Cameron Slater is a right-wing New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog,[1] which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019.
Following the closure of WhaleOil in 2019, Slater launched a new political blog called the BFD, which was succeeded by The Good Oil in July 2024.
[6] In late 2009 he gained notoriety for naming two high-profile sex offenders, and consequently became the first blogger in New Zealand to face charges for breaching a name-suppression order.
[6] On 11 January 2010, Slater published a blog post that used binary and hexadecimal code to allege the identity of a former Member of Parliament charged with indecent assault on a 13-year-old girl.
At the time of the headline, all that the media had reported was that one person had been killed when a car crashed at high speed into the bedroom of a house in Greymouth after ignoring Police.
[20] In lieu of an apology, Slater offered the following: "[W]here is it written in the rule books that you have to take into account people’s feelings?”[21] In February 2014, Prime Minister John Key said in the media that Winston Peters had visited the Kim Dotcom mansion three times.
Justice David Johnstone found that Slater had facilitated a personal vendetta against Blomfield by using stolen documents to produce defamatory blog posts.
[28] The book Dirty Politics, written by Nicky Hager and based on correspondence hacked from Cameron Slater's computer, was published in August 2014.
[30] On 30 August 2014, Collins resigned as a minister in the wake of an email suggesting that she had sought to undermine former Serious Fraud Office (SFO) Chief Executive Adam Feeley in league with Slater.
[31] In June 2015, Cameron Slater published a love poem by the Conservative Party leader Colin Craig entitled "Two of Me" on his blog Whale Oil.
[32] This poem was linked to sexual harassment allegations involving Craig and the Conservative Party's former press secretary Rachel MacGregor.
[33] Craig's resignation preceded an internal rift within the Conservatives between supporters and opponents of the former leader; which led to the aggrieved parties taking each other to court.
[38] Slater responded by slamming the mass circulation of the "Dirty Politics" booklet as a violating of postal rules around unsolicited mail.
[5] In early September 2021, Slater published a video and article on his blog BFD showing microbiologist and science communicator Siouxsie Wiles allegedly flouting COVID-19 lockdown restrictions by socialising with a friend in an Auckland beach during the Delta variant community outbreak.
In response, Wiles clarified that her visit was within the rules, as her friend was part of the same bubble as her and the pair had cycled 5 km from her house to the beach.
In mid-April 2024, Slater and fellow host Paul Brennan also analysed a cabinet reshuffle within the Sixth National Government.
[60] In October 2018, Slater suffered two strokes which left him partially paralysed on the right side of his body, and with speech and vision impairments.