Once again I am indebted to my fortnightly invoices which I present for payment. They itemise what I’ve done in those two weeks and, as such, constitute the closest thing that I have to a diary. So, once a year, that invoice book is essential reading. It is fascinating to be reminded of just what I’ve done, and what has happened, in the preceding 12 months. 2004/05 has been a very busy year, with CAFCA having campaigned on one central issue throughout the whole time (the Overseas Investment Bill [now Act]), the very same issue that we campaigned on throughout the previous year; the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) campaigned in a city (Wellington) and at a spybase (Tangimoana) that we hadn’t been to since 1990; and, wearing my Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA) hat, I accompanied a visiting speaker on a national tour and coordinated PSNA’s first visit of a group of Kiwis to the Philippines.

The unglamorous basics of my work don’t change very much, so great chunks of my reports from earlier years can be repeated verbatim. I am CAFCA’s Secretary/Organiser, and it is routine administrative work that takes up a lot of my time. That is the pitfall of having just one fulltime worker. The great majority of our correspondence (and a whole lot of other work) is now done by e-mail or via the Internet. Less and less of our communicating is done by good old fashioned snail mail. In the past it used to be rare that a day would pass without there being anything in our post office box, but that is no longer the case. CAFCA’s existence in cyberspace has become every bit as important as that in the real world. More than half of our members have supplied us with their e-mail addresses, so they hear from us more often than the other half. I hasten to add that the other 50% are not missing out, they still get exactly the same material, but in hard copy only. But more and more of our communications are done by e-mail now. One keystroke instantly sends our information to several hundred members simultaneously. It’s considerably less personal but much more time-efficient.

A small but growing number of our members and allied organisations have asked to be online members only. As it still costs us money to produce the online Watchdog, we charge them the same as everybody else. Cyberspace has brought us into contact with a whole world of people whom we wouldn’t otherwise reach. The majority of media-initiated contacts with us come via e-mail, as a result of the journalist having checked out our Website. There are pitfalls in this method of communication – because people are buried in e-mail, it is easy to ignore or forget one message among hundreds. We no longer operate our Christchurch phone tree. Coincidentally or not, the turnout at our last three Annual General Meetings has been sharply down on previous years (there may well be other factors involved in that). But the turnout in 2005 was slightly more than 2004, which was in itself up on 2003, the record low point.

As well as our own existence in cyberspace, CAFCA runs the Taking Control Electronic Discussion List (named after the 1998 Taking Control: The Fightback Against Transnational Corporate Power Conference). It is a very lively and informative electronic discussion group, which serves an invaluable role in disseminating information, advertising events and publications, and in ensuring (occasionally too) lively discussion on a whole range of topics. One of my jobs is to administer that list. This is usually an undemanding task (apart from the time consuming task of blocking the ceaseless tide of spam), but it blew up earlier in 2005 when we decided to gently remind members of some particular rules. Strong exception was taken in one or two cases, and some people walked to a newly created alternative list. I’ll say no more about it other than that you can’t please everyone (I hadn’t been called a Stalinist in many a long year, it made me quite nostalgic), and that Taking Control continues to chug along.

For the first time this century, we bought a new computer and switched from dial up Internet to broadband (high speed Internet). All of these things cause “teething troubles”, a mild term which covers a multitude of sins. To give some examples – installing desktop publishing software buggered up e-mail access for a week; transferring all my data from the old to the new computer resulted in my having to painstakingly rebuild several of my electronic mail lists (the CAFCA one alone consists of several hundred addresses); and Bill Rosenberg, who is our resident computer whiz, really had to work hard to come up with a (cumbersome but workable) solution to the problem of getting our new computer to talk to our original printer, a very old dot matrix, that we keep solely to print the sticky labels with which we address your Watchdogs.

Sometimes these problems are not of our doing at all. Conversion to broadband led to electronic mailouts to the numerous e-lists that I deal with suddenly becoming several hundred times slower than under the old dial up regime. This is current, as of writing, and is caused by our outward e-mail now going through a different server, namely Telecom’s Jetstream one in Auckland, which imposes a strict limit on the number of e-mail addresses that it will process at any one time. We await the solution (which, it appears, will cost us extra money). And several months ago, I wondered why the volume of e-mail I receive daily had dropped to a trickle, with not even newsletters from MPs getting through. An inquiry to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) revealed that nearly 1,000 e-mails to us had been automatically blocked as spam. I had to spend an inordinate amount of time apologising to people for not responding to their weeks-old e-mails and, tediously, having to set up an increasingly long Friends list at the ISP’s Website, so that mail from those senders would no longer be blocked. I have had to continue doing that on a regular basis, as senders automatically blocked as spammers have ranged from CAFCA members to my wife.

Mention of Becky, and Bill, reminds me that I personally, and CAFCA in general (plus ABC and PSNA, which share the annual Internet bill), owe them a huge vote of thanks for their untiring and unpaid work as in-house computer experts. Without them on hand the disasters really would be dire, the bills to sort them out would be horrendous and the time lost while things were being fixed would be a major disruption. This year has been a particularly busy one for Bill, with him making so many computer-related visits to our place that he suggested that our neighbours would think we’re running a thriving business in stolen electronic goods. Just to install broadband alone (and thus save CAFCA the $248 which Telecom charges for that, on top of the $99 to switch our line on at the exchange), cost Bill two consecutive Saturday afternoons. We’ve seen a lot of him at our place this year

And in case you get the impression that I’m moaning about our ISP, far from it. We owe Plain Communications a big vote of thanks for their very generous support, which includes the personal attention of its Chief Executive Officer, Robert Hunt (quite frequently outside office hours and work days) when we report problems. Plain is a key stakeholder in Converge and was instrumental in the latter waiving all volume restrictions in its hosting of both the CAFCA and Watchdog Websites. ABC and PSNA also have Websites there.

All of this stuff involves me, a non-driving, cackhanded, short tempered technophobe, having to master all kind of terrifyingly sophisticated and expensive equipment. My treatment of modern means of communications can be best exemplified by the day my mobile phone fell out of my pocket while I was cycling on a central city street and was promptly run over by a truck. Unfortunately, it emerged unscathed. I’ve given up trying to master texting (I’m all thumbs – which is what you’re supposed to be – but you know what I mean). And I never have learned to drive, which means that I have to be nice to people, particularly my long suffering wife, when I really do need to do something that you can’t do on a bicycle. When it comes to technology, Becky is my polar opposite (she even likes to read the manuals, for God’s sake) and my late father was fond of saying to her: “You’ve dragged him kicking and screaming into the 21 st Century” (he wasn’t so keen when she tried the same with him, he found the 20 th Century enough of a challenge).

Every August we conduct our annual membership renewal, so for several weeks at that time of year, a disproportionate amount of my time is 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. We don’t carry non-payers, simply because we can’t afford to. We send out one reminder to the overdue and we give them one last chance - w e contact all of those with e-mail addresses and give them one last chance to pay up (and, in the case of overdue Christchurch members without e-mail addresses, we ring them up). Quite a few do then pay up. Every year we purge our mailing list, the usual number being anywhere from 40-60 people (and it’s worth pointing out that, in any given year, a number of those so removed do rejoin. Indeed, some are serial rejoiners). I am famous/infamous for getting overdue subs out of people, usually by the time honoured method of public embarrassment. Indeed I inspire such feelings of guilt in some of these lapsed CAFCAlics that I don’t have to say a word. I’ve had people give me overdue CAFCA membership payments at events ranging from my 50 th birthday party to Elsie Locke’s funeral.

The first four weeks after we mail out the Membership Due slips is when most of the money comes in. This year, four weeks was the time span from the mailout to the AGM. In that time, we banked $5,595, which is an excellent response (with several hundred more waiting to be banked). But, not untypically, $500 of that was owed to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account (because members will send us one cheque with instructions to split it between CAFCA and the Organiser Account). Deduct that amount and the income in those crucial four weeks of 2005 is about the same as the comparable four weeks of 2004. That is excellent, because our membership is down a bit, and those two totals, in 2004 and 05 – both over $5,000 – are well up on some previous years.

