Ian Wishart (born 1964) is a New Zealand journalist, author, an opponent to the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change, and the editor of Investigate magazine. He has featured twice in the Listener magazine's power list, with his highest appearance being 29, and a listing as the country's "most influential journalist" in 2007.[1]
Wishart has said that his book Eve's Bite (2007) is "the most politically incorrect book ever published in New Zealand".[2] In the book, Wishart argues that New Zealand society is being "poisoned" and the Western world as a whole undermined "by seductive and destructive philosophies and social engineering that within the space of a generation have intellectually crippled the greatest civilisation the world has ever seen".[2] His more recent books include Absolute Power (2008),[3] which details Helen Clark's years as Prime Minister and Air Con (2009), in which he says that man-made climate change is not significant against the scale of natural forces, and that climate change is being used primarily as a revenue-generating exercise by the climate-industrial complex.[4] Both Absolute Power and Air Con were #1 bestselling titles on the NZ Booksellers List.[5]
Wishart went to Onslow College, and studied journalism at Wellington Polytechnic, graduating in 1982. He has worked for Radio Windy, Radio Hauraki, Radio Pacific, TV3 and Television New Zealand. He started a book publishing company, Howling At The Moon, in 1995.[6]
He has married twice with children from his first marriage and from his second. He and his second wife, Heidi, are Anglicans.[6]
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Ian Wishart studied journalism at Wellington Polytechnic (now Massey University) in 1982 and began working at Wellington's Radio Windy from the middle of the year after filing eyewitness reports for the station from the scene of a hostage drama.[7] Wishart went on to work during the 1980s for Radio Hauraki, the Radio Pacific network, and New Zealand's first commercial FM licence holder, 89FM in Auckland,[8] but resigned his position as News Director[9] to take up a position with the new TV3 network in 1989 as one of its founding reporters.[7] Wishart was serving as Chief of Staff for the network's news division when he resigned to join rival TVNZ in 1993.[10] Wishart is listed as working for One News, and the TVNZ current affairs shows, "Frontline" and "Eyewitness"[10] - as co-anchor/reporter with Alison Mau.
In October 1983 Wellington's two daily newspapers both carried front page stories about an armed bank robbery where two men were stabbed by the offender as he escaped. Ian Wishart is named in the reports as a Radio Windy journalist, an eyewitness and one of six people who intervened to tackle and disarm the robber.[11][12]
In 1992, New Zealand politician Winston Peters began raising a series of allegations in Parliament about prominent business leaders trying to bribe politicians. As he escalated his claims to include movie and bloodstock financing deals and tax havens in the Caribbean and the Cook Islands, it was revealed Peters had been meeting with a second-hand computer dealer named Paul White, who had come into possession of 92 floppy disks that had been inadvertently sold by Citibank's New Zealand division with client banking data still on the disks.[13][14]
Paul White was killed in a controversial pre-dawn car crash in Auckland on 4 September 1992, and when emergency services arrived on the scene the Citibank disks and NZ$15,000 in cash he had been paid in an out-of-court settlement by Citibank the previous day were missing.
Ian Wishart was assigned by the TV3 network to report on the case, and subsequently found ties between information on the Citibank disks and tax haven dealings. Wishart then came into possession of some confidential business transaction papers that became popularly known as "The Winebox documents" because they had first turned up in an old wine carton.
The documents detailed extensive tax avoidance and tax evasion schemes run through Cook Islands offshore companies associated with an entity part owned by the New Zealand Government state bank, the Bank of New Zealand, and merchant bank Fay Richwhite & Co, whose principals Sir Michael Fay and Sir David Richwhite were close allies of both the Labour and National political parties.
Although Winston Peters and other financial journalists and newspapers also had copies of the Winebox documents, it was Ian Wishart who first identified the key “Magnum” and “JIF” transactions,[15] later confirmed by the Privy Council and the New Zealand Court of Appeal to be prima facie criminal fraud.[16] against the revenues of New Zealand and Japan respectively.[17]
Wishart was pressured by TV3 news director Rod Pedersen to drop the investigation and instead take up a promotion to the position of 3 National News Chief of Staff, a position Wishart had been appointed to in an acting capacity after the earlier resignation of the incumbent. Wishart decided to quit the network however after being advised by former National government cabinet minister, turned immigration consultant, Aussie Malcolm, that TV3's Canadian CEO had been hit with an immigration status challenge by the NZ Government as a direct result of Wishart’s ongoing investigations into the tax haven deals.
TVNZ head of news Paul Norris immediately hired Wishart to continue working on the project as a special investigation for TVNZ, to be carried out in secret with the assistance of “Frontline” journalist Michael Wilson and producers Carol Hirschfeld and Mark Champion. The investigation was dubbed “Project X” internally.
The documentary was originally scheduled to air in December 1993, but was prevented from going to air by TVNZ management after the intervention of the TVNZ board of directors. Wishart and his colleagues decided to leak details of the banned programme to other news media, turning the blackout into a public issue.
