It is no secret that I use the structure of the previous year’s Report as the basis for the current one. But there is no truth in the baseless allegation that I simply present the same Report every year (perish the thought). Indeed, upon re-reading my 2001 effort, I see some major contrasts with the 2002 one. I started my 2001 Report with phrases such as "business as usual", "decline", and "we’ve been less in the media and the public eye".

Well, what a difference a year makes – CAFCA has had more media attention in 2002 than for quite a few years, and we’ve been more active than for some time. As for me personally, I have been even busier than usual. For instance, in the 12 months since the 2001 AGM, I have organised three national speaking tours, two of them involving a total of several years of work to pull off. They were: on behalf of the Anti-Bases Campaign, the October 2001 tour by Canadian ex-spy, Mike Frost; my own tour, on behalf of CAFCA, in April, June and July 2002; and, on behalf of the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa, the September 2002 tour by Filipino union leader, Emilia Dapulang (she only left New Zealand this morning, so it’s too soon to fully evaluate that one yet). More on them later.

The unglamorous basics of my work don’t change very much, so great chunks of my 2001 Report and those of earlier years can be repeated verbatim. I am CAFCA secretary, and it is routine administrative work that takes up a lot of my time. That is the pitfall of having just one fulltime worker. What has become noticeable in the past few years is that the great majority of our correspondence (and a whole lot of other work) is now done by e-mail or via the Internet. CAFCA’s existence in cyberspace has become every bit as important as that in the real world. In recent months I have painstakingly set up an e-mail list of CAFCA members (about 50% of our members have supplied us with an e-mail address) and that is now the instant way to communicate. I hasten to add that those without Internet access are not missing out, they still get exactly the same material, but in hard copy only.

I have also set up e-mail lists for ABC members, PSNA members and unions, so that is the reason why some of you receive the same message several times over. I apologise for the duplication and point out that is why God created the Delete key. We are very lucky indeed to have two computer whizzes on call and free of charge – namely Bill Rosenberg and my wife Becky – to sort out the inevitable disasters and to update the software as necessary. For example, until recently we couldn’t open the increasing number of publications and documents arriving in PDF Acrobat format. Now we can. All of this equipment costs money – indeed we recently had to pay out more than $400 just to replace a couple of rollers in our gargantuan, industrial strength printer. A cartridge of toner for it costs $350 (fortunately it lasts a long time).

Because we have recently conducted our annual membership renewal, a disproportionate amount of time has been spent updating the membership list and banking the loot. Not that I'm complaining. Membership fees and donations are the backbone of our finances. Unlike so many other small groups we don't have to ask for loans or grants, and we are financially self-sufficient (plus we can finance special campaigns, such as my national speaking tour, entirely out of our own funds). Being on the Internet costs CAFCA hundreds of dollars per year, and that’s at rock bottom mates’ rates, with unlimited volume. We owe Plain Communication a big vote of thanks for their very generous support. And we’re now spending hundreds more per year for a simpler domain name and a redirection service to our Website. Our regular income is down on what it was in the past but we take that into account by adjusting our membership accordingly (in plain English, we don’t carry non-payers, simply because we can’t afford to). We’ve been running a user pays operation from Day One, and could teach Roger Douglas a thing or two about the subject.

Cyberspace comes with its own costs and we are closely monitoring its impact on our finances and membership. Every Watchdog now goes up on the Website and we have had members telling us "Don’t send me the hard copy, because I’ll just read it online". We will continue to charge them the full cost of annual membership, because it still costs us plenty to produce the publication so that it can be freely accessed online. If we get evidence that this free and widely advertised availablity of the online Watchdog is costing us members and money, we will take the necessary steps. The question of how do you make any money from online publishing is one that haunts all online publications. On the other hand, we have picked up new financial members, who want the good oldfashioned hard copy version, having first found us through the Web. Freedom of information versus the need to bring in money to continue to provide the free information is one of the central contradictions for all groups such as CAFCA.

