Once a year 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 that invoice book is essential annual reading. It is fascinating to be reminded of just what I’ve done, and what has happened, in the preceding 12 months. As evidence of the aging process, it also records the odd thing of which I have absolutely no memory. But it’s there in writing, so I must have done it.

2005/06, as usual, has been a very busy year. Whereas CAFCA spent the previous two years solidly campaigning on one central issue (the Overseas Investment Act), this last year has been a more “normal” one. Although, once again, we got heavily involved in a spontaneous local campaign (with national implications), in reaction to a proposal to sell a major public asset, namely the Lyttelton Port Company. The Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) also had a more “normal” year, going back to the Waihopai spybase for the first time in a couple of years. And, wearing my Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA) hat, I did more political lobbying, awareness raising, media work and fundraising than ever before. This wasn’t to organise a speaking tour by a Filipino activist or to send Kiwis to the Philippines, but was in response to the ever worsening political and human rights crisis that besets that country.

The 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 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. The majority of our members have supplied us with their e-mail addresses, so they hear from us more often than the rest. I hasten to add that the latter 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.

However, rest assured, there is one annual function where snail mail is absolutely vital and that is the membership renewal payments, the overwhelming majority of which arrive as cheques (or cash in a few cases. A few hardy regulars pay in cash in person, some coming to the house to do so). We don’t publicise our bank account details as a matter of course but are happy to provide them upon request, if members prefer to deposit it directly into the account.

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. We get all sorts of inquiries and approaches as a result of our Website. One recent example – a California private investigator wanted our help in locating an American purchaser of NZ rural land that he had found among the Overseas Investment Office (OIO) decisions there (for the record we didn’t help, simply referring him to the Office. He can do his own dirty work).

And if not via our own Website, we can be found by Google search in all manner of other sites. For instance, I did a phone interview in August with the London editor of a new glossy magazine aimed at the UK’s expatriate Kiwi population. The subject was rural land sales to foreigners and she told me that she had found us in a recent New Zealand Herald article on the possible sale offshore of Pakatoa Island in Hauraki Gulf. As a London Aucklander missing the sea, beaches and boats, that resonated with her and she came to me for comment. 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). One of my jobs is to administer that list, which is fairly undemanding. It’s been a while since we gave Taking Control the attention it deserves, and it basically just chugs along.

The Joys Of Technology

Electronic communications technology now rules my life (I know that I’m not alone in this). We’ve had broadband for more than a year now, which enables high speed Internet access. High speed is a relative term and I speak from experience. Plain Communications, our Internet Service Provider (ISP) is a small, Christchurch-based company, which contracts its broadband services from Telecom. Conversion to broadband, in 2005, led to bulk 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 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 (as an anti-spam measure). Plain could offer no solution and we ourselves only fashioned a partial one by getting a second e-mail address (but that doesn’t work for the CAFCA e-list, which has too many recipients. So, I can literally ride my bike into the city, do my business and come back to find it still processing the bulk mailout to that list). So that’s our, indirect, experience with Telecom’s broadband. There was a brief recent period of respite when technical problems led Plain to have to swap to another server and suddenly everything went out very fast. But we now seem to be back into slow motion.

On the other hand, as part of Telecom’s forced unbundling this year Plain cut our monthly broadband bill and has twice increased the capacity – the catch was a non-negotiable condition that all our toll calls must be via Telecom (or our broadband bill would go up). Telecom is still very much into bundling, or in our case, rebundling (our toll calls had gone through TelstraClear, to whom we had to bid adieu).

We’ve had to endure a couple of crashes this year. The ripsnorting southerly in June that blanketed Canterbury in the heaviest snow for many decades also cut off the power to most of Auckland for a day. Ironically, it was the Auckland crisis not the Christchurch one that buggered Plain, which has vital equipment in the Sky Tower. It went offline for a couple of days and we went with it. Earlier in the year I couldn’t use the computer for anything, online or offline, for several days because of our first ever hardware failure. That led to the first ever visit by a computer repair man (who, to his great embarrassment, had to ask me for a very low tech wire coat hanger when he discovered that he’d locked himself out of the company car). That left me twiddling my thumbs and discovering the joys of daytime movies while I waited. Even our antediluvian dot matrix printer had to be taken away by an even older repair man (the young guys have never seen the likes of our old printer before) because I literally gummed up the works when labels got inextricably jammed in it. Machinery, you’ve got to love it.

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. It was Robert who rang to tell me the magic formula for getting back online after their Sky Tower blackout – to turn my broadband router off and on. He told me that he doesn’t why it works but it does (and it did). 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.

Healthy Bank Account

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 (those infamous but unavoidable fire engine red slips stapled to the cover of Watchdog) 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, I 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 all sorts of events and gatherings (including funerals and my own birthday party).

The first few weeks after we mail out the Membership Due slips are when most of the money comes in. This year, it was five weeks from the mailout to the Annual General Meeting. In that time, we banked $6,450, which is extremely good and better than 2005 at the comparable time. In fact, the totals in the first few post-mailout weeks of 2004, 05 and 06 are well up on the years immediately before, and reflect increased financial support despite a lower membership. So that is most gratifying. CAFCA is in a sound financial position which is the envy of other similar size organisations.

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. 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 regular campaigns such as the Roger Award, plus substantially help to finance special campaigns such as the Keep Our Port Public coalition, of which CAFCA was (and is) a leading part.

Membership Drive

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). Membership is 490, at the time of writing, which is higher than a year ago. But we only achieved that by putting work and money into it. In the recent past it had been steady at just below 500 (the highest it has ever been was around 550). So, when we removed the latest batch of non-payers this year, we were starting from a lower base, and the total dropped to around 420. In 2006 the committee held its first strategy meeting in two years and decided to devote some concerted attention to recruiting new members, for the first time in several years. So, we contacted a range of other groups and publications with whom we have recently worked and asked if they would include either a CAFCA flyer or article in their newsletter. We had positive responses from the Aoraki ( Canterbury) Greens, the Maritime Union, the Rail and Maritime Transport Union, the National Distribution Union, Pacific Ecologist and the New Internationalist magazines (the latter accounted for our most successful ever recruiting drive when we last included a leaflet a few years back. We put a leaflet into their August 2006 issue which was devoted to the very timely topic of banks. They highlighted that the “prestigious” Roger Award had been most recently jointly won by BNZ and Westpac, and gave a plug to CAFCA. The response wasn’t as big this time but still very worthwhile).

As a result of that effort and expense (we recognise the central capitalist principle that you have to spend money to make money) we’ve picked up a good number of new members so far, plus had some former ones rejoining from our first ever mailout targeting ex-members. Even when we don’t get any new members as a result of a mailout (I’m not aware of anyone joining from the above unions), such mailouts are an excellent awareness raising exercise to audiences that we can’t otherwise reach, to people who have never heard of us. But building the membership requires our constant attention. It’s worth emphasising that although our membership may be down on recent years, they’re all financial members and as I’ve already said, they’re sending us more money than when we had more members.

We’re printing more copies of each Watchdog, nearly 550 for this issue (and we never have any spares left of any issue, they all go, we can’t keep up with demand). Not only because membership is up but because our old friends at Trade Aid put in an order this year for 30 copies of each issue, to supply one to each of their shops throughout the country. And they insisted on paying top dollar too. Watchdog wholesales to bookshops at $3 (retail is $5) and that’s what we offered. But Trade Aid paid $20 per shop (i.e. an actual annual membership), which was very generous indeed of them. It’s good to have that kind of support.