Thanks to all of you who have sent donations both large and small. 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. 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. Indeed, as of now, none of it is any longer spent on Internet access (see below, under Organiser Account). We run a lean and efficient operation, using a few thousand dollars a year for our operating expenses, and with the bulk of our money earning interest in a couple of term deposit accounts. That means that we can finance things like our campaign on the Government’s new Overseas Investment Act, which has consumed our time over the past two years. We distributed thousands of our leaflet and postcard on the subject to individuals and organisations throughout the country, basically free of charge. And we could finance things like the 2004 Roger Award event, which was held in Christchurch for the first time since 2000. I didn’t do a national speaking tour this election year but I did make one out of town speaking trip – to Napier. CAFCA paid for that, plus my expenses, without having to ask anyone else for the money.

We are Christchurch-based, but we have a national reach, in terms of members, money and influence (indeed, the bulk of our members are in the North Island). As I mentioned, our membership is down a bit this year (463 as of the September AGM). In recent years it had been steady at just below 500 (the highest it has ever been was around 550). Why is it down? In other years, we have picked up members by means of, for instance, having a CAFCA flyer mailed out with the New Internationalist or by me doing a national speaking tour. Neither happened this year. Although membership is down a bit, they are all financial members (we don’t pad our membership figures by keeping non-payers on our books) and they are paying as much, if not more, than when there were a few more of them.

One final thing about CAFCA money. I’m pleased to report that, this year, we have finally closed our original ANZ account. This means that we have cut all ties to the transnational banks and do all our banking with Kiwibank. Unlike in my 2004 Report, I don’t have any substantive complaints about Kiwibank’s service, which is a pleasant change.

And, also unlike my 2004 Report, the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my income, rates only passing mention this year. In 2004 it hit its lowest ever point, we went into crisis mode and mounted a Special Appeal, which was a major project in its own right. The response was astonishing, bringing in more than $10,000 in donations (they were coming in for months afterwards) and dramatically bumping up the number of regular pledgers from less than 30 to 50 (even I was surprised when Bob Leonard reported that number to the 2005 AGM, as I hadn’t realised that it had gone so high). That Account is now much more sustainable, with pledges and donations enabling my hourly pay rate to have been increased twice in the past 18 months, to its present $10, and the bulk of the money having been wrenched out of Westpac’s transnational grasp and put on term deposit with Kiwibank. Once again, my heartfelt thanks to all of those of you who keep supporting my work, and therefore that of CAFCA and ABC, by your generosity.

There is no pay rise in the offing but the Organiser Account has doubled the amount for which it reimburses me for monthly expenses. For many years now it has been reimbursing me for our phone rental; now it pays nearly all of our monthly broadband charge as well. The effect of this is that CAFCA is no longer paying for Internet access, that cost has been transferred to the Organiser Account. It has been running so long (since 1991) and so successfully that it is seen as a model by other organisations wanting to free themselves from the tyranny of having to raise an income for their worker or workers.

My daily routines haven't changed - collecting and processing mail six days a week (including the daily deluge of e-mail); correspondence; reading and analysing publications for fortnightly committee meetings; banking; handling orders for CAFCA material; clipping papers and gathering material for our files and as research for articles (both from hard copy and much more from cyberspace). This stuff has to be done daily, otherwise it can easily get away on me, and become a major headache. After the annual membership renewal, I have to spend a lot of time updating the mailing list and banking the money. If I go away for even just a few days there’s an awful lot of catching up to be done upon return. I am the de facto treasurer; I am responsible for getting all office supplies and for getting any dysfunctional equipment repaired and maintained. I handle all dealings with printers, banks, Internet service providers, NZ Post, bookshops, etc, etc. Then there are the spontaneous approaches from members, the public and the media for information or statements on a whole raft of subjects – these can arise without any warning, requiring an instant response and can be quite time consuming. But it’s simply part and parcel of the job.

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 three Christchurch ones and one in Wellington, 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. Indeed I regard those bookshops as our compulsory savings scheme. If my stock of spares of the latest issue runs out, I can always count on getting back their unsold copies, for which we can always find a good use.

The other reason that we don’t pursue bookshop sales is 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 foreign control is not an easy subject to illustrate. As you may have noticed, graphics and even photos tend to get recycled a lot (particularly when used to break up that great indigestible lump of Overseas Investment Commission [ OIC] material that provides up to half of every issue). Otherwise it really would just be page upon page of text. So, this is our annual appeal: if you’ve got cartoons, graphics or photos that you think are suitable for Watchdog, then send them to us and we’ll have a look at them. Several members have done so in the past but not all have been suitable.

Watchdog remains the journal of record on foreign control. Quite deliberately, every previous issue for the past two years has featured a cover story on the Overseas Investment Act (we followed it all the way through from when it started as a review, through leaked official recommendations and then all the legislative stages from Bill to Act). Not only did we run cover stories about it in every issue for two years, but all manner of other articles about it. For example, Bill Rosenberg provided an executive summary (a mere 17 pages) of our 58 page submission on the Bill to the Finance and Expenditure Select Committee. That whole campaign opened up other stories for Watchdog. The cover story in issue 108 (April 2005) featured the submission to the Committee by a disaffected former OIC insider. Number 109 (August 2005) had a truly wonderful cover photo taken at the farewell cocktail party for the OIC (it’s now the Overseas Investment Office) taken by someone who was there.

A substantial chunk of every issue remains Bill Rosenberg’s meticulous chronicling and analysing of the monthly approvals by the OIC (now OIO). That’s has been Bill’s main regular contribution this year. He finished as national President of the Association of University Staff (AUS) after a two year term, but he remains very active in that union and as a member of the International Committee of the NZ Council of Trade Unions (CTU). The AUS mounted a major national industrial campaign this year, involving strikes, pickets, marches, the works. Bill was in the thick of that (the Canterbury branch of AUS is headed by David Small, somebody else very familiar to Watchdog and Peace Researcher readers over the years).

Union work takes him to Wellington on a regular basis. And it has taken him much further afield. In his CTU capacity, he had a fortnight long speaking tour in northern Norway (all of it spent above the Arctic Circle), as the guest of local unions. Norway had its general election in September, one week before NZ, and privatisation was a major issue in the campaign. The rest of the world can see many cautionary lessons to be learned from “The New Zealand Experiment”. In a town right up on the Russian border, Bill debated privatisation with a spokesman for the Norwegian equivalent of Act. Whatever he said must have done the trick, because the Conservative government was defeated by what the media called a “Red/Green” coalition. Plus he (like me a few months earlier) had to deal with a major health crisis involving not one but both of his aged parents, simultaneously. In his case it started, literally, when he got home from a CAFCA meeting late one night and until things stabilised nobody in the family got any sleep for several days. All of this (plus the fact that he actually has a “real” job and a family) helps to explain why we haven’t seen the same range of his articles as in the past. All of us owe Bill a huge vote of thanks for the sheer volume of his writing and the quality of his analysis. Watchdog would be much the poorer without it.

I’ve managed to get a lot more writing done for Watchdog than in previous years. It’s not easy to juggle the roles of editor with that of writer but once I’ve got my teeth into an article, I enjoy it. There is never enough time to write all that I’d like. And we have a number of other regular writers now, apart from Bill and I. Joe Hendren is a valued one (you’d never guess that someone who writes about “Panglossian Paradigms” and “reductionism” got his degree in Philosophy). Jeremy Agar is the extremely reliable and prolific book and film reviewer, who’s always suggesting new things to review. In his case, he combines this with being a Banks Peninsula District Councillor, which is very time consuming (although this is the Council which has run a successful campaign to cease to exist and to be absorbed into Christchurch, so he doesn’t have long to go with his local government duties).