In 2001 our regular income was down and, for the first time, we had to appeal to you for extra funds just for our normal running costs. We didn’t need to repeat that this year. After the first fortnight of membership renewals (which is the crucial time after our annual membership renewal mailout), I banked $3,500, which is $500 less than the comparable time in 2001, but better than some years in the late 1990s. Many thanks for your generous response. Our strength is our independence from all funding agencies, the State, or anybody else that can pull strings, call tunes, or cut us off without a penny. Our financial base is our membership – that just means that sometimes we have to come to you with cap in hand. We have zero debt, we pay all our bills in full and on time, we have very low overheads – none of CAFCA’s money goes on wages or office rental, power, rates, etc, etc. We run a lean and efficient operation. Because of this, we have the luxury of being able to fully finance things such as my national speaking tour, without having to worry about fundraising for it (unlike both ABC and PSNA, which had to fundraise before their respective speaking tours could be confirmed). It means that we can also finance things such as the wonderful April 2002 event in Auckland, at which the 2001 Roger Award winners were announced. We are Christchurch-based, but we have a national reach, in terms of members, money and influence.

Membership is just below 500 (for several years it was steady at 500-550, so there has been a slight decline). But we continue to pick up new members and quite a few of our members pay for others to join. To keep things in perspective – that reduced income from our annual membership renewal came from a smaller membership base, yet was nearly as much as that from a bigger membership in recent years. Viewed that way, we are in fact, doing OK, and our income is more than holding its own. And we now use the new technology to chase up overdue members. We contact all of those with e-mail addresses and give them one last chance to pay up – quite a few do so.

The CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my income, is independent of both CAFCA and the Anti-Bases Campaign. This year, after a decade of it running itself without either CAFCA or ABC having to devote any attention to it, the Account hit a record low level (years ago both groups agreed that if it ever dipped below a certain amount, we would have to take action. It did and we did). So, for the first time ever, we had to run a direct mail appeal and ask people for more money. I have to be my own bargaining agent and fundraiser, and I have absolutely no qualms in pursuing money to ensure my own income and the survival of the Organiser’s job. I’m pleased to report that the response was good – we received both handsome donations and picked up several new pledgers, some very recently (an appeal such as this can take a long time to be turned into action by people). We now have approximately 30 pledgers. But we always need more pledgers and donors. To keep this in perspective, I get paid the minimum wage ($8 per hour) and for a few months this year I wasn’t claiming the newly increased minimum wage because we weren’t sure of the ability of the Account to afford it (it now can). The continued viability of the Organiser Account after 11 straight years is, frankly, remarkable, and my faith in human nature owes an awful lot to the generosity of the people who have paid me to do the work that I love for such a long time.

One final thing about money – I’m pleased to report that we’ve fully or partially joined Kiwibank (for entirely political reasons. Of course, the Campaign Against Foreign Control should be banking with a publicly-owned, New Zealand-owned bank). CAFCA has put about half of our money into Kiwibank on term deposit and will review the situation about whether to move over there wholesale; Foreign Control Watchdog Inc. has closed its ANZ account and transferred to Kiwibank, just in the past couple of days. Both the ABC and Peace Researcher accounts at WestpacTrust have been closed and transferred to Kiwibank within the past ten days – back in 1996 CAFCA was heavily involved in the campaign against the sale of TrustBank to Westpac and it is a great relief for ABC (which was also involved in that campaign) to sever that particular tie. Having said that, I have to report that we (i.e. all of the above) have encountered some teethgrinding situations in our dealings with Kiwibank, that we will charitably ascribe to teething problems (hopefully). For purely pragmatic reasons, we have no plans to move the Organiser Account from WestpacTrust for the foreseeable future.

Watchdog is our flagship, it is our point of contact with members and the world at large. We are very satisfied by it, and get a lot of positive feedback. We publish three issues per year – in April, August and December. We don’t pursue shop sales, apart from a couple of Christchurch ones, because it’s a lot of hassle for very little return – just getting paid when such piddly little sums are involved can be a very time consuming and frustrating exercise. Small publishers like us get sent to the bottom of their "to pay" list. And because Watchdog is never going to look or read like the multitude of magazines available (therein lies its charm). It is now the best looking and most extensively illustrated that it’s ever been, but it’s still not an easy subject to illustrate. As you may have noticed, graphics and even photos tend to get recycled a lot. Otherwise it really would just be page upon page of text. So, this is an appeal, if you’ve got cartoons or graphics that are suitable for Watchdog, send them to us.