New Committee Members

At the strategy meeting we decided to address the question of finding new committee members. Bill Rosenberg and I have been on it since the Big Bang; John Ring and Reg Duder since the early 90s. Our most recent member was Joe Hendren, who has been a most valued part of the committee and writer for Watchdog for the past few years (plus he dropped the average age by several decades). This year we asked two people to join the committee and both accepted – Jeremy Agar and Lynda Boyd. Jeremy has been Watchdog’s incredibly prolific reviewer for several years and a valued member of the broader CAFCA team (those who regularly help at mailouts). Lynda, who comes to us from the Anti-Bases Campaign committee, is our first woman committee member this century ( Liz Griffiths has been our bookkeeper for many years but left the committee in the late 90s), and drops the average age even further (she is in her early 20s, whereas Joe has shuffled into his 30s). Lynda is a union organiser and spent the last few months of 2006 working for Unite in Auckland, organising their McDonald’s campaign. However, just as she rejoins us from the Auckland union scene, we are about to lose Joe Hendren to it, and permanently, sad to say. He got the newly created job of National Distribution Union Researcher and after several months of doing it from Christchurch was summonsed to Head Office. He will be much missed and has been a great asset during his several years on the committee (but he’ll still be writing for Watchdog). But to those of our members (and there are a few) who bewail that CAFCA is run by middleaged men who have been there nearly as long as Ken Barlow has been in Coronation Street, do not despair just yet. We may solve that eternal conundrum of Left groups, the Problem of Succession.

The CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my income, is in the healthiest state it’s ever been. There’s more than $12,000 in the operating cheque account (still held at Westpac, for totally pragmatic reasons), and that was before Bob had banked a $1,000 donation from a very generous member. There’s nearly another $9,000 on term deposit at Kiwibank. There are 50 regular pledgers, with three new ones having started very recently (cancelling out three who have stopped, two of whom had been doing it from the outset, in 1991), and a flow of donations, large and small. It’s been so good in the past year that I have been given two pay rises, firstly to $11 per hour gross, then to the present $12.50 (plus it pays all of my phone rental and nearly all of my broadband access fee). This means that I have finally surpassed the rate Becky started on when she commenced work with her employer, back in 1993. The Account 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. 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.

I don’t go seeking outside funding but, in November, it most unexpectedly came to the door (quite literally). On a perfectly ordinary evening my fiendishly cunning wife had persuaded me that we were going out to a work do and that I should get respectably dressed. Then, just as I thought we were going out, a number of colleagues and friends turned up at the back door, led by Bill and Bob. I wondered if I’d been made redundant and they’d come for the keys. A stranger with them proceeded to start making a speech at, and about, me. It soon transpired that she was from neither This Is Your Life nor Mucking In (a pity, as the back yard could do with some work) but from the Orangi Kaupapa Trust, which plays Fairy Godmother, dispensing gifts ($5,000 in my case) to “worthy causes” working in the community. You can’t apply to them, and they don’t disclose the nominator(s). Bill told me that they approached him several months earlier and Becky got roped into the cover story late in the piece. I was rendered speechless (only temporarily, mind). The one condition is that the money must be used on the family. A holiday would be nice – it’s been many years since I’ve had one. That is the one major disadvantage to being self-employed and sole charge – finding the time for a break. I just hope that the money is not from the Exclusive Brethren and that I don’t end up starring in Nicky Hager’s next book.

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’s New Look

As I say every year, 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 two Christchurch ones and one in Wellington, because it’s a lot of hassle for very little return. In fact a third Christchurch bookshop cancelled its order this year, ending an eight year relationship, because Watchdog did not feature on its best sellers list. But, on the bright side, another Christchurch bookshop which has stocked a single copy of each issue for several years without ever selling one finally astonished both its manager and me by doing so. That added $3 to the bank account, so you can see that we’re not talking big money here. Although Watchdog does turn up in unexpected places. I was recently informed that my local second hand bookshop (which I’ve never graced with my presence) had a respectable selection of issues in stock.

The major Watchdog news is that it has undergone a makeover and this is the first issue of the new look. After many years of telling us that it looks boring, we finally gave Leigh Cookson, our long suffering layout editor, her head and asked her to submit sample of proposed new designs. She did several and you’re reading what we decided on. The first thing to catch readers’ attention is the new look cover. Leigh actually proposed something much more bold and colourful but that was ruled out by questions of expense (apart from anything else). Even this relatively modestly changed design had to be compromised. Her original plan would have involved an increase of more than 1,000% in the printing costs of the cover alone, and that would have had to be inevitably passed on to members in the form of substantially increased annual membership costs. So we rejected it. The compromise means that we continue to have our blank covers printed by one printer and the rest of every issue printed by another printer. If the latter printer had to print the colour covers for each issue that would have caused the astronomical cost increase, as it’s very expensive for them to do colour printing. As this is the first issue of the new look, the verdict is not yet in and we must stress that it is a work in progress. For it to work properly as envisaged by Leigh, there need to be changes not only in the layout but a reduction in the sheer volume of copy. It remains to be seen whether I and the other regular Watchdog writers (discursive essayists and pontificators all) have the editing and editorial discipline to do that. The omens are not good, as this is my longest ever annual Report.

The new look is primarily being done for our own purposes, to improve Watchdog’s appearance and to hopefully make it more readable for a wider audience. It is not being done to make it more bookshop-friendly. Even if that happened, we would still need to deal with distribution issues and, speaking from the experience of being involved with other publications that gave a high priority to bookshop sales, that creates more hassles all of its own. We are also very mindful that those who find Watchdog “heavy” are more likely to do so because of its content, rather than its layout. At the Waihopai spybase protest camp in January, I took the opportunity to ask one ex-member why he no longer subscribes. “Too bloody depressing” was his immediate answer. What could I say to that?

One reason that we didn’t go for a more elaborate and colourful cover (apart from the minor matter of vastly increased cost) was that we would need to find a really good photo or graphic each time. Mainstream magazines obviously do so but Watchdog doesn’t have the resources to compete with them, and doesn’t see it as a priority to do so. I always remember one of the editors of a former venerable (and completely non-illustrated) Left magazine telling me that if people wanted to see pictures they could stick their heads out the window. Watchdog is rather further along from that Taliban approach to illustrations but we’re never going to be a glossy. We’ve come a long way since the Gestetnered days of yore and have already had one major makeover (in 1997) which took us to our present printers and gave us the design that lasted up until the previous issue.

It is now even better looking than before and the most extensively illustrated that it’s ever been. But foreign control is not an easy subject to illustrate (which is why TV news and current affairs struggles to give it any coverage, apart from picturesque high country stations or coastal properties for sale, which gives the journalists the perk of a trip out in the networks’ helicopters). 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 OIO material that fills up a great chunk 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.

The Journal Of Record On Foreign Control

Quite deliberately, every issue for two years (2003-05 inclusive) 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). This issue includes an update after the Act’s first year, and it is predictably horrifying. We get no satisfaction in saying: “We told you so”.