Sue Newberry burst onto the national stage with her expose of Transpower’s murky cross-border lease deals, which inspired the Press to mount a months-long crusade on the issue. Sue has written for us on subjects ranging from Telecom to Contact Energy (an article co-authored with Bill). I can reveal to you that she did write us an article about Transpower for the August issue, specially tailored for Watchdog readers, but that is a fast changing story. After the whole issue had been laid out (which has to be done in multiples of four pages, because of the printing process), some new information came to light which altered the whole thrust of her article, so she felt that she had no choice but to withdraw it (it was too late to rewrite it or for me to find anything with which to replace it). That’s the only time that’s ever happened (in my 14 years as editor, anyway) and left the issue several pages shorter than planned. This year Sue transferred from the University of Canterbury to Sydney University, with an academic promotion and, unfortunately, told me that work overload means that she couldn’t write anything for this issue (December 2005) but hopes that she can resume writing for Watchdog in 2006. We all hope so, as she brings an entirely different perspective and style to these irreverent and sometimes scatological pages. She told me that she finds it a fascinating challenge to write for a “lay” publication, as opposed to academic journals (I must admit to not being a big reader of accountancy journals, let alone academic accountancy ones. I’ll save them for when I’ve got a serious case of insomnia).

We’ve had the services of other writers, such as Christine Dann, Paul Watson and David Grant, writing on subjects ranging from NZ’s Free Trade Agreement with Thailand to obituaries of Bill Andersen and Rona Bailey. Jane Kelsey makes a most welcome return with her comprehensive and incisive analysis of the WTO that is the lead article in this issue. And we make a point of soliciting articles from people who are at the sharp end of fighting the transnational corporations (TNCs), so special thanks this year to Jean Bibby and Liz Remmerswaal for their articles on their successful campaigns to save Coromandel’s Whangapoua from a Malaysian-owned sawmill and Hawke’s Bay’s Cape Kidnappers gannet sanctuary from an American-owned luxury resort.

I thank all those writers, who all do it for no pay and extra big thanks to Leigh Cookson, who has done the tedious, fiddly and hairtearing job of laying it out for years now. She does get paid but bugger all. Leigh has waged a thus far fruitless campaign to try and persuade the all-male committee to change what she calls the “boring” layout design of Watchdog. We’ve invited her to present us with a sample for our consideration, but the sheer size of the task has defeated her (the magazine is so big and individual articles are often so long, plus everything from the cover onwards would have to be redesigned). So, I think she’s given up on that for now.

Watchdog prides itself on being a newsletter, publishing news and analysis that you won’t find elsewhere. We decided, in 2003, that we would return to our anti-imperialist, anti-war roots and run material on those subjects in every issue, if possible. This is in response to the grave threat to world peace posed by the American Empire on the rampage. Hence the articles on Iraq (sometimes republished from elsewhere if I can’t find someone closer to hand to write it up). For the first time, Watchdog this year has covered the Ahmed Zaoui case – David Small has been writing about that in Peace Researcher for a couple of years now. I decided that it was time to run it in Watchdog as well. And Watchdog is absolutely value for money, on sheer weight alone - the three issues since my last Report total 224 pages, the same as 2004 (but remember, the August issue would have been longer if Sue Newberry hadn’t had to pull the plug on her article). 80 pages are the printers’ limit, so sometimes I have to leave articles out or hold them until the next issue (this happened with the April issue)

It’s not all depressing facts, table of figures, and heavy analysis. Indeed, in the August issue, I made a point of stressing several victories over the TNCs, both in NZ and internationally. 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. They humanise what can be a daunting and impersonal subject. This year there have definitely been more of them, three in this issue alone - I never expected to have to write one for Rod Donald. They have been longer, none more so than my epic warts and all one on Owen Wilkes. Both that and my obituary of my father (in the April issue) attracted a very large amount of positive feedback (and one complaint that there had been too many obituaries this year and not enough investigative journalism and coverage of current affairs). Viewed from one perspective, they could be construed as editorial or even personal indulgence. But I think (and obviously the vast majority of you agree) that they provide an opportunity to honour an individual, tell his or her story (which is never boring, not even that of my Dear Old Dad, much as he strove to be the compleat stick in the mud) and record our history. And I do mean “our” history. Because if we don’t record it, who will? Thesis writers and academics, with their dessicated language and footnotes? God help us.

We are a well established electronic publisher – both Foreign Control Watchdog and CAFCA have their own separate (but linked) Websites. Many t hanks 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. As editor, I am responsible for overseeing the site and have to prepare, proofread and edit every issue that goes online.

CAFCA’s Website (maintained by Bill) has continued to be critical this year for publicising widely the regularly updated online version of our leaflet (written by Joe Hendren) on what is now the Overseas Investment Act. The site also features Bill’s encyclopaedic writeups of the Overseas Investment Commission’s monthly Decisions, various of our Fact Sheets, briefing papers and submissions and a section on the Roger Award. It has an excellent selection of Links, which take you to a fascinating array of groups and publications all around the world. And the Search facility is a godsend for anyone wanting to check out both sites. The Websites reach an audience far in excess of our actual membership and attract feedback from all around the country and the world. Journalists routinely use them, and contact us as a result of visiting the sites first. The CAFCA site is regularly and favourably publicised in the mainstream media.

Work With Other Groups

I am co-employed by the Anti-Bases Campaign which, averaged out over a year, takes up less of my time than CAFCA. The busiest part of my ABC work occurred at Easter when we spent a couple of action packed days in Wellington and at the Tangimoana spybase. I’m not sure that the latter has ever been mentioned in my annual Report before. It is the lesser known of the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau’s (GCSB) two “ New Zealand” spybases – Waihopai is more recent, better known and much more important. Tangimoana is part of the same UKUSA Agreement network of spybases. The 1940s’ UKUSA Agreement is New Zealand’s most important, and secret, international intelligence agreement. It divides the world up for signals and electronic intelligence gathering purposes, between the relevant agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ. For details on Tangimoana, check it out at the Other Bases page of the ABC Website at www.converge.org.nz/abc. ABC had last been in Tangimoana and Wellington in the context of our 1990 Touching The Bases Tour, which spanned both islands. At Easter, as we marched away from the spybase, Green Co-Leader, Rod Donald, told me that it was the first time that he’d ever been there.

Organising an activity in the capital city is a very different task from organising one in a remote Marlborough valley (which is where Waihopai is located). Our former ABC committee colleague, Kane O’Connell, who now lives in Wellington, was our local organiser and he handled all the logistical stuff that I normally do when I’m organising Waihopai. There was still drama though – just prior to our arrival, Wellington Airport was closed by fog for several consecutive days and we had to draw up contingency plans for what would happen if we couldn’t fly up from Christchurch. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. On the morning of Easter Saturday, we held a seminar about spies and spybases, at which the speakers were world renowned researcher, Nicky Hager; Green MP, Keith Locke, and myself. The only glitch was that we found ourselves doubled booked with a brass band who wanted the room for a rehearsal so, as we took a slightly earlier than scheduled lunch, we were serenaded (bombarded actually) by a brass band in full flight and at very close proximity. That afternoon, we travelled on a chartered Wellington City bus (ironically, from Stagecoach, one of the nastiest of the TNCs in the transport sector), driven by a local peace activist, for a wonderful Tour of Secret Wellington, all scripted by Nicky Hager (I had last taken part in one of those during the 1993 Peace Power and Politics Conference). That took us to places such as the GCSB offices; we held a picket outside Defence HQ (which also houses the head office of the Security Intelligence Service); and we caused great consternation among the security personnel at the fortified US Embassy when we turned up there unannounced. It was the most fascinating couple of hours that you’re ever likely to spend in Wellington. On the Sunday, we once again boarded our chartered Stagecoach bus and drove the 150+ kms north to the Tangimoana spybase. The cops were waiting for us, complete with dogs, and although they wouldn’t let us drive in, we were able to march up to the base (which, unlike Waihopai, is not visible from the road) and hold a rally there. This made it onto that night’s TV3 News, plus I did media interviews with Radio NZ and Sunday papers.