In my 2001 Report I detailed the problems for Watchdog layout caused by the destruction of Christchurch Corso and the loss of the Corso building. For more than a year Leigh Cookson had to lay it out at home and juggle each issue around several homes and buildings. No more, thank God. ARENA now has a very swish central city office and that is where Leigh now lays out Watchdog. She deserves our heartfelt thanks for having now done this vital job for several years.

Watchdog remains the journal of record on foreign control. The guts of every issue remains Bill Rosenberg’s meticulous chronicling and analysing of the monthly approvals by the Overseas Investment Commission. Plus Bill provides us with his excellent writing and analysis on other subjects, ranging from the bilateral free trade agreements being foisted on us to the Labour government’s Innovation Strategy. Myself, Bill and Dennis Small are the main three regular writers. For compelling personal reasons, Dennis has done less writing for us in the past year but will be back in the December issue with one of his doorstop book reviews (yes, it’s definitely in this issue. Welcome back, Dennis. Ed.). We have picked up one more regular book reviewer, in Jeremy Agar (also in this issue. Ed.), and we receive unsolicited articles from members, but we’re choosy about what we publish.

Watchdog prides itself on being a newsletter, publishing news that you won’t find elsewhere. That tends to be my speciality. Pressure of other work means that I don’t get as much Watchdog writing done as I would like (I do far more actual writing for the ABC’s Peace Researcher and even the Philippines Solidarity Network’s Kapatiran), but I do specialise in subjects like Tommy Suharto and Lilybank, which I’ve followed for years. The August issue featured my first ever indepth analysis of an election result – we tend to not give too much attention to the Parliamentary circus – but this one contained material guaranteed to offend supporters of all parties and we got plenty of positive feedback on it. This year, for the first time, we have published a couple of speeches of mine, and they have received a very good response from readers.

It’s not all depressing facts, table of figures, and heavy analysis. Watchdog prides itself on the personal touch, and readers respond very warmly to that. The obituaries (written by myself and others) always get a warm response. Over the years, I have been told how much people value those obituaries, and it has been suggested (only half jokingly) that we should publish a collected edition. I always find them a fascinating subject to research (it may come as no surprise for you to learn that biographies were my favourite boyhood reading) and the sheer breadth of life experience of our members is a reward in itself. And Watchdog is absolutely value for money, on sheer weight alone - the three issues since the last AGM total over 220 pages. 80 pages are the printers’ limit.

Of course, the August issue was number 100, a significant milestone in CAFCA’s history (of more than a quarter of a century) and one that was well recognised in the letters from readers that we published in that issue (a one-off innovation in itself). Recently, while researching yet another obituary, I had occasion to go right back to 1975, to have a look at what was then called CAFCINZ (ChCh) Newsletter. The contrast between then and now is very stark indeed. Who knows if Watchdog will make it to number 200? How long is a piece of string? We will keep it going, in its present format as long as we are able, because we certainly think that it meets a need. There is nothing else like it around.

We are well established as an electronic publisher now – both Foreign Control Watchdog and CAFCA have their own separate (but linked) Websites. Many thanks to Greg Waite for his hard work running the Watchdog site (from Australia, proof that we actively practise internationalism, which should never be confused with globalisation). It's a no frills site - all text, no illustrations. What you see is how it goes to layout, not as it finally appears in Watchdog. We have neither the time, nor the expertise to make it look better. And I have already detailed the possible adverse impacts on CAFCA membership and finances of having Watchdog freely accessible online. I’ll just repeat that we are constantly monitoring that situation.

CAFCA’s Website (maintained by Bill) features his encyclopaedic writeups of the Overseas Investment Commission decisions, various of our Fact Sheets and my "Beginner’s Guide", briefing papers on subjects such as the Suharto assets in NZ, a section on the Roger Award, including an online nomination form for the 2002 one, and a newly created Links section to the Websites of some of the groups and publications with whom we have exchange deals (going back decades in some case). Most recently, Bill has added a Search facililty for both sites. The Websites reach an audience far in excess of our actual membership and attract feedback, good and bad, from all around the country and the world. More and more we find that journalists are using them, and contacting us as a result of visiting the sites first. To give just one example – the New Zealand Herald has taken to writing up the OIC decisions on a monthly basis, and recently highlighted CAFCA’s Website address (on an equal listing with the OIC’s) as its source.