A substantial chunk of every issue remains Bill Rosenberg’s meticulous chronicling and analysing of the monthly decisions by the OIO. That’s has been his main regular contribution this year, although he has also contributed a couple of articles on other subjects. Bill is very active in his union, the Association of University Staff and is a member of the International Committee of the NZ Council of Trade Unions. Most recently the Government has appointed him to a two year post as a Tertiary Education Commissioner, which takes him out of town, primarily to Wellington, on a regular basis. I’m not sure if the protocol is to address him as Doctor Commissioner Bill or the other way around. He makes no secret of the fact that he wants to cut back on the inordinate amount of time that he devotes to writing up the OIO material, something that he’s done since 1989. Funnily enough, he’d like to have a life and spend more of it with his family. 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.

The amount of writing that I get done for Watchdog varies from issue to issue, mainly depending on time and how busy I am with other things. 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. For the August issue I found myself with enough time to write detailed articles on the Lyttelton Port Company, Telecom, banks and tobacco transnationals. That was the most non-obituary writing that I’d done for some time and I was very satisfied with it. Judging by the feedback we received, so were you. For this issue, I’ve written about subjects ranging from Toll to Bill Sutch and the Roger Award. There is never enough time to write all that I’d like but the beauty of a regular newsletter is that there is always another chance with the next issue.

We have a number of other regular writers now, apart from Bill and I. Joe Hendren is a valued one and his specialised writings on Toll earned him his first ever appearance in the mainstream media very recently, namely being quoted in a Listener article. 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 an elected member of one of the Banks Peninsula community boards, which are the newest members of the Christchurch City Council. Jeremy’s lengthily discursive essays in the form of interwoven book and film reviews have become a favourably commented upon feature of Watchdog in the past few years.

Watchdog is grateful to feature the writings of two of this country’s most high profile academic activists. Jane Kelsey has given us several articles (or submissions) on “free trade” matters in the past year, including in this issue. Sue Newberry has moved from Christchurch to Sydney University but is still writing for us. In my previous Report I detailed how, at the last minute, we had to pull her article on Transpower from a 2005 issue because she needed to check and rewrite it. That duly appeared in the April 2006 issue. Now she’s turned her X ray vision onto the accounting practices of Westpac but, for various reasons, she had to postpone that from this issue. We look forward to it, and I hope Westpac does too.

We’ve had the services of other writers, such as John Minto, Bob Leonard, Frances Mountier, Lindy Nolan, Kate Dewes, Sue Bradford, Maire Leadbeater, Abi King–Jones and Lynda Boyd whose writings ranged from articles to a book review and obituaries. I am particularly pleased at the increasing number of women writing for us. 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. After many years, Leigh has finally persuaded us to upgrade the design and modernise the look. The result is what you see in front of you. It’s not the full psychedelic version that was one of her suggestions but she can live with it as it is.

Watchdog prides itself on being a newsletter, publishing news and analysis that you won’t find elsewhere. We decided when the US invaded Iraq 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. So there’s always something about Iraq or the bigger subject of American imperialism in every issue, mostly in the reviews in the past year. And Watchdog is even better value for money than the previous year, on sheer size alone - the three issues since my last Report total 236 pages, more than 2004. 80 pages are the printers’ limit, so sometimes I have to leave articles out or hold them until the next issue (which has happened with this issue).

It’s not all depressing facts and “too bloody depressing” 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. They humanise what can be a daunting and impersonal subject. 2005 was a shocking year for deaths and, consequently, there were plenty of obituaries (three in the December 05 issue alone). I never expected to have to write one for Rod Donald. They provide an opportunity to honour an individual, tell his or her story and I only regret that there’s not room for more such stories. The Deaths In The Family section affords each person a couple of lines. When asked to provide those lines about his mother, Nicky Hager sent his four page funeral eulogy for her which I sincerely hope gets published somewhere, because hers was a fascinating story and her son’s loving tribute was beautifully written.

Websites

We are a well established electronic publisher – 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. 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) is our voice to the world. The site also features Bill’s encyclopaedic writeups of the Overseas Investment Office’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. Bill and I regularly update the Key Facts which are a permanent feature. During the summer silly season, for wont of anything better to do, I e-mailed them to members, the media and the world at large. Judging from the response from both members and journalists, they constituted a revelation (never mind that they can be permanently found on our site). And they have entered the mainstream. For example, a full page and entirely uncritical Press article this year about foreign land ownership tossed in, without feeling the need for any explanation of who or what CAFCA is, that we estimate that foreigners own approximately 7% of New Zealand’s land. CAFCA was the only authority cited on this fact, not the OIO, the Government, the media, academia or any of the think tanks (for the record, we estimate that foreigners own 7% of the commercially productive land, which is a crucial distinction, and even more “bloody depressing”).

Waihopai Spybase Protest

I am co-employed by the Anti-Bases Campaign which, averaged out over a year, takes up less of my time than CAFCA. ABC has been holding protests at the Waihopai spybase since 1988 and we’re not about to stop doing so, despite the usual taunts of “You’ll never close it down” and pointed references to clichés involving barn doors and bolted horses. Precisely the same sort of reactions have been hurled at every movement for social change in New Zealand’s history – “women will never get the vote…this country will never go nuclear-free …you’ll never get smoking out of pubs”, etc, etc. We’ll keep doing it for as long as it takes, and the fact remains that ABC is the only group to organise protests at Waihopai. If we didn’t do it, then it wouldn’t get done. We were last there in 2004. In 2005, we had a change of tactic and targeted both Wellington and the Government Communications Security Bureau’s (GCSB) other spybase, namely Tangimoana. Following our assessment of that at the ABC committee’s annual strategy meeting, we decided to return to Waihopai in January 2006.

Ever since we deliberately changed our tactics away from confrontation and mass arrests (1997 was the last time anyone was arrested at a Waihopai protest), our activities in Blenheim itself and at the base have been very similar from one year to the next – a rally in Seymour Square in central Blenheim, with speakers from ABC, leading Green MPs and representatives from other parties and organisations; followed by a march through town (almost always on the footpath as opposed to the street); a sausage sizzle open to the public back at Seymour Square; then out to the base where Bob Leonard metamorphoses into the highly photogenic Uncle Sam in order to inspect everyone’s Undemocratic Republic of UKUSA* passports as they cross the border onto foreign territory at the base; concluding with a march up to the heavily fortified inner gates and more speeches. There have been some variations – some years have featured a Best Dressed Spy Contest and/or a Spies Picnic at Seymour Square; we have also had video evenings and public meetings in Blenheim, with local, national and international speakers (we’ve had guests from both Australia and Britain over the years). To us, it sometimes feels very much like the same old same old but people never fail to respond positively to it. In short, it may be a formula, but it’s one that’s tried and proven. It works. In the years of mass arrests and confrontations out at the base, we tended to ignore Blenheim, and generated hostility as a result. Now our relationship with the local people and media is very positive. *The UKUSA Agreement is the top secret divvying up of the world for purposes of electronic and signals intelligence gathering by the relevant spy agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ.

With the notable exception of January 2003 – when John Craighead, a Marlborough District Councillor and prominent local Green really got stuck in to mobilising locals to come out and oppose the imminent invasion of Iraq, leading the Marlborough Express to call the resulting march by 250 people the biggest protest that the town had seen since the 1981 Springbok Tour – our activities have attracted around 50 or so people. We had no reason to believe that January 2006 would be any different. One completely unforeseen and tragic event changed that, namely the November 2005 death of Green Co-Leader, Rod Donald (see my obituary of him in Watchdog 110. December 2005, which can be read online at
http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/10/09.htm).