We adjudged the weekend a great success except for one significant factor – the number of people taking part was small, with actual Wellingtonians being almost entirely absent. More people from Christchurch took part than Wellingtonians and others came from as far away as Auckland. We can only speculate as to why that was (it certainly wasn’t from lack of publicity or hard work by Kane O’Connell and his local helpers). More’s the pity. All we can say to the absent locals is that they missed a fascinating weekend of action and information in their own backyard. Because of the disappointing local response, this was the first ABC activity to run at a noticeable loss, primarily because of the cost of hiring a bus for what turned out to be a small number of people. But ABC makes provision for this contingency, and it made no difference to our financial position.

The Waihopai spybase remains our main focus. We are going back there in January 2006 for another one of our regular national protests (we’ve been doing so since 1988). This involves plenty of organisational work for me, starting from the very basic requirement of a campsite. For every previous Waihopai protest this century, we had camped on private property, at a Waihopai Valley vineyard just walking distance from the base. Sadly, our host has sold up and gone, and finding another campsite in a very conservative part of the country consumed an unexpectedly long time (one local told me that “your reputation for publicity seeking stunts has preceded you”, and shut the door on us. Publicity seeking stunts are the whole point of our protests, actually). However, I eventually found somewhere. I mention this to illustrate just how much of my time as ABC organiser is taken up by this very basic logistical work.

The other aspect of our campaign to close the Waihopai spybase is information. So, one major project this year was to update our mobile display about it. This dated from the 1990s and had been originally created by Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Wellington. ABC’s main role then was to send it around the country. This time we took responsibility for a full makeover. It had sat, unused, in Wellington storage for several years. We got it back; I raised $1,500 (from the Cathy Pelly Trust) to get it redesigned and then Bob and I spent a lot of time rewriting all the text and choosing illustrations. Once that was done, it went to our graphic designer, Linda Barnes of Fullmoon Design, to lay it out. She did an excellent job, and essentially at mates’ rates. The whole process from fundraising to fruition took many months, far longer than we expected, but it was well worth the wait. The display is now a very professional, informative, colourful and eyecatching. We are not keeping it to ourselves, it is to be shared with the nation. We have secured local organisers in cities from Dunedin to Whangarei and, at the time of writing, it is making its way around the country, to be displayed at all sorts of events and in a variety of different venues.

This seemingly harmless display has the power to inspire controversy. The public library in Blenheim won’t have it, because it is “one sided and the base has no right of reply” (we’d be delighted if the spybosses would say anything about what Waihopai actually does). Last time it toured, in the late 90s, a complaint from the then base commander got it withdrawn from that same library. The GCSB has made sure that it has curried favour in Marlborough. When we approached the Waihopai Valley Residents Association to ask for January 2006 camping rights in the grounds of their community hall, we were told no, as the base had previously donated to the hall’s restoration and they didn’t want to offend the spies; local vineyards also declined, for similar reasons, namely that they didn’t want to get offside with the base.

ABC’s other major activity in the past year arose spontaneously from the tragedy of Owen Wilkes’ suicide. I hadn’t planned on going to his funeral, but did, making a flying visit to Hamilton for a few hours (and had to bludge a lift to Auckland Airport in order to get home on the same day). Once there, I hadn’t planned to speak but, egged on by an ex-partner of Owen’s sitting next to me, I did. ABC has always talked about doing something on July 4 th, which we long ago renamed Independence From America Day, but we hadn’t actually done anything to mark that occasion for many years. I suggested it as the entirely appropriate date for a Christchurch memorial meeting for Owen and the thing just took off from there, acquiring a life of its own. ABC and CAFCA worked together on it (Owen was a founder of both), with ABC doing the bulk of the donkey work. More than 100 people turned up on a midwinter Christchurch night, many of them having come from far away. Bob was the MC, I was the keynote speaker. I spent a lot of time researching and writing that, which became my obituary of him, in both Watchdog and Peace Researcher. Writing it put me back in touch with people that I hadn’t seen or heard for many decades, such as Owen’s friends and colleagues from his time in Norway. And it introduced to me to a whole raft of other people, throughout the country and around the world, people for whom Owen was a major figure in their lives and work. My research unearthed the fact that I had a lot of material both about and by Owen, both personal and political, written material and photos. So, I played a major role in preparing the magnificent display on his life and work that Ann Currie (a former committee member of both ABC and CAFCA) designed for the night. She, Bob and I spent a Saturday morning putting it all together.

The memorial has been reported in both Watchdog and Peace Researcher. It brought together a fascinating array of people from past and present, the speakers were excellent, it was a deeply moving and satisfying way to say goodbye to Owen from his Christchurch friends and colleagues, and it was very memorable political event in its own right (appropriately it marked the first outing of the updated Waihopai display). Owen’s death attracted major mainstream media coverage, and I was interviewed by both the Listener and the Press for their obituaries. The latter even gave free, unsolicited publicity for the memorial meeting (not once but twice), helping to boost numbers on the night. For a number of weeks, my life consisted of a very intense, concentrated dose of Owen Wilkes, often in the most sensitive personal aspects of his life – I had to break the news to his ex-wife; I was dealing with his current partner; I re-established contact with another partner, for the first time since the 80s; yet another one shouted me lunch at a rather nice restaurant so that we could talk about him and she could “achieve closure”. It was a full on time. And it’s not over yet. The January protest at Waihopai will feature the planting of native trees, at our Department of Conservation campsite, in memory of both Owen and Rod Donald. The initiative for this came from local Greens, to honour Rod, and they were happy to accept our suggestion to include Owen.

ABC’s work has an ongoing international context. Andrew Wilkie is an Australian former Intelligence analyst turned whistleblowing author and Green candidate. The (NZ) Greens toured him through NZ as part of their election campaign. Rod Donald took him to the inner gate of Waihopai; in Christchurch, the ABC committee was invited to Rod’s home (my first visit there) to meet Wilkie and swap notes. At his well attended Christchurch public meeting, Rod invited me to speak from the floor, we took along the Waihopai display and distributed leaflets advertising the Waihopai protest. In November 2005, a party of Japanese peace activists came through NZ, hosted by the NZ Peace Council. They had played a role in the closure of a US base in Japan and were eager to make contact with us. Bob and I met them, showed them around the US military base at Christchurch Airport (Harewood), and Bob accompanied them up to Marlborough, where he was their guide at Waihopai (getting excellent local media coverage in the process). Mass protests against the disastrous US war of occupation in Iraq have virtually stopped, but there was one in March, to commemorate the second anniversary of the invasion. It featured a central city die-in. ABC was there.

My regular ABC work is as editor of Peace Researcher. I can only commit to get out two issues a year (a far cry from PR’s original frequency) and even that is a struggle. As it is, one of those was a special issue entirely devoted to Owen Wilkes (who was actually the inspiration for PR, back in the early 1980s, long before my time with it). This was our first special issue in three years (Watchdog doesn’t do special issues, it doesn’t have to because of its sheer size. At 28 pages, the special PR on Owen was less than half the length of an average Watchdog). I enjoy writing for PR, as it allows me to get back to the subject matters on which I cut my teeth as a political activist more than 35 years ago – war, imperialism, Intelligence agencies, et al. I have built up a stable of regular writers for PR – myself and Bob Leonard, of course; David Small has been following the Zaoui case for years now; both Joe Hendren and Jeremy Agar of Watchdog also write for PR on different subjects (it enables Jeremy to review books and films that we don’t cover in Watchdog). Each issue goes online, and we owe a debt of thanks to ABC’s Webmaster, Yani Johanson, who finds time to do that (and the full range of other activities involved in being an ABC committee member) amidst his life as a very busy grassroots local body politician.