The Taking Contol Electronic List Server (named after the 1998 Taking Control: The Fightback Against Transnational Corporate Power Conference) is a very lively and informative electronic discussion group. As an experiment I recently advertised it by e-mail (we’ve been advertising it by hard copy for years). The result was instant and a substantial number of new members joined up.

CAFCA material continues to crop up in all manner of publications, some of them very unlikely, because of the range of facts and analysis that we offer that they can’t get anywhere else. Bill continues to be the "respectable" face of CAFCA and has regularly had articles published in the Independent, a business weekly.

I am co-employed by the Anti-Bases Campaign, which usually takes up less of my time than CAFCA. The busiest part of my ABC work occurred just weeks after the 2001 CAFCA AGM, with the October 2001 national speaking tour by Mike Frost, who spent 34 years as a Canadian spy, and is now a writer and speaker. Frost (and his wife Carol) was ABC’s guest for two weeks, speaking at nine venues from Christchurch to Whangarei. We set ourselves a $5,000 budget, raised it easily, then got another $2,000 from one of the Government–appointed committees which distribute the Rainbow Warrior blood money. We strung together a network of local organisers and activists, publicised it widely, and attracted great interest from the media (he did a very good National Radio interview with Kim Hill, plus stuff like TVNZ’s Breakfast and stories in provincial papers). This is the first time ABC had done this - a previous overseas expert was coming here already on a private holiday, in the late 1990s and we piggybacked on that - but I’ve organised national speaking tours before, so I knew what I was letting myself in for. It is an extremely labour intensive job. It wasn’t all plain sailing – we encountered perfectly understandable opposition from some of our closest colleagues on the political morality of paying for former spies to come here. And we had differences and dificulties with Frost himself, primarily caused by him not being "one of us".

The Frost tour demonstrated the dangers of long term planning. It took 18 months from invitation to fruition, and ABC needed all that time to fundraise and organise it. The September 11 atrocities occurred just weeks before his arrival and they completely threw him. He told us (and his public meetings here) that he had seriously considered not coming; that he had abandoned his speech on the topic we’d agreed on; and that, when he stood up to speak at his first public meeting (in Christchurch, which I chaired) he wasn’t sure what he was going to say. Mike had no political analysis and was a fairly naive fellow - he declared his support for Bush’s "war on terror"and said that the Western Intelligence agencies (his old alma mater) needed more spies and more money to do their job properly. He had the decency to publicly state on every occasion that he and ABC disagreed on this. Needless to say he got a rough time from people at some of his public meetings (he singled out Whangarei), and situations also arose like our Wellington organisers spontaneously deciding to cancel national TV interviews that they’d worked hard to arrange, on the grounds that Frost’s views, boiled down to a ten second sound bite, could be disastrous. "Disappointing" was a common word in the feedback we received from our local organisers.

Having said all that, it’s worth repeating the obvious – he was not and never had been, "one of us". That was the whole point. He was a real live ex-spy, prepared to talk publicly and critically about what he used to do for a living (he was very proud of some of his achievements on behalf of Western Intelligence); he had no problems with international travel or the law (unlike several of his ex-colleagues in the spy business) and he was prepared to do it for us, without his usual trappings of a hefty speaker’s fee and staying in hotels. People in this category are very thin on the ground and we don’t have the luxury to pick and choose. In fact I can’t think of any other individual in the world who would meet the above conditions. What he had to say about the inside story of being a rank and file spy (he hated that word, and much preferred "Intelligence agent") was fascinating stuff and well worthwhile. I’d give his tour a 5 out of 10 for content (but pat myself on the back with a 10 out of 10 for organisation). Whether ABC would do it again is another subject.

The Frost tour was ABC’s big project of the past year (and most of the year before that). So we decided that we couldn’t organise our annual Waihopai spybase protest as well. Hilariously, both the Marlborough Express and the Blenheim Police contacted us on what they assumed to be the scheduled date, to find out details. And I thought that I was a creature of habit! Indeed the newspaper concocted a whole story out of our not having a Waihopai demo this year. But they can rest easy – we are going back there in January 2003. Recent Waihopai protests have emphasised both fun and funniness. We have decided, in light of this being our first protest at Waihopai since September 11 and in the full likelihood of there being a war in Iraq as well as Afghanistan, that the emphasis this time will be on a serious anti-war protest.