Dedicated To Rod’s Memory

In gratitude to his years of work on the Waihopai campaign, ABC dedicated the January 2006 protest to Rod’s memory. As master of ceremonies (MC) in Blenheim’s Seymour Square, I started the proceedings with a minute’s silence for him. In all our publicity in the final few months before the protest, we urged Green Party members, and all the other people who took part in the outpouring of grief after his death, to come to Waihopai as a practical way to honour his memory and continue his work. The Greens mounted a major publicity effort among their members and particular thanks are due to Rod’s former Parliamentary Executive Secretary, Bronwen Summers (who has since resigned and left Wellington) and Rod’s longtime friend and Banks Peninsula campaign manager, Christine Dann. The result was a significant increase of people at the January 06 protest, boosted by many Greens coming for the first time, including Party Co-Leader, Jeanette Fitzsimons (joined by Russel Norman, who has since been elected the other Co-Leader). Keith Locke MP came again, as he always has done since entering Parliament.

The local (Kaikoura) Greens, headed by their 2005 election candidate and ABC activist, Steffan Browning, organised a memorial planting of native trees at our campsite (they are also dedicated to the late Owen Wilkes, at ABC’s request).The Party took it further and made a full weekend out of it by deciding to hold its annual Picnic for the Planet at our campsite, on the Sunday of the protest weekend, complete with bands, and Jeanette Fitzsimons delivered her annual State of the Planet Address there. This whole extravaganza was organised by Steffan Browning and Christine Dann (sadly, neither she nor her younger sister, ABC Treasurer, Robyn Dann, were able to attend any of the weekend’s activities due to the sudden death of their mother only days beforehand).

This led to us hosting more than 50 people at our camp on the two nights we stayed there (usually we’d be lucky if we got 20 or 30). They came from as far north as Hokianga and as far south as Otago, plus quite a lot of foreigners temporarily resident in NZ. We had nearly 100 on the march through Blenheim and at the base. Apart from that wonderful 2003 turnout (the vast majority of whom were locals that we’ve never seen before or since), this was the biggest Waihopai protest crowd in many, many years. That could all be attributed to one thing – the Rod Factor. As an inveterate publicist and seizer of opportunities par excellence, he would have mightily approved. We know that he was with us in spirit.

New Camp Had To Be Found

There were some other changes this year too. For the first time this century we had to find a new place to camp, as our previous host, Olly Oliver (a sympathetic vineyard owner and producer of Big Balls, that strictly limited line of red wine inspired by the two testicular spybase domes that dominate the outlook from his former Waihopai Valley home) had been defeated by years of consecutive frosts buggering his harvest and had sold up and gone. As I detailed in my 2005 Report, finding a new camp site proved a hassle and took much more of my time than it should have.

But, eventually, we settled on staying in a Department of Conservation camp (at Onamalutu) for the first time ever, which meant that, also for the first time ever, we had to pay to camp. Even though DOC camps are considerably cheaper than commercial camping grounds, the nearly $600 that we paid DOC to camp there for two nights constituted a significant percentage of our expenses and definitely contributed towards ABC incurring a small loss from the weekend’s activities. That said, it is an absolutely beautiful spot, surrounded by magnificent native forest, with some lovely walks. The only downsides that I personally encountered were that, while it was very hot and sunny by day, it proved to be extremely cold at night (I’d hate to camp there in winter) and it came complete with a nest of annoyingly persistent wasps. There is a great irony in it being the site of a grove of memorial native trees for Rod Donald, that most addicted of cellphone addicts – there is no cellphone coverage. This so alarmed some of the other addicts present that they drove to the closest place where they could use their mobiles. The much larger number of people camping with us brought with it the problem of feeding so many people with our usual limited resources. Particular thanks are due to ABC’s youngest committee members, Frances Mountier and Lynda Boyd, who took on numerous practical tasks at very late notice when Robyn Dann had to withdraw due to the death of her mother just days beforehand. They mobilised a willing crew of volunteers from among the campers. And although there is no Blenheim ABC, none of this would have been possible without the very hands-on involvement over many months by both Steffan Browning and Phil Hunnisett, who undertook a multiplicity of tasks in their capacity as ABC’s men in Blenheim. Heartfelt thanks to both of them (and to those who helped them).

Themes: Anti-War & Waihopai Deals NZ Into US Killing Machine

Taking a longer term perspective, there has been a change in emphasis. When we started out and throughout the 90s, the emphasis of the protests was that “Big Brother Is Watching Us” i.e. the threat posed to civil liberties by Waihopai and the GCSB. There was also emphasis on Waihopai’s role in spying on our Asia/Pacific neighbours, such as those waging the life or death struggle for independence in East Timor against the genocidal Indonesian occupiers. Once George Bush became US President and went to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and anywhere else that took his fancy, the emphasis of the protests changed to being explicitly anti-war, stressing that Waihopai is New Zealand’s main contribution to any and all US wars, present and future. It is a US spybase in all but name, and its 24/7 role in gathering intelligence for the US is much more important than any token commitment of NZ military forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, etc. Waihopai compromises our hard won position of having broken the nuclear and military ties with the US; it is part of a 60 year old covert intelligence-gathering network (the top secret UKUSA Agreement) which is a central player in the US war machine and which means that New Zealanders, knowingly or not, have the blood on our hands of the innocent victims of those wars, many of them victims of “faulty intelligence”.

So, in 2006, our visual props dramatically symbolised death – we had 30 adults and kids in white face masks (representing the civilian dead of those wars), some crosses with “Iraq” and “Afghanistan” painted on them (thanks to the Christchurch Catholic Worker group) and some coffins (courtesy of Christchurch Save Animals From Exploitation). The leaflet we handed out to the Blenheim public was illustrated by a photo (which also features on our permanent Waihopai display) of Afghani villagers mourning their children killed by a US air strike arising from just such “faulty intelligence”. All the speakers in Blenheim and at the base hammered this point – indeed, one of the strongest speeches was a spontaneous one made by one of the masked “dead” at the base gates, speaking on behalf of the innumerable all too real dead of those US wars. We also had a couple of new visual props this year, the brain child of Bob Leonard, namely a couple of large white balloons complete with red flashing lights on top (to represent the two huge white domes of the spybase with their aircraft warning lights on top). Unlike the real domes, these ones had “Close Waihopai Spy Base” emblazoned on them. And, also unlike the real domes (unfortunately) one of them disintegrated all by itself.

Lange Papers Reveal Historic Details Of GCSB Spying

There was another factor which led to the 2006 protest having an even higher profile than usual and that was the fortuitous coincidence of the Sunday Star-Times splashing some of the late David Lange’s papers across its front pages the Sunday beforehand, including the GCSB’s inadvertently released1985-86 Annual Report. That sensational revelation had major repercussions – for example, it led to the GCSB Director, Warren Tucker, making the first ever lengthy public defence of his agency’s work and denying claims arising from the Sunday Star-Times expose (basically amounting to “I can’t tell you anything about what we do but trust me, it’s all for your own good”). Tucker’s statement, plus news stories and editorials about it, appeared in several papers on January 31st (my reply to it, on behalf of ABC, “Spy Alliance Must End”, was published in the Press of February 9th and generated a lot of positive response from throughout NZ and overseas). The Sunday Star-Times story was basically too late to drum up any more participants for the protest but it certainly put the issue of GCSB spying smack into the public consciousness just days before Waihopai (ironic really, as that 20 year old report was detailing who was being spied on from the GCSB’s other, older Tangimoana spybase, which has a different function and uses a different method of spying. The report pre-dates Waihopai’s existence or even the announcement that it was going to exist).

