HIT JOB

Professor Doug Sellman had never visited Whale Oil, the right-wing blogging website that labelled him “mad” and a “trougher” and only interested in amassing research funding and taking overseas junkets.

The director of the National Addiction Centre and respected University of Otago academic tried his best to ignore the mocking blog posts he figured went with the territory as an advocate for tighter alcohol control.

Then came the publication in August 2014 of Dirty Politics, in which investigative journalist Nicky Hager published emails and chat messages hacked from Whale Oil founder Cameron Slater by “Rawshark”, a figure unidentified to this day. The leaked correspondence exposed political smear tactics and paid hit jobs.

Sellman discovered that he, too, had been singled out for attacks. The book revealed that Carrick Graham, an Auckland-based lobbyist with tobacco, food and alcohol companies on his roster of clients, had paid Slater an amount later established in court as $124,000 between 2012 and 2016 to run pro-industry blog posts, some of which targeted public-health campaigners critical of Big Sugar, Big Alcohol and other interests.

But who was Graham’s paymaster? Dirty Politics alleged that Katherine Rich, the former National Party MP who led the Food & Grocery Council (FGC), was involved. The powerful industry lobby group represents food and beverage producers that sell tens of billions of dollars of products, including alcohol and tobacco, in our supermarkets each year.

One of Graham’s leaked emails, sent to Slater on January 21, 2014, had the subject line “Sugar”.

“Coke keeps sending stuff to KR expecting her to do something (where we come in). Hit pending.”

The references to other “KR hits” were numerous, and the inference – always denied by Rich – was that her organisation was bankrolling smear campaigns. “I was shocked by the apparent