ABC has been involved in other activities. Bob Leonard and I appeared before the Defence and Foreign Affairs Select Committee, to speak to our submission on the Terrorism Suppression Bill. It was a memorable appearance and attracted big coverage in the next day’s Press (my only other appearance before a Select Committee had also been with Bob, before exactly that same one, back in 1986, when it was chaired by Helen Clark). I spoke to a Green Party public forum on War and Peace. ABC was slightly involved in the anti-war protests of late 2001 (they were a very wishy-washy disparate affair that knocked off for Christmas and never resumed). And we took part in the first protest at the US military base at Harewood to be held for many years (that was memorable for being the hottest day of summer and the road was literally melting beneath our feet). Bob and I have both made complaints to the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security about our well-founded belief that the Government Communications Security Bureau (the NZ spy agency which runs Waihopai) is spying on us. Bob’s has been rejected; at the time of writing, I haven’t had a decision. I am responsible for our international links, such as with anti-bases groups and individuals in places from Australia to the UK and Okinawa (within the next couple of weeks there is a major Australian demo at the Americans’ Pine Gap spybase, near Alice Springs. This duly took place, in October, and even got reported in the NZ media. Ed.). I do the ABC’s media work, which can range from student radio to the New Zealand Herald. Most recently I have been interviewed by Radio New Zealand News about the Terrorism Suppression Act and the Marlborough Express about the forthcoming Waihopai protest.

My regular ABC work is as co-editor of Peace Researcher. It’s the only co-editorship * that I’m involved with, and that definitely does slow things down. Bob Leonard and I can only commit to get out two issues a year (a far cry from PR’s original frequency). It’s a job that involves me doing much more actual writing than for Watchdog. PR is a much smaller undertaking than Watchdog, with a smaller mailing list. The two publications used to have different emphases but there is much more overlap now, in these days of the "war on terror". As with Watchdog, PR is online. * Since this was written, Bob Leonard has resigned, after having been PR editor for nearly 20 years. From now on, I am the sole editor. Bob will continue as a PR writer and an ABC committee member and activist.

Basically, since the Frost tour and in the absence of a Waihopai demo this year, ABC has been treading water. Unlike CAFCA, it is very much a single issue group and without regular concerted action on that single issue, it will atrophy. We need to breathe new life into it.

I am on the committee of GATT Watchdog. Both CAFCA and GATT Watchdog were instrumental in bringing together a coalition of different groups which organised a day of action in Christchurch, targeting selected TNCs, to coincide with the World Trade Organisation’s Qatar meeting in November 2001. GW has very regularly published The Big Picture. Aziz Choudry did some excellent work in raising the issue of GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) in the health sector and with local government. Aziz regularly travelled overseas, becoming more and more in demand as an international expert on globalisation. And there is a November 2002 national speaking tour scheduled by high profile French anti-globalisation campaigner and peasant farmer leader, Jose Bove *. I am not involved with ARENA but Bill is. He has travelled several times to Wellington for ARENA meetings, and in December 2001, he and Aziz travelled to Brussels for an international conference to discuss the campaign on the World Trade Organisation. * Unfortunately, since this was written, the Bove tour has been cancelled, from the French end. Ed.

My other involvement is with the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa, which, unusually, has had a flurry of activity. PSNA is a tiny group, which basically keeps ticking over but we can manage to run a national speaking every few years (the last one was in 1999). This year we brought out union leader Emilia Dapulang, the vice chair of the KMU (May First Movement), to speak on the impact of globalisation on Filipino women workers. This tour took place so recently that Emilia only left the country this morning, so it’s far too soon to be able to properly evaluate it *. She toured the country for two weeks, speaking at eight venues from Dunedin to Whangarei, accompanied by women activists and union leaders (I spoke with her at a Seafarers’ Union stopwork at Lyttelton and to a University of Canterbury Development Studies class; I also chaired her Christchurch public meeting). She had an excellent response from her meetings, particularly those with women unionists, and good media coverage (for example, an excellent National Radio interview with Linda Clark, and some provincial newspaper articles). PSNA set a budget of $5,000, which we didn’t need to raise, because it didn’t cost quite that much. PSNA was in the fortunate position of being able to underwrite it, in advance, whilst fundraising, and we nearly broke even on it. Once again this tour shows the perils of long term planning (this was two years in the making). The timing was originally set to take place in the build up to the election – Helen Clark’s early election put paid to that, but Emilia’s subject matter was just as relevant after the event. Organising international speaking tours can be an exhausting and nervewracking business – the Government refused Emilia a visa just weeks before her scheduled arrival (nothing political, just the racist and sexist criteria applied to poor brown Third World women. Becky and I had had to deal with exactly the same situation when sponsoring my oldest sister-in-law for a 1997 family visit), so I had to negotiate a visa for her, via international fax and phone. Then at the very last minute, previously unknown Australian tour organisers popped up and asked us to change her flights to suit them. But that’s all just part of the fun, the tour’s been a great success and Emilia was an absolute pleasure to host. * The Dapulang tour has since been evaluated by all concerned as extremely successful. Ed.