And the Sunday Star-Times story had political consequences: while the Government scrambled to find out if former Prime Minister Lange’s papers contained any more secrets that he shouldn’t have had, two of the smaller parties – the Greens and the Maori Party – called for an inquiry into what it had revealed and for the closure of Waihopai. Nothing new about this for the Greens, who have campaigned against Waihopai for nearly as long as ABC has. They have contributed two MPs, including one Co-Leader, to every protest for many years. In 2006 it was Jeanette and Keith instead of Rod and Keith. But the Maori Party is the new kid in Parliament, and is still feeling its feet on all sorts of issues that fall outside its core concerns. So it was gratifying to see that party, in the person of Hone Harawira MP, come out so strongly in the days before the protest. ABC invited him to join us and although he couldn’t make the Saturday activities in Blenheim and at the base (he had a prior commitment to a hui in Wellington), he came to the Onamalutu camp for the Sunday activities. He told us that’d always wanted to join us but, living in Kaitaia, he hadn’t been able to afford it in the past. The free domestic air travel that MPs get solved that problem this year, so we were very pleased to welcome him.

Protests In Blenheim & At The Base

The weekend’s events themselves went very smoothly. On Saturday January 21st we started with a rally, in the blazing heat in Blenheim’s Seymour Square. I was the MC and first speaker. I started proceedings with a minute’s silence for Rod and, I must admit, it gave me goosebumps as I remembered his role as MC at the Best Dressed Spy contest at that very spot several years earlier. The crowd of nearly 100 then formed up, complete with banners, placards, masks, crosses, coffins and balloons, and set off on a footpath tour of central Blenheim. Our first stop was a little unusual, namely the Marlborough District Library. The reason was that it had refused to host our travelling display on the Waihopai spybase (unlike other public libraries), saying that the spies have no right of reply. This issue had generated media coverage of its own. As soon as the Library opened on the Saturday morning, ABC committee members, Bob Leonard and Yani Johanson, had set up the display outside it, so that Blenheim people could see for themselves what the fuss was about. We had hired a small truck (fortunately Phil Hunnisett has the necessary licence) to drive on ahead of our march and be used as a speaking platform at our various stops. So, outside the Library, I clambered aboard and used a megaphone to tell the marchers, library users, staff and the public about the censorship which prevented them from finding out what the sinister blot on their landscape actually does (at the conclusion of the weekend, the display was set up in a central Blenheim shop). We marched on, stopping at two other central Blenheim venues on a very busy summer’s morning, where I spoke to the public. It became apparent that one thing that ABC had overlooked was chants – some hasty improvisation by our young firebrands, Frances Mountier and Lynda Boyd rectified that, revealing Francie to have a most impressive vocal stamina. We returned to Seymour Square where our two other speakers were Green MP, Keith Locke and John Minto of Global Peace and Justice Auckland. Bob Leonard had transformed into Uncle Sam (mystifying one participant, who thought that he was Colonel Sanders) and received a rowdy reception (someone actually threw something at him, I hope that it wasn’t a fried chicken) when he made his standard speech telling us to bugger off.

After our well received sausage sizzle (which always features a choice of vegetarian sausages), we drove in convoy out to the base. Usually Uncle Sam welcomes us onto his territory (as mere mortal Bob Leonard, he had negotiated our access right onto base property, for one hour) but the current base commander wasn’t going to be upstaged, and made a speech to all of us (a first) welcoming us on and telling us to behave. That’s where the hospitality stopped – unlike Rod’s last visit, there were no muffins. Everyone had their Undemocratic Republic of UKUSA passports inspected by Uncle Sam and stamped as we crossed the border, then we all formed up and marched down the road to the forbiddingly locked inner gates. It made for a striking sight in that sunscorched, bleak setting – the banners, placards, masks, coffins and crosses. Outside the gate I was again MC and opening speaker. The Green Leader, Jeanette Fitzsimons was the featured speaker. John Minto spoke again, and Steffan Browning spoke on behalf of Marlborough people opposed to the base. Then we had an open mike and several people spoke, either to the crowd or directly into the base (one, with a most impressive theatrical voice, exhorted them to abandon their jobs and march out, leaving the gates open). Speaker after speaker told of how Waihopai is part of the American killing machine and spies on our near neighbours – for example, veteran Auckland peace and justice activist, Maire Leadbeater, talked about the current dire situation in West Papua (Indonesia’s “new” East Timor) and how Waihopai and the other stations in the network will be spying on independence activists there. As already mentioned, the most moving speech was made by one of the masked ”dead”. In 2004, it was at this point that a group of young Wellington anti-war activists had stripped naked and formed a peace sign on the boiling hot asphalt of the road. There was no such excitement this time, to the disappointment of at least one network TV cameraman who, upon arrival, asked me if there would be any naked women this year (I told him he’d have to make do with the male participant who spent the entire weekend naked, for reasons known only to himself, and who attracted a number of complaints and an order from the Police to cover up in Blenheim, which he did, to the absolute minimum. His bare arse formed the backdrop to a national TV interview with Keith Locke). Of course, Uncle Sam spoke again as well, telling us to bugger off (basically that’s all he ever says when he speaks at Waihopai).

Excellent Media Coverage

Our Waihopai protests always get excellent local and national media coverage and this year was even better than most. There are a number of reasons for that – the issue is a major one with excellent visuals for newspaper photographers and TV cameramen; protests of any kind are a rarity in conservative, provincial Blenheim (by contrast, ABC’s Easter 2005 activities in Wellington and at Tangimoana got virtually no coverage); the time of year – January – is the silly season and we are realistic enough to know that we get that coverage because there aren’t the usual competing stories that obsess the media when Parliament and the Government are in business; the regular involvement of the Green Party, at the highest level, attracts those in the media who specialise in politics and Parliament; and the revelation of the GCSB historic spying details in the Sunday Star-Times days earlier had put the issue to the top of the national agenda. So, this year, we had two national TV networks – TVNZ and Maori TV (the latter’s first time at Waihopai, although they couldn’t find anyone to interview in te reo) – cover the whole range of activities in great detail, meaning that it merited a lengthy and prominently placed item on TVNZ’s One News. There was extensive coverage on several radio networks. John Minto had only just started as a weekly Press columnist and he kicked things off days before the demo with a column headed “Spybase serves US interests” (16/1/06), which concluded: “Later this week I will be joining other New Zealanders in a protest at Waihopai to call for the base to be closed”.

The Marlborough Express ran stories about it before, during and after the event, including a couple of frontpage leads (they love running big photos of Uncle Sam). In fact, the Express felt compelled to “balance” its extensive coverage of the protests by an editorial (23/1/06) entitled “Spy base here to stay”. The other local paper, the Blenheim Sun, also ran several stories. The Christchurch Press has its own reporter in Marlborough and he filed several stories. Indeed Steffan Browning has probably learned the hard way not to give the media any quotes to take out of context. In his speech at the base gate, Steffan said that he thought it was a “bit woeful” that more locals hadn’t taken part. The Press (23/1/06) headlined this as “’Woeful’ turnout in base protest” (it was anything but woeful, being at least twice the size of the usual turnout). There was a Press feature, (20/1/06, “Their neighbours are spies”; also published in the same day’s Dominion Post as “Mysterious valley of the golf balls”) which emphasised that Blenheim and Waihopai locals didn’t know and/or weren’t bothered about what the spybase does. This rather misses the point that Waihopai is fundamentally a national, indeed an international, issue, not a local one. It’s a conservative rural area (it’s been a National stronghold for many years), so we’re not surprised that we don’t get a large local turnout (2003 was the wonderful exception to that rule). On the contrary, ABC is delighted that we get a small but vital band of locals who, year after year, join with their compatriots from one end of the country to the other in protesting at the spybase and calling for its closure. And media coverage this year, which got inextricably mixed in with the revelations arising from the Lange papers, routinely spelled out what the base does for US Intelligence, and matter of factly referred to the UKUSA Agreement (whose existence has never been confirmed by any member government or agency) without prefacing it with “alleged” or “so-called”. Indeed, in his unprecedented public statement defending the GCSB its Director, Warren Tucker, confirmed the Agreement in all but name (Tucker has since quit as GCSB Director, to become the Director-General of the Security Intelligence Service).