My wife Becky is the layout editor (of the hard copy edition) and she does an extremely professional job. PR is the best looking, best illustrated that it ever has been. But there will be a forced change in its appearance (the form is undecided yet) coming up in the next year. This has been brought about by the untimely death of Ray Butterfield, at the tragically early age of 57 (he died of a heart attack). Ray had been the PR printer for many years. When I became the sole charge editor two years ago (previously Bob and I were co-editors), I transferred the printing to the same outfit which does Watchdog. But it can’t do colour printing, so Ray continued to do the two tone PR covers (exactly as Watchdog’s original one man printer continues to do the coloured covers for that). Once our finite supply of those run out in no more than two issues, we will have to redesign the cover (or find somebody else to print it). That’s the disadvantage of using a solo printer.

And PR definitely has the bragging rights over Watchdog, in that it can truthfully claim to have inspired a film. A couple of years ago I wrote a brief obituary of the Christian Pacifist Society and offered readers a copy of a much longer article from a 1974 issue of the University of Canterbury student newspaper, Canta (which I edited that year), all about the World War 2 Government’s treatment of conscientious objectors and other dissidents. This attracted the interest of wellknown Wellington documentary maker, Russell Campbell of Vanguard Films (my friendship with Russell and relationship with Vanguard dates back to the early 80s). He duly made “Sedition”, a fascinating 140 minute documentary on exactly that subject. It premiered in the 2005 International Film Festival and I had the privilege of being invited to introduce Russell at one of its Christchurch screenings. Since then it has won a prize at the prestigious annual Media Peace Awards.

So ABC is alive and well. We continue to attract (and lose) young people onto our committee. Last year we lost Kane O’Connell to Wellington (but he has since become our man in the capital, and has also, on his own initiative, found a Wellington bookshop to sell Watchdog). This year we’ve lost Claire Dann (off indefinitely on her Big OE) but gained Lynda Boyd and Frances Mountier. People (usually despairing middle aged ones) sometimes ask me: “Where are the young people coming through who will carry on your work”? Look no further than the ABC committee – Lynda, a union official, is in her early 20s, and Frances, a student, is only just 18 (her enthusiastic idealism and preparedness to get herself arrested on a regular basis remind me of myself at that age). The disadvantage is that young people tend to go elsewhere in the country for work or overseas on their Big OE, but that just means that we have to keep a keen eye out for likely replacements.

I am on the committee of GATT Watchdog. Its two main activities are publishing The Big Picture ( Leigh Cookson does an excellent job of basically producing that by herself) and being the co-organiser of the annual Roger Award (it and CAFCA take turns to organise it; in 2004, it was GATT Watchdog’s turn). In December, to coincide with the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Ministerial Meeting in Hong Kong, GATT Watchdog held a rally in Cathedral Square. I was one of the speakers and CAFCA helped to organise and publicise it. Basically my only involvement with ARENA this year was when Becky and I spent several hours on a public holiday helping it shift office. I had last done it a couple of years earlier and this lacked the drama of that occasion (which had taken place in the central city frenzy of the final days of the Christmas rush and culminated in a fight between our truck driver and an enraged motorist wanting his parking space. The motorist came off second best, to the tune of a smashed rear windscreen).

There is no shortage of things to be done in the “free trade” field – what with the WTO’s Doha Round, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and a Government hellbent on signing us up to bilateral or multilateral free trade agreements with countries that many New Zealanders would have difficulty locating on a map (Brunei, for instance). The problem is fitting that huge issue in alongside everything else that needs to be done, and by a small and very dedicated group of people with no shortage of other things on their plates.

My other involvement is with the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa, which organises a national speaking tour every few years. In October 2004 we toured Marie Hilao-Enriquez, a human rights leader. I accompanied her for the full fortnight of her tour, from Dunedin to Whangarei (the last time I did that was in 1995, with academic and debt activist, Leonor Briones). We comfortably raised more than the necessary $5,000 and I spent several months of 2004 organising this tour. There was a family connection – Marie is a maternal aunt of my wife, Becky, so she had a few days of family holiday with us at the end of the trip (the only bona fide holiday that I’ve had for years). It was a highly enjoyable and memorable three weeks, even though the weather was lousy the whole time. You can read about Marie at
http://www.converge.org.nz/psna/activity2.htm.

So, although I haven’t made any national CAFCA speaking tour since 2002, I did tour the whole country with a visiting speaker in late 2004. I spoke first at every one of her public meetings, and made sure that I mentioned my CAFCA connection (and actually picked up some new CAFCA members en route). Everywhere we went we tapped into the CAFCA network, because it was frequently CAFCA members who were organising our visit to their city and/or hosting us. It was particularly poignant in one case, because a veteran key CAFCA member in one provincial city was, shortly after our visit, felled by a massive stroke which has permanently disabled him (he can no longer speak). It is very sad to realise that I will never again see him as he was.

That tour took me into all sorts of places and situations for the first time, from being greeted by a rousing haka from hikoi participants to the confines of Auckland Central Remand Prison (when Marie went in to visit Ahmed Zaoui); from a very free and frank discussion with NZ diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to a freewheeling discussion in two languages when local Filipinos turned out to Marie’s final public meeting. It was the fourth national speaking tour that I’ve organised for a Filipino progressive movement speaker in the space of a decade; the second one in which I’ve accompanied the speaker for the whole duration (I accompanied a third speaker for one leg of his tour) and they are always an enormously satisfying experience. We can learn a hell of a lot from mass movement leaders of the calibre of the ones that PSNA brings to NZ every few years.

Usually after a speaking tour PSNA has a quiet year. That is what we planned but it was not to be. Marie’s tour sparked an upsurge of interest in the increasingly appalling human rights situation in the Philippines. In mid 2005 we received an invitation from her for New Zealanders to join an International Solidarity Mission to five of the worst human rights hotspots, including where the frontlines of what President Bush has christened the “second front in the ‘War On Terror’”, namely against Filipino Muslim separatists in the south of the country. Marie invited me to go (I haven’t been to the Philippines since 1998) but I wasn’t disposed to do so, and thought it would be better to get new people to go and become fired up. PSNA offered $1,000 towards the cost of a Kiwi going. To our pleasant surprise, we received several applications, meaning that we had to choose (by contrast, for several years now we have offered $1,000 towards the costs of a Kiwi unionist or worker attending the annual May Day activities organised by the militant trade union confederation, the KMU – May First Movement – and received no response at all). Having picked our delegate, we mounted an urgent online appeal to help others to go and raised several thousand dollars (Christian World Service was the single biggest donor; it has supported the work of both PSNA and the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account with big donations over the years). So we were able to contribute substantively to the costs of three Kiwis (a fourth was self funded). This is the first NZ delegation to the Philippines that PSNA has organised since the remnants of the Solidarity Network relocated to Christchurch in the early 1990s. There were only five Australians there (more than 80 foreigners took part), so a four person delegation from NZ was very respectable. Two of them are CAFCA members, key contacts in their provincial cities; another is a veteran filmmaker from Vanguard Films, whom I have known and worked with since the early 80s. Exactly as I hoped, they all returned fired up and got stuck into a round of speaking, writing and lobbying the Government to do something about the dreadful human rights situation in this near northern neighbour of ours. I did the media work once they got back home and our lead delegate featured in a lengthy interview on Radio NZ’s Nine To Noon With Linda Clark (I had managed to get Marie Hilao-Enriquez a 30 minute interview with Linda Clark in 2004, so that programme has been good to us).

Our other PSNA work this year has been much more prosaic, namely dealing with the legacy of the 2000 self combustion of Corso in Christchurch and what to do with the historic Philippine material which had been in the Corso building and which had been hastily evacuated from it in the course of one actionpacked long weekend five years ago. It had sat in a large heap in our garage and clogging up shelves in my office. So we (myself and my PSNA committee colleagues, Becky Horton and Trish Murray) put in several weekend workbees in the garage classifying and describing the several hundred political books out there (they had been accumulated in the 1980s and early 90s when Philippines Solidarity was coordinated from Auckland by Keith Locke and there was a functioning Philippine Resource Centre; we inherited the lot in the mid 90s). Then we set about finding a home for them. The Asian Studies Library at Auckland University took two big boxes of the books and Victoria University’s Asian Studies Library took another box (we’re working on a home or homes for the rest); the University of Canterbury’s Macmillan Brown Library took all the publications and papers. This added to its collection, because it already holds the papers of the late Father John Curnow, the founder of Philippines Solidarity in NZ (for my obituary of him, see Watchdog 68, October 1991).