I continue to edit PSNA’s newsletter Kapatiran (Solidarity), which comes third behind Watchdog and Peace Researcher in my editorial priorities. So I’m only aiming at a modest two issues per year. But it’s all good solid stuff, as big as (if not bigger than) PR, and we always aim to be relevant to Kiwis. The last issue featured five writers, more than the number who regularly write for Peace Researcher or Watchdog. PSNA has picked up a welcome new committee member in Trish Murray, who has a long background in international work with Corso and now ARENA, including a previous stint with Philippines Solidarity back in the 1980s. PSNA will continue on in its own lowkey way. One hopeful sign – there is a new Philippines Solidarity group in Auckland, quite independent of PSNA. This is the first time there has been more than one Philippines Solidarity group in New Zealand for more than a decade.

For me the major campaign and/or event in the past 12 months has been my speaking tour. This is the third time I’ve gone round the country, always in election years (the previous two being in 1993 and 1999). This time I spoke in 12 centres, from Christchurch to Whangarei, done in three bites, from April until July. It is useful to compare the 2002 tour with its 1999 predecessor. Unlike the speaking tours I’ve organised on behalf of other groups, the CAFCA tour itineraries are determined by whom is prepared to offer to host and organise my visit. We are happy to leave it in the hands of our members and supporters, rather than cherrypick centres and organisers. That means that this year I didn’t go to Dunedin, but I did speak to meetings in Bay of Plenty. In 1999, Wellington was a tour stronghold, but it was very difficult to find anyone in Auckland; this year, the reverse applied and we really struggled with Wellington. In the end, no CAFCA members could be found to do it and we are indebted to the Victoria University students who did organise my Wellington visit. It meant that all my appearances in the capital were on campus only, but beggars can’t be choosers. In 1999, whole swathes of my North Island visit were hosted by Alliance branches – the self-destruction of that party ruled out any repeat this year.

I definitely think that overall this year’s tour was down, in terms of numbers of people who attended the meetings and in the amount of money raised and number of new members. But don’t get me wrong – these speaking tours are well worthwhile. This year I had the most productive visit I’ve ever had to Auckland, thanks to the ferment stirred up by John Banks, and the excellent work done by the activists who organised my visit and the wonderful 2001 Roger Award event in central Auckland. Members in Bay of Plenty went to some lengths to host and organise my first ever CAFCA visit there. My Takaka meeting was a great success, bigger and more lucrative than the comparable 1999 one. I was interviewed by papers we’d never dealt with before, such as the Gisborne Herald; I did a 30 minute interview for Auckland regional channel, Triangle TV, that has been screened several times in the past few months. What’s more I’ve even been contacted by people who’ve seen it. I was invited to speak from a church pulpit to a (Nelson) congregation for the first time ever (they’ll probably have to reconsecrate the church now).

CAFCA has extremely good relationships with activists from several political parties – I was hosted and organised by people active in Labour, the Alliance and the Greens (plus one host who declared himself for Jim Anderton). We have no trouble working with all these people – they know where we stand on political parties and we all get along just fine. My hosts and organisers included people from several social classes, all sorts of occupations, Maori, women, unionists, gays, clergy, academics, Buddhists, you name it. CAFCA has very broad appeal, because what we are on about affects so many people. And for me personally it was a wonderful way to see the country (most of my travel was by bus, shuttle or car), I stayed in some exceptionally beautiful places, and I met up with some great people – highlights included staying with old friends on a remote beach inaccessible by road, and sharing a spa by starlight with my hosts in another place (theirs was also the only one of my meetings to have ever been attended by a possum. The old saying about never acting with animals is true, the bastard upstaged me). And we musn’t forget, as we too often do, our biggest number of members, right here in Christchurch. I addressed my first CAFCA public meeting in my hometown for nearly a decade and we got a good turnout. These tours are our way of putting faces to names, of saying thank you to our members and supporters around the country, to take our message and our information to people, organisations and media outlets who have never heard of us before, and to further strengthen CAFCA as a living, breathing organisation with ties from one end of the country to the other. They are an absolutely vital part of my, and our, work and very rewarding. I may not have had an actual holiday for a long time, but these tours constitute a very good working holiday. They are simultaneously exhausting and energising.