The network was enjoined to an injunction forbidding broadcast of the programme, but the leak of further information made the gagging writ worthless and the documentary finally aired in June 1994 as a special primetime two hour broadcast. The revelations forced the establishment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Winebox transactions. A senior Inland Revenue Department investigator, Tony Loo, subsequently told the Commission of Inquiry that he and other IRD staff did not understand how the transactions had worked until they watched Wishart's documentary on TV.[18]
Although the Commission report initially exonerated the transactions, the Commission findings were overturned by New Zealand’s highest court which found the transactions were prima facie fraudulent and that the Commission had made substantial errors in finding otherwise.[19] Ian Wishart published three books detailing his investigations and the outcome: The Paradise Conspiracy (Howling At The Moon, 1995), The Vintage Winebox Guide (Howling At The Moon, 1996), and The Paradise Conspiracy 2 (Howling At The Moon, 1999).
Part of Wishart's first book, The Paradise Conspiracy, was loosely reworked as a feature film, "Spooked", starring Cliff Curtis and directed by Geoff Murphy.[20]
In November 2009 Ian Wishart obtained the first confirmation that leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit were genuine, after reaching CRU's Phil Jones by phone. Wishart published stories on both the Investigate magazine blogsite "The Briefing Room" and in the online newspaper TGIF Edition confirming the authenticity of the emails, which formed the basis for other news reports on the developing story worldwide.[21]
In September 2010 Wishart published his book Arthur Allan Thomas: The Inside Story. The book reviews the murders of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe. In it, Wishart presents new evidence on the role of a police officer, Detective Lenrick Johnston, and suggests he may have in fact been the killer of the South Auckland farmers.
Wishart was accused by Police Association spokesman Greg O'Connor of defaming a dead officer, and his theory was also rejected by another author on the case, Pat Booth who believes Jeannette Crewe murdered her husband in self defence then killed herself. O'Connor said he had not and would not read the book, while Booth's comments were made before the book was released.[22] Wishart's theory received strong support from a former police officer on the Crewe murder inquiry, retired Detective Inspector Ross Meurant (who later pursued a career in politics), who wrote in the country's biggest daily paper after reading the book that "Wishart's conclusions are disturbingly possible in my view".[23] Meurant has called for the unsolved murder case to be re-opened.
Wishart's book also encouraged Rochelle Crewe, the only daughter of Harvey and Jeannette, to speak publicly for the first time ever on her parents' murder.[24] Crewe told the New Zealand Herald newspaper that Wishart's book had provided evidence of "pervasive corruption", and she wrote to New Zealand Police Commissioner Howard Broad asking why police had never pursued Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton and the late Detective Len Johnston by way of a criminal investigation, despite the finding of corruption against both men by the Royal Commission.[25]
After leaving TVNZ, Ian Wishart covered the Winebox enquiry for the National Business Review, the Waikato Times, the Evening Post, the Christchurch Press and other daily newspapers. He has also written for the New Zealand Herald, Sunday Star-Times and Metro magazine. In 1997 he was named as the host of the New Zealand version of reality series Real TV,[26] which screened on the TV3 network from that year. In 2000, Wishart began hosting talk radio shifts on the Radio Pacific network,[27] taking over as regular evening host in the 7pm to 10pm slot. Wishart was known to whip up his audience on occasion, as evidenced when he broadcast the phone numbers of Green Party MPs and urged his listeners to make protest calls, jamming the Green Party's phone lines.[28]
In 1995, Wishart established his own publishing company, Howling At The Moon, reportedly after other publishing companies had been threatened into backing out of their plans to publish his first book, The Paradise Conspiracy.
Although it commenced as a self-publishing venture, and 15 Ian Wishart books have been published under the Howling At The Moon imprint, the majority of the more than 40 books published by Howling At The Moon have in fact been written by other authors. Some of the notable titles by other Howling At The Moon authors to make the official New Zealand bestsellers list have included:
Five of Ian Wishart's books - The Paradise Conspiracy; Lawyers, Guns & Money; The Paradise Conspiracy II; Absolute Power; and Air Con - have achieved number one bestseller status on the NZ Booksellers national "Bestsellers" list, while several more - Daylight Robbery; The Vintage Winebox Guide; Ben & Olivia; Eve's Bite; Arthur Allan Thomas - peaked at number two on the Bestsellers List.
Air Con managed to become the #1 bestselling climate change book for Amazon on both sides of the Atlantic in mid 2009 when it topped its category in Amazon's US[29] and UK charts simultaneously.
THE HUNT In November 2011, Ian Wishart published the book THE HUNT, co-authored with George London, chronicling the search for two children kidnapped off a London street in 1981 and never seen again. The day the book was published, one of the children made contact with their mother for the first time in 30 years. The book became major international news, appearing in The Evening Standard[30], The Daily Mail[31], The Sunday Times, Israel's Channel 10[32], New Zealand's TV3[33], the BBC and news outlets around the world.
Howling At The Moon has published mostly general non-fiction/current affairs titles, with only one venture into fiction, 1997's The Source: Earth Voyage by British author Martin Rackham. The book jacket specifies it is the first of a trilogy, but Howling At The Moon has never published further titles in the series.
In 1999 the publishing company established a subsidiary company to publish the monthly periodical, Investigate magazine.