I am PSNA secretary and editor of its newsletter Kapatiran (Solidarity), which comes third behind Watchdog and Peace Researcher in my editorial priorities. I aim to get out two issues per year but I hadn’t managed to get out an issue since mid 2004. PSNA, and I, have been busy with other things. I’m pleased to report that, in November, we got out a double issue, the biggest ever at 44 pages. It can be read online, Becky is the Webmaster. Check out www.converge.org.nz/psna.

I keep being haunted by my extremely long lineage as a political activist (which predates CAFCA and ABC by years). As I mentioned in my 2004 Report, I was interviewed (in December 2003!) for Frontier Of Dreams, the 13 part history of New Zealand that screened on TVNZ during the last quarter of 2005. I was interviewed about the 1960s and specifically the Progressive Youth Movement (PYM), the original group to which I belonged (and out of which CAFCA and ABC effectively grew). That episode screened in December 2005. I even got “paid” – a box of chocolates (and thankfully that was before I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, so I could eat them in good conscience). My ancient past is now part of New Zealand history. On Anzac Day, there was a Press supplement for the 90th anniversary of Gallipoli. It highlighted PYM’s Anzac Day protests in the early 70s and the furious response of Christchurch’s then Mayor. One of the Press’ former Rightwing columnists (since sacked) had another go at the subject. And a TVNZ documentary on the changing way that Kiwis had marked Anzac Day since the 1920s also featured footage of one of those demos (the one with the most fighting).

I haven’t kept a lot from those early years (I’m not a great hoarder) but one thing that I have kept is my trusty folder of very faded carbon copies of typewritten articles (on foolscap paper; you’re betraying your age if you can remember typewriters, carbon copies and foolscap) and profiles of people from the early 1970s, written mainly for Canta, the student paper, but also for the shortlived NZ edition of the American music paper, Rolling Stone (which was published by dear old Alister Taylor). For my epic obituary of Owen Wilkes this year, I reproduced nearly all of a 30+ year old profile of him that I wrote for Canta. I haven’t written any profiles for decades, except for a brief spurt in the early 90s when I was invited, ironically, by Owen to do a series on “heroes of the peace movement” for the former PeaceLink, which he was then co-editing.

I have been the Organiser for 14 years now, which is an extremely long time for a job funded entirely by the regular pledges and donations of CAFCA and ABC members and supporters. It is remarkable and I didn’t envisage it holding out this long when I embarked on it as a 40 year old redundant Railways labourer, back in 1991. Once again, I take the opportunity to thank you for your generosity. My pay is $400 per week gross. This continuing financial support is a most gratifying vote of confidence in the work that we, and I, do.

Personally, it has been a unique year. All sorts of things have happened. Such as the CAFCA/ABC workplace (our home) coming under repeated attack from military personnel. Say what? How come this wasn’t in the media or even Watchdog? The reality is rather more prosaic. For six hellish months we had next door neighbours who decided that their home (which had gone from one quiet lady owner for decades to a rental property) would be the street’s party house every weekend. I don’t mind parties and have hosted my share of them over the years, but this became unbearable. So, as a good activist, I got active against problem neighbours for hopefully the only time in my life and played a role (spread out over several months) in having these guys evicted, all other attempts to solve the problem having failed. They didn’t take kindly to this, and after they had moved they repeatedly attacked, in the course of one month, both their former home and our place, always on a Sunday and usually in the early hours of the morning. Fortunately all they used were eggs but things escalated when they launched a more damaging attack on their old home, I made my first ever 111 call, the cops came very promptly and we’ve never had any more trouble. What was the military angle? After a previous incident when our place was bombarded with eggs and other unidentified flying objects (while they were still living next door), I demanded that one of them come over and clean it up. He did and when asked what he and his mates did for a living, he replied that a couple of them were soldiers living off base. He was looking forward to leaving the Army and going to Iraq as a mercenary, for the big money. If that’s the calibre of what the Iraqi liberation forces are up against, I can see why they are running rings around the illegal occupation armies and their private goon squads.

In my last Report, I said that my 86 year old father was dying (terminal kidney failure) and that everything arising from this was taking up more and more of our time. He died, in February (my obituary of him appeared in the April Watchdog). A death of such a momentous nature is always a watershed in one’s personal life and involved an intense few months of concentrated family work. All manner of things had to be attended to – for instance, the distinctly peculiar business of selecting and designing our own grave (we established a family plot). My late mother had suffered from a crippling mental illness (bipolar disorder, which was then called manic depression) and while he was alive the old man had vetoed me getting her hospital records. After he died, I turned my investigative skills to securing them, and eventually got her files, from both Sunnyside and Porirua, going right back to my birth (her illness was triggered by post-natal depression). It was rather strange to read references to “the baby” and realise that was me, as I’d never thought of myself as one of those. Inevitably my being a leading light in good old PYM, with its attendant controversies and court appearances, featured in Mum’s 1970s’ files. They were a fascinating but very gruelling read. And before publishing my father’s obituary in Watchdog, with its matter of fact discussion of Mum’s mental illness, I had to first write to my two nephews and two nieces and tell them about their grandmother’s mental illness, with its small chance of being hereditary. Their mother, my late sister, had (for her own reasons, which I respected) never done so.

There have been other deaths, some documented in Watchdog, and some not. Even our last cat died (of feline AIDS, a horrible bloody thing), thus ending my 23 years of continuous, and usually multiple, cat ownership. And my splendid old bike wobbled its last, presenting the repair man with a cracked frame once too often. I am now reduced to the indignity of riding a mountain bike that had been left to languish in the ignominy of our leaky back shed for a decade. It’s been one of those bloody years.

But it hasn’t all been death and metal fatigue. At the currently fashionable age of 54, I’ve become a (surrogate) father. By choice I’ve never had kids (I had the necessary adjustment made a quarter of a century ago), but am perfectly happy with this new reality. It arises from Becky’s sponsorship of her oldest niece while Katharine goes to university here and lives with us. So I find myself suddenly responsible for a young woman (she’s turned 18 since being with us). She comes from good working class activist stock – her father is a grassroots union official at a major TNC hotel in Manila. Because of his union activities, he was one of several such unionists suspended without pay for six months in 2004. The family had to get by as best they could, as there is no welfare system in the Philippines (PSNA did a bit of fundraising for the suspended unionists). She’s been no trouble and is good fun to have around. It was definitely a novelty to be asked to proofread an essay on Japanese Noh drama. Another one of her essays, in Mass Communications, made extensive use of Bill’s 39 page magnum opus on the ownership of the NZ news media (you’ll find it on the CAFCA Website). And I’d better make the best of it, as Becky has grand plans to bring out the rest of her not inconsiderable number of nephews and nieces. That should keep us going for several decades, as Katharine’s mother has just had her latest baby this year.

Getting Katharine here proved not to be straightforward (but then, what is?). Becky went up to the Philippines in June (her second trip home in six months) planning on spending a fortnight there and bringing Katharine back (the kid had never been in an airport, let alone on a plane. She had never left her home island, least of all her country). But they got the runaround from NZ Immigration officials at the NZ Embassy in Manila, and Becky ended up having to spend a third, unpaid, week up there to try and sort it out. But no visa was to be forthcoming. Now, I’ve dealt with these bastards before when visas have been refused (once for a family visitor, the other for a touring speaker hosted by PSNA). And twice I’ve got those refusals reversed. This time I decided not to endanger my own foofoo valve but to “go through the proper channels”. I approached our MP, Labour’s Tim Barnett, for help – within a couple of days he and his staff at Christchurch Central were on the job and the chastened Embassy issued Katharine with a goldplated visa good for three years, just in time for her to catch the plane to Christchurch and to enrol at Canterbury. I maintain my perfect strike record in dealing with recalcitrant, lazy and incompetent Immigration bureaucrats. Don’t mess with Uncle Murray.