CAFCA was responsible for the 2001 Roger Award. The event was held in Auckland, for the first time. The timing of my North Island speaking tour was arranged to start at the Roger (to kill two birds with one stone and save money), What a great night it was – outdoors, right in the heart of downtown Auckland, with tremendous music and entertainment, excellently organised by Jim Gladwin and a very dedicated crew who really worked hard to make it a very special night. I spoke on behalf of the organisers; veteran Auckland activists Maire Leadbeater and John Minto delivered the judges’ decision; and there was an audio-visual feast of musicians, bands, videos and street theatre. I was frankly amazed (the yokel comes to Queen Street on Friday night, eh).

The corporate media continue to largely ignore it (with some noble exceptions) but we have hard evidence now that the Roger Award is hitting its targets – the transnational corporations. For the first time ever, Tranz Rail (the only repeat winner) approached us and all the judges, asking to meet to discuss how it had "improved" and asking to be removed from consideration as the worst TNC (for the record, we declined to meet them). Stuff like that makes it all worthwhile for us. I want to once again thank our judges – every time Sukhi Turner, Mayor of Dunedin, agrees to do it again, she sets off a media frenzy among the "rightthinking" people of Otago, but she resolutely sticks to her guns. For the 2002 Roger, CAFCA and GATT Watchdog are sharing the various jobs – we are responsible for all matters to do with the judges and getting their report written up; GW is responsible for distributing the nomination forms, publicity and media work. Once again the event will be in Auckland (in early 2003) and CAFCA will again finance that.

The other issue that has seen us very much in the spotlight in the past year has been that of the sale of rural land to foreigners. This is not a new one, and it is one where there is a broad spectrum of concern and opposition. I have already mentioned the avalanche of media interviews I did within a couple of days in August when the Maori opposition to the sale of Young Nick’s Head was at its zenith. For the past decade, we have consistently had our best media coverage when we’ve highlighted the scandal of Tommy Suharto owning Lilybank – although he sold it, in 1999 and is now in an Indonesian prison as a convicted murderer, we were still getting media coverage about Lilybank this year, We got the whole file on the subject from the OIC, wrote it up and circulated it to the media – national weeklies such as the Listener and National Business Review ran articles about it. Bruce Ansley of the Listener did his second cover story in the past decade on the sale of South Island high country land to foreigners, extensively drawing on CAFCA’s material and featuring Bill. Other dailies and weeklies have contacted us about the issue, either from a national or provincial perspective. One of our founder members is now on the Otago Conservation Board and he was instrumental in getting them to take up the issue, using our material. We have had a good working relationship with the Forest and Bird Protection Society for years on this issue, and Bill provided them with the information for a widely quoted background paper on the South Island high country sales. Our members include farmers who have foreign owners and forestry TNCs for neighbours, and who can see the adverse effects on themselves and their communities. Just in the past couple of weeks we have received an unsolicited petition from a branch of the 60s Up Movement, opposing land sales (it’s not our petition, we’re not running any petitions at present). They obviously circulated it at one of their meetings and sent it off to us, as a body opposing the takeover of our rural land. That demonstrates that there is a level of public concern about this subject.

