Ian Wishart (born 1964) is a New Zealand journalist, author and publisher, 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]

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.

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 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 instead decided to quit the network 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.^{[citation needed]}

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]

After leaving TVNZ, 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,^[21] which screened on the TV3 network from that year. In 2000, Wishart began hosting talk radio shifts on the Radio Pacific network,^[22] taking over as regular evening host in the 7pm to 10pm slot. On one occasion he broadcast the phone numbers of Green Party MPs and urged his listeners to make protest calls, jamming the party's phone lines.^[23] Around this time, Wishart became a born-again Christian.^[24]

In November 2009 Wishart became involved in the "Climategate" controversy when he obtained 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.^[25]

In September 2010 Wishart published his book Arthur Allan Thomas: The Inside Story in which he reviewed the murders of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe. In it, Wishart presented new evidence on the role of a police officer, Detective Lenrick Johnston, and suggested he may have 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 author and campaigner Pat Booth, who believes Jeannette Crewe murdered her husband in self-defence before killing herself. O'Connor said he had not and would not read the book, while Booth's comments were made before the book was released.^[26] Wishart's theory received support from a former police officer on the Crewe murder inquiry, retired Detective Inspector Ross Meurant (who later pursued a career in politics), who after reading the book wrote in the New Zealand Herald that "Wishart's conclusions are disturbingly possible in my view".^[27] 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 on her parents' murder.^[28] 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.^[29]

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.^{[citation needed]}

Although it began as a self-publishing venture, ultimately publishing 15 of Wishart's books, more than half of all the books released under the Howling At The Moon imprint have been by other authors. They include:

• Thirty Pieces of Silver by Tony Molloy QC
• Dogfight: The Kiwi Airlines Story by Ewan Wilson
• Presumed Guilty by Miriyana Alexander
• Confessions From The Front Line by Murray J Forbes
• Ruthless by Susan Rogers-Allan
• Last Words by Christopher Lewis

Five of 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 and Arthur Allan Thomas-reached No.2 on the list. Air Con in 2009 became Amazon.com's No.1 bestselling climate change book in the US^[30] and UK simultaneously.

The Divinity Code, published in 2007, was a pro-creationist response to the atheist arguments of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

In November 2011, 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,^[31] The Daily Mail,^[32] The Sunday Times, Israel's Channel 10,^[33] New Zealand's TV3,^[34] the BBC and news outlets around the world.

A 2012 book, The Great Divide: New Zealand & Its Treaty, was commended by Ngapuhi elder David Rankin, who said the book provided "clear evidence" that some of New Zealand's earliest residents might have arrived before the Polynesians. Rankin called for an investigation into the status of Maori as the country's indigenous people. He accused academics of conspiring to rewrite New Zealand history.^[35][36] But the book was criticised by historians Vincent O'Malley and Paul Moon. O'Malley said Wishart's book was not considered to be scholarly or credible,^[35] while Moon said it was one of several books promoting the "soft-core" denial of the role of Maori in New Zealand and written by "self-published authors with an agenda to discredit tangata whenua status". Moon said The Great Divide disregarded recorded and oral history and the heavily research-based background to Waitangi Tribunal claims. He said implications that academics had somehow misrepresented New Zealand's history were preposterous.^[37]

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 published no further titles in the series.

In 1999 the publishing company established a subsidiary company to publish the monthly Investigate magazine.

Wishart has married twice with children from his first marriage and from his second. He and his second wife, Heidi, are Anglicans,^[6] having formerly been an atheist.^[24] He is also a proponent of intelligent design.^[24][38]

All published by Howling At The Moon Publishing Ltd unless otherwise stated:

• The Paradise Conspiracy (1995) ISBN 0-473-03397-6
• Ian Wishart’s vintage winebox guide. (1996) ISBN 0-9583568-0-7
• Lawyers, Guns & Money (1997)
• An Irish Legacy (1998)
• The Paradise Conspiracy II (1999) ISBN 0-9582054-0-X
• Ben & Olivia : what really happened? (1999) ISBN 0-9582054-4-2
• The god factor (1999) ISBN 0-9582054-2-6
• Beating Big Brother: how people power turned off the TV tax! The Anti TV Licence Campaign (2000) ISBN 0-9582054-8-5
• Daylight robbery : the rise and fall of the "people’s bank" (2001) ISBN 0-9582054-6-9
• Eve's Bite (2007) ISBN 978-0-9582401-1-6
• The Divinity Code (2007) ISBN 9870958240123
• Absolute Power: The Helen Clark Years (2008)
• Air Con (2009) ISBN 978-0-9582401-4-7
• Air Con: Climategate Edition (2010)
• Arthur Allan Thomas: The Inside Story (September 2010) ISBN 978-0-9582401-7-8
• The Great Divide: The Story of New Zealand & Its Treaty, (2012)
• Breaking Silence: The Kahui Case (upcoming as of June 2011)

• Investigate Magazine - homepage for Wishart's monthly publication
• TBR.cc, "Investigate magazine's breaking news forum" - a topical blog administered by Wishart
• thebriefingroom.com - archive of articles from Investigate

Template:Persondata