Campaigns And Events

Exactly as with 2004, there has been one central theme and activity to CAFCA’s work in the past year. In November 2003, the Government announced a review of all aspects of the overseas investment regime. This was conducted behind closed doors by officials, headed by Treasury, with their own distinct ideological agenda. There was token consultation – a Treasury official holidaying in Christchurch over Christmas 2003 condescended to visit Bill Rosenberg at his home to solicit our views (and then he complained about having to break his holiday, at an officials’ meeting in Wellington). The Government tried to keep the review secret but we thwarted that, courtesy of a patriotic whistleblower who leaked the details to us. The stated purpose of the review was to bring in a new Overseas Investment Act to further liberalise that regime. The details of that new Act, which came into force in August 2005, were the subject of the cover story of every consecutive Watchdog from December 2003 to August 2005 inclusive.

From the outset CAFCA has warned that this review/Bill/Act contains more threats than opportunities. The latter lie in its recognition of strong public opposition to the relentless sale of prime rural land to foreigners, and we have played no small part in that opposition. So it introduced measures to make some land purchases a bit harder. Not to actually stop them, just make them a bit harder. The former lies in its measures to make transnational corporate takeovers even easier and subject to less official scrutiny.

For the past year, as with the previous one, our campaigning on this has consisted of getting out information, and lobbying. Not only via Watchdog but also through a regularly updated leaflet, written by committee member, Joe Hendren. We have made this available both in hard copy and online. Over the past two years, many thousands of hard copies have been distributed to a wide variety of other groups and inserted in the mailouts of a number of publications. In addition, this year we produced two postcards for people to succinctly register their opposition to it, one to go to an MP of their choice and the other to Michael Cullen, whose brainchild it was. We supplied orders for thousands and thousands of these in the first few months of the year. For example, 2,400 of each of them were posted out to Green Party members (which involved a special printing job to meet the exact size specifications for a Green mailout).

All year I have been regularly updating and publicising our analysis of this Bill/Act, mainly by e-mail. We did our most intense political lobbying for several years – we drummed up numbers of people to make a submission opposing it and some of them to personally present their submission to the Finance and Expenditure Select Committee. Bill wrote the definitive submission (58 pages) and went to Wellington to present it on our behalf. I personally briefed one Labour MP twice and we regularly dealt with the Greens, both on and off the record (many’s the time that Rod Donald rang up to discuss aspects of this and other matters of interest to CAFCA). We held one public meeting on the subject, just before Christmas 2004. Precisely because of its timing, it was not well attended. Bill spoke and I chaired it, plus I ended up presenting Sue Newberry’s speech as she was unable to attend.

This long campaign over two years has meant plenty of media coverage for CAFCA. I’ve done numerous interviews with newspapers, radio and TV, both at the local and national level, with both mainstream media and specialist ones, such as iwi and student and community access radio stations. And we have been successful in getting our material directly into the media. Earlier this year, I had an article published in the Press opposing the Bill. They ran the whole article but stuck a meaningless title on it. However that doesn’t prefigure a new Golden Age of me writing regularly for the Press . I was initially contacted because they’d been told that I’d be the man to write an article critical of the monarchy (to coincide with a visit by Prince Charles). I told them that it was not my speciality, put them in touch with someone who did write a much better anti-monarchy article than I could have, and took the opportunity to talk the Perspective page editor into accepting an article from me on the Bill. He hasn’t been in touch again, so normal service has resumed. It was only the second time that I’ve ever been invited to write anything for the Press (the other one was a book review, years ago). But that one article was read by a lot of people, such as the respectable pinstriped lawyer and ex-All Black with whom I hold learned discussions about rugby when we meet whilst collecting our mail at the Postal Centre. I’d never mentioned politics to him in the several years of these conversations; he raised the subject, saying that he’d read the article and that a lot of New Zealanders would agree with us (although admitting that he was in a compromised position himself, regularly dealing with the OIC for clients who were involved in deals involving foreign land purchases).

In the past two election years, 2002 and 1999, I have done a national speaking tour. Our campaign on the Bill/Act provided an ideal focus for another one this year but my father’s terminal health and the fact that, as an only child and his only surviving family member, I was responsible for him, ruled that out. I had been away for a fortnight in October 2004 (accompanying Marie Hilao-Enriquez on her national speaking tour) but his health had declined precipitously since then, and he was staying alive by sheer pigheadedness alone. He died on February 1 but that was by then too late, as it takes several months to organise a national speaking tour. If left too late into the year, it would have been impossible because a lot of our members and supporters were busy with the election campaigns of their various parties.

However I did make one brief foray outside Christchurch. In February I flew to Napier for a couple of days, to speak at a public meeting organised by the Hawkes Bay Greens (the Greens ran their own national petition against land sales to foreigners). It was an excellent meeting, attended by about 80 fired up locals. The other speakers were Rod Donald (the first time he and I had ever spoken together – sadly it will also be the last time) and a couple of local speakers (one from the successful campaign to save the iconic Cape Kidnappers gannet sanctuary from a US billionaire). I’ve only ever spoken in Napier once before, on my 1999 speaking tour. This time, unlike 1999, I did several media interviews and Maori TV turned up to film the meeting (I haven’t seen a TV network do that for years). CAFCA picked up several new members from that flying visit. It was balm for the soul to sit and listen while one of the speakers (who is both a member and a local Councillor) held aloft his copy of Watchdog, whilst singing the praises of both it and CAFCA.

GATT Watchdog was responsible for the 2004 Roger Award but CAFCA organised the event to announce the winners. This was held in Christchurch for the first time since 2000. Despite bad weather, we got 80 odd people to it and we had a great night. I was MC – the programme included a singer (literally our next door neighbour), a 20 minute preview of “The Last Resort”, a documentary being made about land issues, including sales to foreigners (Bill and I were among those interviewed). Bill was the keynote speaker (which meant that this was actually CAFCA’s second, and better attended, Christchurch public meeting about the Overseas Investment Bill). Sue Newberry was able to make it to this one and she presented her Financial Analysis of the winner, Telecom, by means of a PowerPoint presentation. We flew down the Chief Judge, John Minto, from Auckland to announce the winners. It got pretty extensive media coverage, both on the News and Business pages of a number of major papers (the Press even included its first ever photo of the repellently beautiful Award itself), and led to a furious reaction from several finalists. We also got our first ever letter of complaint from a Minister – Jim Anderton. He wrote to us on behalf of one of the winners, Ernslaw One, a Malaysian forestry TNC (that spun off into a story all of its own). I did quite a few media interviews, both print and radio (everything from Radio New Zealand’s Business News to student and iwi stations, from daily papers to specialist business magazines). Indeed looking back through my de facto diary (my fortnightly invoice book), the 2004 Roger Award accounted for the biggest number of media interviews that I did on any subject this year, some taking place months after the event. The Roger Award has become firmly established in the national consciousness. The most heartening thing about this year’s media coverage was that it quoted from the Judges’ Report , not just my (of necessity) once over lightly press release announcing the winners. That means that journalists were actually seeking out, reading and quoting the much more detailed Report , which Bill puts online as soon as the winners are announced. That’s exactly what we want to happen.