So much of our work is done in conjunction with other groups (such as on the whole free trade and globalisation area) that it’s becoming increasingly harder to differentiate where our campaigns begin and theirs end. Effectively it means that we have a bigger pool of people and expertise to work with. And networking continues to be our priority. In 2001 we decided to devote some attention to other local groups of the Left (who have all, at one time or another, given CAFCA a hard time for various ideological reasons). But we can agree on more than we disagree, so it’s productive. Both Bill and I spoke to the anarchist’s national conference, in October 2001 (this was a trip down memory lane for someone who was a 1960s anarchist and who was never seen at any anti-Vietnam War protest without my huge black flag); CAFCA took a leading role in building the coalition which organised the November 2001 day of action against the WTO. The protest action centred on four TNCs, representative of whole sectors of the NZ economy now owned overseas. My responsibility was Telecom, which meant that I had to write a leaflet and speak to the fired up crowd outside Telecom’s building in the central city. It was like the good old days – a company security guard threatened to call the cops on me unless I shut up speaking by megaphone outside the mirror glass door that he was guarding. I didn’t shut up and no cops were seen (perhaps they got lost, or maybe they don’t like Telecom either).

Building that coalition brought us into close working contact with the variety of activist groups based at the InterActive Centre in the central city, which was a breath of fresh air. There were plenty of political differences within that coalition but we resolved them to everyone’s satisfaction and worked together well. Unfortunately the InterActive Centre has recently closed, because of the age-old problem of a massive rent increase (CAFCA has never gone down the road of renting or buying an office, which constitutes a huge savings. In my younger days I had plenty of experience of all that, when involved with places such as the Resistance Bookshop and Action Centre, in the 1970s).

Of course, 2002 was election year. I have analysed that at length in the cover story in Watchdog 100, so I refer you to that, rather than go over it all again here. But briefly, we consider the demise of the Alliance to be a self-inflicted tragedy and one which has had an adverse impact on many good grassroots activists and party workers. We had a very good relationship with the Alliance as a party (and to a lesser extent with the Parliamentary caucus). As the party disintegrated, our previous close working relationship was reduced to virtually zero, as the party became self absorbed in first a civil war and then a struggle for survival (the jury is still out on that). We can only suggest to all the disillusioned and dispersed good people of the Alliance that there is plenty of work to be done outside of the Parliamentary circus and that we would welcome their energy and activist experience. We continue to have a good working relationship with the Greens, both at the grassroots and Parliamentary level, and with the odd Labour activist. But the events of the past year have only reinforced our belief that we are entirely correct to not endorse any party, to be independent of all of them, and, whilst we have done more political lobbying and Parliamentary work in recent years than before, the real struggle is outside of Parliament. That’s where CAFCA belongs. It was only because of the excellent extra-Parliamentary struggle (ironically, led by an ex-MP and a New Zealand First one at that), waged by local Maori in opposition to the sale of Young Nick’s Head that put any aspect of foreign control onto the election campaign agenda (and, incidentally, led to CAFCA having our biggest media coverage in years). No party campaigned on that issue, and the whole issue of free trade didn’t get a look in at all. Mind you, we shouldn’t feel slighted – huge issues such as the economy per se, or New Zealand’s involvement in yet another American war, weren’t mentioned.

We don’t have any big special projects lined up. As already mentioned, we are sharing the responsibility of organising the Roger Award again and this goes from strength to strength with each passing year. Ever since we decided, a couple of years ago, to hold the actual event outside Christchurch (it’s been in Wellington and Auckland now), that has given activists in other centres a sense of shared ownership of what is an invaluable campaign. The creativity unleashed by them in organising the Roger events has been wonderful.

We will continue to be an integral part of GATT Watchdog, and fight all the various manifestations of globalisation, such as the proposed free trade agreement with the US (held up as the prize for our helping fight America’s wars), and GATS. "Globalisation" = "corporate globalisation" = imperialism and that goes to the heart of our reason for being. We started as an anti-imperialist organisation, and we remain one today. Indeed the other major factor of the past year, and stretching into the future, is the resurgence of nakedly violent American imperialism and warmongering. There is nothing subtle about Bush and his gang of cowboys. New Zealand, along with the rest of the world, faces big decisions about whether to follow these authoritarian ideologues down the path of endless war and resource grabbing (the resource in question being oil). This country, once again, needs to define where it stands in the world – "you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists" is the choice we’ve been offered. CAFCINZ started off by campaigning against US imperialism and US bases in NZ – CAFCA moved away from that, largely leaving it up to the Anti-Bases Campaign. We don’t have the luxury of that jobsharing role any more. So, expect CAFCA to be, once again, involved in the anti-war and anti-imperialist movement that is building both in NZ and around the world. We cannot ignore a situation as dire as the one that we are now threatened with by the American Empire. It is no exaggeration to say that the future of the world (let alone New Zealand) is at stake.