The fading smear machine treats defamation as a cost of doing business

Video: A brief exchange at Cameron Slater’s '20 Year Celebration' captures how defamation is treated as a manageable cost rather than a warning, revealing a far-right conservative media culture built on escalation and collective backing. (Supplied / YouTube / The Good Oil Podcast livestream)

Months ago blogger Cameron Slater uploaded a full live replay of his ’20 Year Celebration’ through The Good Oil Podcast, presenting it as a marker of longevity rather than a point of reflection. Within the recording sits a brief exchange that is revealing precisely because it passes without challenge.

During the event New Zealand First Leader Winston Peters speaks to the attending audience and jokes that they should turn off their mobile phones because “we don’t want any defamation cases.” Laughter follows. The remark is then reframed, with Peters warning that defamation is “enormously expensive,” before offering reassurance that if their supporters make a stand, “you’ll have support.” The sequence alone exposes an underlying assumption about how risk and consequence are understood within the far-right conservative echo chamber.

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In a professional newsroom, defamation is not treated as a punchline or a shared burden to be absorbed collectively rather it is a signal to pause, to verify, and often to reconsider publication altogether. Editors are trained to treat legal risk as an indicator of potential failure in evidence or framing and not as a badge of courage or an inevitable cost of speaking out.

Image: Cameron Slater sits down with Matt McCarten in a podcast episode. Screenshot from 'The Good Oil Podcast - Episode 22 - Matt McCarten' (YouTube / The Good Oil Podcast)

Slater’s “Good Oil” operation reflects an operating logic that defamation is framed as an expected expense rather than a deterrent. Reassurance about collective “support” takes the place of editorial restraint raising questions about credibility.

The technique of the fading smear machine is to embark on hyping up exposure which then becomes normalised as part of the environment, rather than treated as evidence that the line between allegation and fact may have been crossed. Escalation is then prioritised over verification all while reputational harm is treated as collateral rather than consequence. Allegations are framed as entertainment and the target is degraded early to provoke reaction. Any response is then treated as confirmation that the manufactured smear campaign has landed.

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Claims are disguised as opinion commentary and do not need to be substantiated if they can be amplified quickly enough and therefore pressure becomes the objective, once a target is forced into public defence, the spectacle sustains itself through repetition and audience participation to continue perpetuating twisted narratives.

Image: Whale Oil was a highly influential and controversial New Zealand political blog run by blogger Cameron Slater from 2005 until it shut down in 2019. It began as a personal outlet but became known for its right-wing commentary, aggressive political posts and for publishing material linked to smear campaigns and attacks. (Supplied / thisquality / whaleoil.co.nz)

That logic aligns closely with the pattern Slater has spent years embedding, referring to the Whale Oil blog that sat at the centre of a political influence network. The type of tone is a deliberate one and familiar because it is designed to be that way, though the machine to drive it is slowly fading as more people become aware of smear campaigns and how they are no longer effective in today’s political climate.

This is why Slater’s output consistently reads like provocation to rile up a target and treat them as a political punching bag. The intent is to force escalation until a dispute becomes a media spectacle though audiences are not invited to weigh evidence but to join the performance, reinforcing the frame already in place.

Slater’s history provides a documented record of where this approach leads as Courts have repeatedly found his campaigns defamatory and malicious, describing deliberate attempts to destroy reputations over extended periods and noting refusals to retract alongside conduct designed to obstruct legal accountability.

In the long defamation battle brought by Matthew Blomfield the High Court ordered Slater and his company to pay $475,000 in damages after finding his publications were false, defamatory and malicious, recording in precise legal language that the campaign was designed to destroy a man’s reputation and noting the years of obstruction, delay and conduct intended to frustrate the legal process. In the Human Rights Review Tribunal he was separately found to have interfered with privacy through the harmful disclosure of personal information and was ordered to pay $70,000 in damages for humiliation, loss of dignity and injury to feelings, alongside formal orders restricting further misuse of that material. The pattern continued in Craig v Slater, where ten defamatory publications resulted in $325,000 in general and aggravated damages and a further $95,000 in costs, with the Court emphasising the serious reputational harm, the deliberate nature of the campaign and the refusal to retract.

Those findings did not simply damage Slater’s platform; they altered how his claims were received.

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Image: A still image of Cameron Slater seated on in front of an audience alongside New Zealand First Leader Winston Peters speaking at a lectern during Slater’s “20 Year Celebration” event. The image captures the public setting in which defamation was discussed casually as part of the operating environment rather than as a constraint. (Supplied / Screenshot from The Good Oil Podcast livestream)

When politicians such as Peters deploy hard edged rhetoric, they do so within an arena built for confrontation and partisan advantage and this has been his strategy for while. Parliamentary politics rewards aggression and performance and the rules of that engagement are broadly understood even by those who disapprove of its excesses.

The problem emerges when that style of politics is echoed through media-adjacent platforms that adopt the posture of journalism without its discipline or newsroom reporting standards. And when commentary operates with a campaign mindset, the safeguards that normally slow misinformation weakens. Legal threat fades into background noise while confidence in having “support” replaces accountability.

The broader media environment has also shifted in New Zealand because audiences have become more familiar with the mechanics of smear campaigns while mainstream outlets are more cautious about amplifying frames built on insinuation rather than evidence. Manufactured outrage no longer guarantees momentum as the smear machine fades and suspicion alone no longer bends news cycles. Seen in that context, the exchange captured in the celebration video matters because it shows that the internal logic remains unchanged. Defamation is still treated as a manageable cost, escalation as a virtue, and collective backing as a substitute for restraint, while the surrounding environment has grown less receptive.

The sound of laughter in the room signals confidence in a fading strategy that assumes the same reactions will follow into the 2026 election, even as audiences beyond that space responds with increasing scepticism.

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