a number of changes to his blog following the election.

One of these changes, moderation of comments, has been a subject of Sycamore-Smith’s criticism. The comments that followed Farrar’s story, which Farrar noted he deleted, were only removed upon complaint; they included explicit encouragement of Sycamore-Smith being “raped repeatedly.” Sycamore-Smith considers these comments disturbing.

In the interim period between Sycamore-Smith writing her subsequent OUSA column and Critic’s publication, Critic sat down with Nicky Hager to discuss the wider implications of Farrar’s involvement. Hager considers Farrar to be operating with “selective morality,” and that the criticism is a “subcategory of attack politics … they know their commenters are mad dogs. They empower their commenters to attack people; they have enabled this.”

Hager argues the commenters, who have made thousands of contributions to the Kiwiblog website, are to be expected; and Farrar’s manipulation of Sycamore-Smith’s column does nothing but add to the “feeding frenzy” his more inflammatory posts incite.

More importantly, Hager considers this to play into a strategy to tackle the involvement of individuals in politics who the right wing deems dangerous. The style of smear campaigns employed by Slater and Farrar involves the systematic slamming of various people by calling into question their moral standpoint. The tag-team efforts of Farrar and Slater allow Farrar to take a moral high ground and undercut the reputations of “hundreds, if not thousands,” of people.

Hager notes, “they do it in quite a systematic way … basically anyone who speaks up on the side of politics that are a hassle for the National Party gets hounded. It’s a deliberate tactic, and it means over time that all kinds of people feel shocked and chilled and potentially pushed out of politics.”

Student politics operate, for the majority of the time, under the radar of mainstream media; the ability of Farrar and Slater to report without needing to give the appearance of balance means student politicians are left unable to make comment outside the bloggers’ circles.

For Sycamore-Smith, who has made an active effort to promote women’s welfare since assuming her position, the attack has been “shocking.” Hager notes that this is “coming from the party that has been hopeless to women on domestic violence,” and that “they’ll use it for attack, but not for policy.” Both Sycamore-Smith and Hager are frustrated by what they consider to be hypocrisy.

This plays into chapter five of Hager’s book, which addresses the value of tackling individuals who might be dangerous for the right’s political strategy, or what Simon Lusk euphemistically describes as “weakening the power of those who believe in big government.”

Crucially, this has been based on a report Simon Lusk himself wrote, which describes negative politics as a contributing factor to low voter turnout and low voter turnout an asset to National. Internet Party leader Laila Harre has been critical of this, as she considers it an affront to democracy and argues it is “sick.”

This has not been the first time a student politician at Otago has been the subject of the attack blogging strategy. Critic editor Zane Pocock published an editorial in Issue 21 relating to Dirty Politics -style revelations about previous Otago student, Beau Murrah. Involved in a 2012 scandal, Pocock points to a “deep sense of political angst” about Murrah’s role as a student politician. So much so, that the leaked documents Pocock was referring to revealed Cameron Slater’s agreement that “the little cunt is a Winstonite,” and he was “going to hang him out to dry.” Importantly, Slater revealed knowledge that “Farrar is clocking [Murrah] tomorrow.”

Sycamore-Smith argues that when the threads of narrative are tugged together, they indicate a wider, underlying reason to contribute to the lack of student engagement with politics: the negativity endemic to the National Party’s “attack politics machinery” is discouraging to student politicians. If this is analysed in the context of Farrar’s blog post about Sycamore-Smith, it makes for worrying insight into the motives behind attack-politics on student figures.

By discouraging students, a traditionally left-leaning sector of society, these bloggers have the capacity to aid National in a third-term victory. Hager comments “if you belong to a demographic which mightn’t vote for them then the best thing is that you think politics is something to not participate in.” The low student voter engagement, an issue identified by many political analysts in their election coverage, is therefore something Dirty Politics has indicated influential National members strive for.

Nicky considers that, worryingly, there are “plenty of people who don’t believe in democracy … and it’s normalised to the point where no one even notices that’s what’s going on.”

For the National Party, the most dominant response to Hager’s allegations has been to dismiss what the book insinuates as a smear campaign, or to argue Slater is nothing more than a gangrened limb that ought to be cut away. Hager considers both of these responses to be problematic, because they ignore a couple of glaring issues: first, Hager does not operate under a left-wing agenda, and his investigative efforts have been troublesome for Labour in the past. Second, Hager notes Slater’s involvement is a spider web of lies and threats; that it’s not as simple as a member gone rogue, it’s a concerted effort by a number of people to change the nature of an entire political party.

Hager aims to have these uncomfortable truths play out on the public stage, and considers this important for those who care about the direction of the National Party and tugging it back to its roots. The National Party’s ideals have been a cornerstone of the New Zealand political landscape since its inception, and Dirty Politics has exposed those who have threatened the party’s future.

Farrar’s allusions about Sycamore-Smith reveal a darker side of student politics, one that goes beyond student association dealings and into the shady world of the right-wing blogosphere. As the interactions unfold out of sight from mainstream media, how they play into the wider implications of Hager’s allegations is only just beginning to become clear.