Tree Planting For Owen Wilkes

Usually the Waihopai protests finish on the Saturday and all that happens on the Sunday is that we pack up the camp, maybe have a debriefing and then go our separate ways. Because of the Rod Factor, 2006 was different. Sunday January 22nd was a day of activities at Onamalutu – the memorial native tree planting for Rod and Owen Wilkes; music; the Picnic for the Planet and Jeanette Fitzsimons’ annual State of the Planet Address. These were very well attended and were also subject to extensive national and local media coverage. As they were organised by the Greens and not ABC, this is not the appropriate place in which to report them, the Greens have their own outlets in which to do that. But there was one activity on the Sunday morning which was ABC’s doing and that was the memorial tree planting for Owen Wilkes (anyone wishing to remind themselves about Owen can read my obituary of him in Watchdog 109, August 2005, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/09/09.htm).

The tree planting was conducted in typical blazing Marlborough sunshine and a wind strong enough to blow away the speakers’ gazebo at one point. The tree planting organiser, Steffan Browning, had done himself proud and assembled anything up to 20 trees to be planted. It was started with a Maori blessing, music and featured MPs from two parties (Greens and Maori). I spoke about Owen and highlighted the reasons why his memorial should be in Marlborough, namely three former or present bases – Woodbourne, Black Birch and Waihopai. It is also highly appropriate that he be permanently memorialised in a DOC reserve, as he spent years working as a DOC archaeologist (in Waikato) after retiring from the peace movement.

I had assumed that my brief speech would be it as far as Owen was concerned, that as it was organised by the Greens, the rest would be about Rod. I was very pleasantly surprised as speaker after speaker got up to talk at length about both Owen and Rod – Jeanette Fitzsimons, Bronwen Summers, Keith Locke, Richard Suggate and Maire Leadbeater among them. They very much got equal billing. While the musician played on and the sun blazed, dozens of people pitched in to plant the trees. I found it all very moving. And it’s a beautiful permanent setting for such an appropriate memorial for these two Cantabrians who, although they never met and were of different generations, both lived the green life (in Owen’s case) and the green and Green life (in Rod’s case). If you’re in Marlborough, visit their trees at Onamalutu. Unfortunately, DOC won’t agree to a permanent plaque, but you can contact Steffan Browning at greeny25@xtra.co.nz or 021 725655 for directions on how to find them.

After listening to Jeanette’s State of the Planet Address, ABC set out on the long drive home to Christchurch. It had been an extremely successful protest, one of the best ever, and due to the unique mix of events (the celebration which arose from the tragedy of Rod’s death) an unforgettable weekend. Rod certainly would have been right in his element. We did him proud, and we ensured that the spybase remains firmly fixed in the national consciousness. The long running campaign to have it closed has gained its second wind, it is more relevant than ever. As we live in ever more dangerous times (all aboard for the next war on – whom? Iran? Hamas? Hizbollah?), this spybase is more important than ever to the US war machine, it is more compromising than ever to “nuclear free and independent” New Zealand. Waihopai is a blot on the national landscape that must be removed.

We’re Going Back There In January 2007

Because our work is far from done. Once again I’m in the thick of organising all aspects of it, which range from the humdrum logistics (we checked out other campsites before deciding to stick with the DOC reserve) to national publicity and media work. The latter can involve overseas as well as NZ media – I recently did a live phone interview with a Melbourne community radio station. That took me down memory lane. I haven’t been to Melbourne since the 1980s but back then I visited that same station, more than once, for studio interviews on my participation in Australian anti-bases protests. And the bare arsed man from the January 06 protest has told us that he’s coming again, which led to me writing to someone, for the first time in my life, telling him that his attendance is conditional on him keeping his pants on in public. You see everything in this job.

Waihopai Display Has Toured Country

ABC’s Waihopai display has been a great success and I’ve been kept very busy coordinating its movements from one end of the country to the other (it’s been up and back several times). It started in Auckland and Whangarei in late 2005, then came back south for us to take to Blenheim for the Waihopai protest weekend; then on to Nelson Library; Wellington; and prime spot in the Palmerston North Library, where it attracted media coverage and another internal self-censorship row (we won). The Greens had it in their Dunedin office window and at their national conference in Upper Hutt, followed by some more time in Wellington. Then it came back home, where I set about finding venues for it. In September it was in the front window of the New Brighton Library for a fortnight and in October/November it had a fortnight in the University of Canterbury Library and a fortnight each in two other Christchurch libraries (plus a fortnight in October in Takaka, hosted by the Golden Bay Greens). Special thanks are due to Mark Roach, a Wellington member of both ABC and CAFCA, who lets us use his courier account to transport the display (Mark has his own business transporting art works around the country. He has personally shifted the Roger Award several times over the years, free of charge). I’m a non-driver, so in Christchurch, Jeremy Agar has been the invaluable transport man, and he does it all for the flat white I’ve shouted him each time we’ve delivered or collected the display.

The display has been very successful and has led to all sorts of spinoffs. For example, its fortnight in a Takaka café led to us being contacted by the owner of a national billboard and billsticking company (he lives there). He offered us his company’s sites in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch to display several hundred Waihopai posters, free of charge. ABC didn’t actually have such a poster but a sympathetic Christchurch graphic designer (an old mate from the 70s) had, coincidentally, offered his services free of charge. I provided the text and the theme. We married up those two offers and, voila, got several hundred copies of a professionally produced poster around the country, all for buckshee. Plus our new mate in Takaka has been personally taking our material to outlets all around the top end of the South island, spreading the word with the zeal of the convert.

Peace Researcher

My regular ABC work is as editor of Peace Researcher. I’ve got out two issues in 2006, the biggest and second biggest issues ever, 52 and 48 pages respectively, the size that Watchdog used to be years ago before the latter went supersize. 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 – myself and Bob Leonard, of course; Jeremy Agar, Watchdog’s prolific reviewer also writes for PR (it enables him to review books and films that we don’t cover in Watchdog); Kane O’Connell, formerly of the ABC committee and now ABC’s Man in Wellington, has started writing for us in 2006. Each issue goes online, and we owe a debt of thanks to ABC’s Webmaster, Yani Johanson, who, eventually, 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. This year we had to make a decision forced on us by the tragic 2005 death of Ray Butterfield, who had been our longtime printer (2005 was a dreadful year for deaths). Ray had still been a vital part of the team, pre-printing the blank covers. His sudden death (by heart attack) meant that supply would run out this year and we needed to decide whether to find someone else to replicate them or re-design the cover. We opted for the former, giving the job to the printer who pre-prints Watchdog’s blank covers and we now have several years’ worth of pre-printed PR covers in storage.

