[Click to hear David Cohen on Wellington's VBC Radio discussing the media coverage of this weekend's Mt Albert byelection.]

Steven Price has never struck us as an unthoughtful individual. So why has the savvy Wellington barrister and media commentator blessed the decision of his client, Nicky Hager, to release a long self-exculpation to do with the settlement of an 11-month defamation action brought against Hager by the Australian political strategists Crosby/Textor?

Crosby/Textor is a well-regarded company that offers what it describes as “comprehensive experience in market research, strategic communications and campaign execution” for political parties and business clients in Australia and abroad, including such notables as London Mayor Boris Johnson and, briefly it seems, the National Party of New Zealand.

Hager has long begged to differ. Nearly a year ago, writing in the Sunday Star-Times, he produced a lengthy screed railing against National leader John Key for having his political movements  “overseen and directed by the same professional manipulators used (and also kept secret) by his predecessor, Don Brash” whose very corporate name, he argued, had become “synonymous with controversy.”

In other words, the office of the then leader of the opposition party was doing business with a PR shop whose work Hager disapproved of. (A computer search for examples of “controversy” relating to Crosby/Textor,  but unrelated to Hager’s suggestion of the same, comes up notably shorter on relevant links than it does to Hager’s own controversial use of intercepted email.)

When Hager continued to make his arguments on National Radio, the co-director of the Australian company, Lynton Crosby, decided to sue for defamation.

The case has now been settled. An apology from both Hager and Radio New Zealand in respect of some (but by no means all) of Hager’s comments and inferences has been posted on the state broadcaster’s website. 

Far from leaving it at that, however, the Wellington critic has since gone public, on his own website and elsewhere, with a fresh barrage of fulminations against Crosby/Textor and a media culture in which “the sad fact is that it is much safer for a news organisation to criticise poor people than rich and powerful ones.”

Leaving aside that last contestable assertion — along with the fact that New Zealand’s defamation law certainly does have unresolved inadequacies — this does seem to introduce a new wrinkle into the traditional notion of legal settlement, which by definition is meant to signify the final word on a dispute.

If defamation proceedings are as burdensome as Hager rightly claims, why has Hager just thrown the door open again on a concluded case? And why is his pro bono lawyer, Steven Price, actively promoting such an unusual course of action? It all seems a little hollow mannish.