A Happy Ending – Timberlands’ Schemes Unravel

Afterword to the United States Edition of Secrets and Lies

The anti-environmental campaign described in Secrets and Lies might have made a depressing story, where the secret tactics and constant lies succeeded in defeating the genuine community groups. However, despite illuminating some of the dark side of politics, the lessons from the New Zealand rainforest conflict are mostly positive and hopeful. 

As this United States edition went to print, it appears that all the valuable forests on the West Coast will be put into reserves and the local communities will transfer entirely to plantation forestry. The environmental campaign has worked. The PR companies, particularly Shandwick, are embroiled in a major Public Relations Institute ethics investigation that has become an ethics test case for the whole PR industry.

The experience of the Timberlands-Shandwick campaign has been useful for the environmental movement in other ways too. The best defence against the kinds of PR tactics used in this campaign is to know about them. SLAPPs, front groups, systematic attacking of critics: if groups can recognise the tactics and cry foul when they are used, it helps to reduce their power. Recognising the tactics is also the first step to exposing them. 

Perhaps the most powerful lesson coming from this case study is that when companies and governments resort to unethical tactics, they are wielding a double-edged sword. The dirtier the tactics, the more damage it does to the companies concerned if they are exposed. 

Timberlands’ reward for using these tactics is that it is seriously discredited. After the release of Secrets and Lies, Timberlands went into hiding, avoiding media interviews outside the West Coast. Its future existence looks doubtful. There may also be a government inquiry into the Timberlands campaign, shedding light on the hundreds of pages of documents that have yet to see the light of day.

We hope that this example will encourage others to seek inside information when they suspect unethical PR tactics are being used and that our “Brief Guide of Leaking” may help other people working inside PR campaigns to decide to release information to the public.

Secrets and Lies was first published, in New Zealand, in August 1999. It had been written, printed and distributed in complete secrecy because of the risk of legal interference. On the launch day it rapidly became lead news, followed by days of political controversy over the Prime Minister’s role in the PR campaign.

The reactions from Timberlands, Shandwick and the Government were predictably evasive. They refused to comment on any of the activities revealed. Instead we were dismissed as extremists and conspiracy theorists, Shandwick claimed that the papers had been stolen from their offices four weeks before the book came out (as if books can be written in that time), Coast Action Network spokespeople angrily condemned the book as being anti-West Coast (while most other previous allies ducked for cover) and large numbers of letters to the editor appeared defending Timberlands. 

Indeed, a week after publication a columnist in a weekly business newspaper joked that they had followed our mock crisis management plan in every way except for the legal threats. The following week we received the first two legal threats (which were classic SLAPPs that we checked with our lawyer and then ignored).

Shandwick attempted to put on a brave face and denied it had done anything improper: “We’ve never done anything to thwart NFA”. In his only interview since the release of the book, Shandwick’s Klaus Sorensen said “I don’t think there’s anything that Timberlands or Shandwick need be ashamed of, I don’t think anyone’s done anything illegal.” 

The Prime Minister Jenny Shipley changed her story three times over the period of a week after the book’s launch, looking increasingly exasperated at the bad publicity. By the week’s end, and with the national elections only three months away, journalists were declaring that the revelations were another nail in her government’s coffin.

The most important reaction, though, came from the opposition Labour Party. Pro-Timberlands pressure from the West Coast Labour MP had resulted in the party stalling for months over its policy on the logging. But in the wake of the publicity about Timberlands’ dirty tactics – and especially its targeting of the Labour Party – the party leader personally pushed through a new policy. Under a Labour Government, all the logging of the West Coast rainforests would end.

Others reacted too. The Body Shop owners were so incensed at that tactics used against them that they made their first large donations to the environmental groups opposing the logging and used their buildings and shop windows around the country as prominent anti-Timberlands billboards. And as the news of manipulation sunk in on the West Coast, cracks began to appear in Coast Action Network.

News coverage of Prime Minister Jenny Shipley’s election campaign launch was dominated by native forest protests and the rest of her campaign was dogged by conservation protests. The very first first act of the new government, in the afternoon after the new Ministers were sworn in on Friday 10 December 1999, was to cancel a planning hearing for Timberlands’ beech scheme, saying the scheme would not proceed. A week later negotiations began about ending the rest of the logging and it was quietly announced that Timberlands had ended its contract with Shandwick.

Nicky Hager and Bob Burton