In my 2005 Report, I described, in great detail, how Owen Wilkes’ suicide was a huge event for both ABC and CAFCA last year, with both groups jointly organising a major July 4 th memorial meeting for him in Christchurch. Owen has not been forgotten by us in 2006. I’ve already mentioned the memorial tree planting for him as part of the January activities at the Waihopai spybase. May was the first anniversary of his death and to commemorate it, a fellow employed by the Christchurch City Council to take guided walks (he calls himself a “walktologist”) led one through Beckenham, the suburb of Owen’s childhood. That Sunday morning was a brief spell between vicious southerlies, so numbers were down, but the Mayor and his wife were there. It turns out that Garry Moore knew Owen, and contributed several Owen anecdotes (hilarious stories about Owen as a 1960s’ City Council dustman) to the few hardy souls who took part. He was amenable to the suggestion of both ABC and CAFCA that there be a Christchurch memorial for Owen and we’re currently negotiating the details with the designated Council bureaucrat. She screamed with laughter when I told her that what we wanted was a statue of Owen, at the airport, wearing his leather shorts and peering through his binoculars into the US base out there. There was an impasse about who was going to pay for it, so I went to the Mayor and he pledged $2,000. The latest news is that we’ll most likely get a park bench with a commemorative plaque on it, most likely in Beckenham.

ABC Is Alive And Well

Let’s take September for example. I had two letters in the Press urging on the Australians in their desire to have Christchurch’s American base (Harewood) transferred to Hobart – the Press gave the first one lead letter status with the headline for the page (there was the minor matter of their headline being factually incorrect, describing Harewood as a “spybase”. ABC has never claimed Harewood to be that, and that is not its function at all). It provoked an outraged correspondent to accuse me and ABC of “Stone Age anti-Americanism”. Bob and I went out to Rolleston to speak to a meeting of the Rakaia Greens about Harewood and Waihopai. The Waihopai display went into the front window of the New Brighton Library for a fortnight, then it was off to Takaka for a couple of weeks.

For a change, the committee has been unchanged in the past year, although our two youngest members gave been present in spirit more than in the flesh. Frances Mountier has gone on leave to concentrate on saving Happy Valley but has promised to return. Lynda Boyd is a very busy union official who spent several months in Auckland, temporarily, running Unite’s McDonald’s campaign. On one or two occasions ABC meetings have consisted of Robyn Dann and I meeting in town over a coffee, when our American members – Bob and Yani – have been away in the States visiting family.

I am the media spokesperson for ABC and sometimes they ring me for the darnedest things – for example, the Sunday Star Times asked for personal information for a profile on the newly appointed head of the Security Intelligence Service (Warren Tucker, the former head of the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau, the electronic spy agency which runs Waihopai). Why would I know anything personal about the country’s top spy? Because this is a very small country, where everyone has some connection to everyone else. He is the former brother-in-law of the Wellington mate with whom I regularly stay (who himself is an old friend and comrade dating back to our mutual membership in the Christchurch Progressive Youth Movement, in 1969. He’s been an ABC and CAFCA member for many years). So, while I’ve never met the spy boss, I have met two of his siblings (one of whom sailed a protest yacht to Mururoa Atoll when France resumed nuclear testing there in the 90s) and two of his kids.

GATT Watchdog

I am on the committee of GATT Watchdog, which has had a quiet year. Its two main activities are publishing The Big Picture and being the co-organiser of the annual Roger Award. In July, to mark the tenth anniversary of the Trading With Our Lives international conference in Christchurch (which spun off into the thwarted Security Intelligence Service break-in into Aziz Choudry’s house, and everything that followed from that), GATT Watchdog hosted a Christchurch gathering to discuss responses to the “War On Terror”. This is an ongoing project and the people who took part in that brainstorm are keen for something productive to come out of it. We’ll keep you posted. On the actual “free” trade front, the really good news is the collapse of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Round (see Jane Kelsey’s article, elsewhere in this issue), which also puts a spoke in the wheel of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). That leaves New Zealand even more desperately trying to stitch up bilateral or multilateral “free” trade agreements with anyone and everyone. For the first time in many years there is a genuine feeling that the “free” trade juggernaut has run into a brick wall, one of its own making.

2006 A Full On Year For Philippines Solidarity

My other involvement is with the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa which, o nce again, thought that it would be having a comparatively quiet year and once again we were wrong. 2006 turned out to be a full on year. Since the fraudulent 2004 election, there has been a mass movement calling for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to resign, and there have been unsuccessful attempts to impeach her.

In February, smack bang in the middle of the 20 th anniversary celebrations of the People Power revolt that overthrew the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Gloria declared a State of National Emergency, absurdly alleging a “Right/Left” conspiracy between dissident military units, the underground Communist Party and the latter’s legal Left supporters to stage a coup. She sent troops into the streets to break up all rallies and close down some papers. The first person arrested, under new warrantless arrest powers, was an old mate of ours – Crispin Beltran, universally known as Ka Bel (Ka is an abbreviation of kasama, which means comrade). He’s currently a Left party Congressman but for decades he was the head of the militant KMU (May First Movement) trade union confederation. I’ve known him since I first went to the Philippines in 1987; in 1999, PSNA toured him through NZ. He stayed with Becky and I and the three of us had a great time. I accompanied him on the Nelson leg of his journey and we had some adventures there too. He’s in his early 70s, with health problems (some caused by torture from his last stint as a political prisoner, during the decade and a half of the Marcos martial law dictatorship – he escaped and lived with the revolutionary guerrillas for a couple of years), so he’s been held in hospital the whole time. He heads a list of prominent Leftists (including at least one that I personally know and who has visited NZ) charged with rebellion, which is non-bailable, and carries a life sentence. The Government also tried to arrest his five Leftist Congressional colleagues but they got sanctuary in the Congress building, under the protection of the Speaker. They lived there for two months, triumphantly marching out in May when the rebellion charges against them were dismissed. But Ka Bel and others remain in custody and the rebellion charges have been relaid against his colleagues. Plus the systematic blatant murders of hundreds of activists by military death squads have reached an all-time high (at the time of writing nearly 800 since Gloria came to power in 2001), occurring daily and now having spread from the provinces into Manila. The human rights situation is now even worse than it was under Marcos. The President has declared all-out war on the Communist Party and its New People’s Army, which just means more murders and disappearances of unarmed legal Leftists.

Responding To The Crisis, Lobbying Helen Clark

So PSNA sprang into life, mobilising our members and supporters throughout the country. By a happy coincidence, Helen Clark was about to pay the first visit to the Philippines by an NZ PM since Lange went there 20 years ago (bizarrely, NZ and the Philippines were co-sponsors of an Interfaith Dialogue between Christians and Muslims). She had a summit meeting with Gloria. So we asked people to bombard her with letters and e-mails demanding that she personally condemn this latest assault on civil rights and democracy in the Philippines. The response was immediate - staunch backers of Labour, such as the Engineers Union, wrote to her, along with churches and all sorts of other groups and individuals (many of them CAFCA activists). It worked and Clark was forced to raise the issue with Gloria. Then I wrote to the NZ Ambassador demanding that he get involved and personally visit Ka Bel – NZ is fond of trumpeting that it cares about human rights in the Philippines and we got media coverage both in NZ and the Philippines. In Wellington PSNA members who are unionists organised a picket of the Philippine Embassy and a protest delegation led by the head of the Council of Trade Unions. All of this intensive lobbying attracted a lot of gratitude from our friends in the Philippine movement and fellow solidarity activists in Australia. This has led us into having a much closer relationship with the Aussies. Naturally, a veteran local ultra-Rightist attacked PSNA and everybody else involved as “fronts for the Communist Party of the Philippines” in his regular Weblog (where he devotes himself to attacking the likes of Green MP, Keith Locke). PSNA ran an online appeal for the Free Ka Bel Campaign, and we raised nearly $NZ2,500, which has been sent over to them. Helen Clark was scheduled to go back to the Philippines in December for a regional summit, so we organised a second round of lobbying her on the human rights issue.