CAFCA has had a lot of media coverage this year, and not only because of the Overseas Investment Bill/Act or the Roger Award. The Press has sought me out for comment on subjects ranging from an English-owned luxury lodge that went bust to my opinion of the Sydney-based scion of the Rothschilds who has bought himself a Banks Peninsula bay. A letter I wrote to the Press provided the basis of a fullpage feature on what would happen if Comalco closed its Bluff aluminium smelter. Bill featured on the lead item on TVNZ’s OneNews one night, on a story about Carter Holt Harvey. I did a Radio NZ interview on the same subject. Most of these interviews involve land sales to foreigners, and they’re not only from NZ media – a few months ago I was rung by BBCTV Australia (they were sending a reporter over the next week and wanted information on controversial land sales to foreigners). In November I was interviewed by TV3 News, the New Zealand Herald and the National Business Review about the first ever foreign land purchaser to be convicted following prosecution by the OIC. But the media interest is not confined to the issue of land sales. Commercial radio rang me up one weekend afternoon to record my reaction to a story involving foreign ownership of banks; when I was shouted lunch by the Australasian editor of the UK-based monthly, New Internationalist, during one of her whistlestop visits to NI’s NZ distribution office in Christchurch, she also wanted to pick my brains about banks (each issue of that magazine is devoted to a particular theme).

The OIC continues to provide us with a constant source of material for press releases – most recently we made it onto the Business page of the Press and Dominion Post, plus the Stuff Website, with our revelation that the OIC had not rubberstamped the $1.7 billion takeover of Contact Energy by Origin of Australia (one of the biggest deals of 2004). The OIC thanked us for drawing it to their attention and retrospectively approved it, saying that it had been a mere “administrative oversight”. This was too much for the media to ignore and they ran several stories on it, chasing down who was responsible for what the OIC admitted was an illegal takeover, at least until they did rubberstamp it. It was also picked up the Alliance, now an extra-Parliamentary party, which was campaigning on the electricity issue. One of its Co-Leaders publicly proclaimed himself to be a CAFCA member (I’m not sure how many votes that got for the party).

Mind you, not all of the media approaches come to anything. I was invited to do a regular fortnightly interview on an iwi radio station, starting midyear. There was a copious electronic correspondence setting it up. And then – absolutely nothing. I have no idea what happened, I never heard from the person again. More’s the pity, but I’ve always had a great run with Maori radio, it has provided a forum for some of the longest and most sympathetic interviews that I’ve ever done. Fascinating when you consider that CAFCA is a Christchurch-based pakeha organisation.

Apart from the Napier trip, there have been other speaking engagements. In the space of a few days in September I spoke at an Alliance public meeting on electricity privatisation and to a Development Studies class at the University of Canterbury (the latter was devoted to the history and work of CAFCA itself, rather than the issues we espouse, which made for a different sort of talk to the usual). In December I was one of two guest speakers to addres the Alliance’s national conference, in Christchurch.

Networking continues to be our priority and preferred modus operandi, particularly on big campaigns such as that against the Overseas Investment Bill/Act. And that means that we have a bigger pool of people and expertise with which to work. We don’t just offer moral support either – this year we have made modest donations, big and small, to groups ranging from the Whangapoua Environmental Protection Society (for its inspiring and victorious fight against the Malaysian-owned sawmill that will now not be built in its part of the Coromandel Peninsula) to Peace Movement Aotearoa (to co-sponsor the National Peace Workshops) and to ABC, for the Waihopai spybase campaign. We have strong working relationships with a number of organisations throughout the country and overseas. Networking is one of our strengths.

All this was on top of our usual CAFCA work, which is itself on top of humdrum administrative work. Many years ago, the late Owen Wilkes said that we must be the only group in NZ which still has fortnightly committee meetings (there’s at least one other – ABC). They are as regular as clockwork and indispensable to CAFCA’s work. Those meetings are both very thorough and very democratic – everything is discussed and decided on, they are not just there to rubberstamp the decisions of me, the paid worker. Quite the opposite. At every one of those meetings, there is an agenda item where we discuss what my priorities will be for the next fortnight.

I pay tribute to my fellow committee members - Bill Rosenberg, Joe Hendren, John Ring and Reg Duder. Liz Griffiths continues to do the thankless but absolutely vital job of bookkeeping. And remember, I’m the only one who gets paid. Everyone is very busy, with lots of things going on in their lives – I’ve already mentioned the demands of Bill’s union work, which regularly takes him out of town and occasionally overseas.

Future Activities

For the past two years, we’ve devoted our energies to the campaign on the Overseas Investment Bill/Act. Indeed this year, for the first time in several years, the committee did not hold its annual strategy meeting, because it was already plainly obvious to us what our top priority was. We played no role in the election campaign proper, because that two year long campaign was our election campaign as far as we were concerned. Apart from a couple of the smaller parties, the Greens and New Zealand First, nobody raised the issue of foreign control in the official election campaign. The issues that were contested in that campaign could most charitably be described as lightweight. The (ridiculous) shape of the new Government doesn’t make much difference to us. CAFCA has been fighting this issue, in all its manifestations, for 30 years, under both Labour and National governments. We were born under a Labour government. CAFCA has spanned the Prime Ministerships of Rowling, Muldoon, Lange, Palmer, Moore, Bolger, Shipley and Clark. The 2005 election was an old fashioned two horse race, and the only difference between Labour and National on our issue is one of degree. The 2005 Overseas Investment Act is entirely the work of this Labour government, with Michael Cullen as its champion. So, for us, the election result was here nor there, it’s business as usual.

The Roger Award goes from strength to strength with each passing year. It has become well established, not only within the movement but also in the media and the general public consciousness. It is our turn to organise the 2005 Award. We will continue to be an integral part of the national and global campaigns to fight all the various manifestations of globalisation, from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to the bewildering array of bilateral free trade deals being entered into by the Government. The WTO Summit Meeting was in Hong Kong in December. Bill was there, both as an official observer and attending the international activities opposing it. He was representing his union, the Association of University Staff.

“Globalisation” = “corporate globalisation” = imperialism and that goes to the heart of our reason for being. The major global issue of this year, and stretching into the future, is nakedly violent American imperialism and warmongering. But they have discovered how easy it is to “liberate” a country and how hard it is to occupy it, let alone manage to extricate themselves. With every passing day Iraq becomes more and more like Vietnam, the last great debacle for US imperialism. It’s not on that scale yet (58,000 Americans died in Vietnam; Iraq has accounted for 2,000 plus, and counting) but it’s getting there. As with all past occupiers and their global propaganda machines, those putting their lives on the line to fight the occupiers of their country are slandered as “terrorists”. “Patriots” is the correct term. And that war is exacting a huge cost on the US Empire, in terms of dead and wounded, in terms of the billions wasted in fighting it, in terms of national morale (it’s always good to see imperial arrogance get a kick in the guts), and in terms of that corrupt and bungling Empire’s total inability to look after its own people, as evidenced by the disgrace that is New Orleans. I take my hat off to the Iraqi Resistance.

Even Afghanistan, which should have been a pushover, is proving too difficult for the US. The Government has avoided the swamp of Iraq but supplied our “crack” troops to do the bidding of the Yanks in Afghanistan. That “little” war is hotting up considerably, and the best thing New Zealand could do is get the hell out of there. We cannot ignore the biggest issue facing the world. CAFCA actively supports the anti-imperialist struggle in a number of practical ways. 30 years ago we grew out of the anti-war, anti-bases movement, and we maintain that continuity. For instance, we put money into ABC’s protest action at Waihopai and we help to publicise it. Waihopai is NZ’s single biggest contribution to all and any of America’s wars. We have exposed Iraq war corporate profiteers in New Zealand, be they local branches of TNCs (such as the ANZ Bank) or NZ companies.

Our core issue is foreign control, in all its manifestations. Governments come and go but the reality is that TNCs control the economy, so this is not a problem that will solved through Parliamentary means (although that doesn’t mean we ignore the political process, far from it. But it’s certainly not the be all and end all). It needs grassroots organisations to educate and mobilise people to take back what has been stolen from us. That is the role of CAFCA. And we're more necessary than ever, because our issue is centre stage. Nor is it only a single issue, as it permeates all aspects of people's daily lives. So there's no shortage of things to be done. The only problem is prioritising them. We intend to continue giving it our all, and we know that we can count on your continued active support. Morale is high, tempered with realism. We know what we're up against. But the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Foreign Control Watchdog, P O Box 2258, Christchurch, New Zealand/Aotearoa. December 2005.