In my 2005 Report, I detailed how PSNA’s big project for that year was organising four New Zealanders to take part in the International Solidarity Mission to investigate and expose the State terrorism that systematically murders, tortures and disappears people by the hundreds. Exactly as I hoped, that trip by those four led to an upsurge of activism on Philippine issues on their part. And in September, a year after the event, PSNA hosted a Christchurch meeting to view the excellent documentary that was made of the International Solidarity Mission.

Visiting Filipino Speakers

In October, we had the pleasure of welcoming back an old Filipino friend who is a world renowned leader of the anti-globalisation movement. Tony Tujan is the Executive Director of the Ibon Foundation (plus being involved with numerous other Filipino and international organisations). He had last been in Christchurch in 1998, when Becky and I had had the pleasure of hosting him (and later that year, he returned the compliment when we were over there for Christmas. His is the only home and family of any Filipino movement leader that I’ve visited). This time he’d been brought to NZ to speak in Wellington, so Leigh Cookson of ARENA (Action, Research and Education Network of Aotearoa) took the initiative to bring him to Christchurch for a flying 24 hour visit, jointly organised by ARENA, Christian World Service and PSNA. Despite the fact that he could only come on a Saturday, and that Saturday night is the worst possible night for a public meeting, we got a respectable 30-40 people to hear him.

His speech “Globalisation And War In An Age Of Empire” was an excellent analysis of the current world scene, setting the context for so much of our work in NZ. Indeed, when called upon to speak from the floor to thank Tony, I was able to do so, on behalf of all four organisations covered in this Report – CAFCA, ABC, GATT Watchdog and PSNA – because Tony made points of direct relevance to all of them. Plus we had the pleasure of his company for the few hours that he was in town, with Becky and I acting as his trusty native tour guides. We had a lot of fun (Filipino movement people are always great company). Tony was responsible for me being invited to speak at a regional anti-bases conference in the Philippines in December, the first such international invitation I’ve received in years. It was very flattering but I declined, for a number of reasons, primarily because the conference circuit does not appeal to me. I think that my time can be better utilised at home.

Looking ahead to 2007, PSNA is hosting another one of our regular speaking tours (the last was in 2004). We decided to get right out of our comfort zone, and approached a young progressive Muslim woman leader. She accepted but all the details remain to be worked out. She will be our first active contact with the minority Philippine Muslim population (known as the Moros), so it will be a journey of discovery for all concerned. I edit PSNA’s newsletter Kapatiran but didn’t get an issue out in 2006 (mind you, the last one, in late 2005, was the biggest ever, at 44 pages). Our other PSNA work in 06 has been much more prosaic, namely finding homes for the much diminished pile of historic Filipino political books in our garage (it was a very large pile when we first tackled it, in 2005). There’s only a small box of them left now and, having run out of NZ takers, I offered them to Sydney colleagues, who gratefully took quite a number.

Still Dining Out On The Good Old Days

My ancient past is now part of New Zealand history. I’ve previously told you that, just before Christmas 2003, I was interviewed (about the 60s) for a 13 part people’s history of NZ called “Frontier Of Dreams”. TVNZ finally screened that episode just before Christmas 2005 (indeed they used footage of me in their promo clip throughout the preceding week). Out of an hour or so of interview, they screened two anecdotes from me – one about how I got punched in the face by a cop during the Auckland protest against the 1970 visit of US Vice-President Spiro Agnew (and thereupon resolved to never be in the front row of demos again). The other one was about Christchurch Progressive Youth Movement’s (PYM) “urban guerrilla warfare training camp” conducted in Owen Wilkes’ magnificent West Coast cave, including learning how to make Molotov cocktails. As I told the interviewer, I’m not sure what we would have done with them. The programme also made extensive use of the numerous old photos I let them use, such as a “Join PYM” poster of me and several others with hair and guns, looking like a heavy metal band (it was inspired by a famous US Black Panthers’ poster).

Every Saturday the Press runs a story from the paper of that date decades ago. Thus, in January 06, they ran a report from January 1970 and there I was again, in connection with that same Agnew demo. I was described as “the well-known dissident” and PYM as a “group frequently accused of Communist affiliations”. I was quoted as demanding that Vietnam be united” on the principles of Marxism-Leninism as interpreted by the late President Ho Chi Minh”. I don’t remember saying that, and it doesn’t sound like the sort of language that I use, even in the tedious knowitallness of youth, but it’s in the paper, so it must be true. In August I was among the veteran Christchurch activists (Bill was another) interviewed about Resistance Bookshop by a Victoria University thesis writer. Once again I had to dust off my bound volume of 1974 Canta (the University of Canterbury student paper, which I edited that year), plus my folders of carbon copies of original 1970s’ articles that I wrote for it and other publications, in order to refresh my memory. That year of Canta is proving to be a gold mine. I wrote a series of articles about the real history of NZ, called “It Can’t Happen Here”. One of those articles, about the treatment of pacifists, Communists and unionists by the Labour government during World War 2 proved the inspiration for Russell Campbell’s 2005 documentary “Sedition” and was reproduced in the August-October 2006 issue of the magazine Revolution. Not bad for something written 32 years ago!

The Lady Who Tattooed My Initials On Her Thigh

But the most astonishing blast from that past was an e-mail I received in April from a total stranger. To quote: “This may seem a bit weird but in the late 60s, early 70s, I was so enamoured of your policies and speeches that I tattooed your initials on the top of my thigh….Although I do want to get the tattoo removed soon”. She contacted me because she couldn’t remember the name of PYM and needed to know it for some interview. She thoughtfully supplied her mobile number but I resisted the temptation to give her a ring and ask her to pop over and show it to me. I replied, merely wishing her well with the removal and hoping that the tat hadn’t caused her too many problems with her personal life in the intervening nearly 40 years (I’m not sure what my reaction would be if I discovered some other bloke’s initials tattooed on my new lady love’s thigh, the top of her thigh, no less. Worse, that it had been permanently put there because of this other fellow’s “policies and speeches”, not even his animal magnetism). My God, I was actually rendered speechless, and it provoked much (lighthearted) matrimonial uproar. Certainly, everyone I’ve told about it – women in particular – has erupted into wild shrieks of laughter. Bear in mind also that while female tattooing is a routine fashion accessory these days, it sure as hell wasn’t back then. I haven’t heard any more from her and mercifully, she didn’t enclose a photo of it.

I have been the Organiser for 15 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 $500 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 more settled year than 2005, which was a terrible one for deaths of significant people in my life, ranging from my father to Owen Wilkes and Rod Donald. 18 months after my father died, it was Becky’s turn to experience the shock of the death of a parent, namely her 78 year old father, Rogelio Roque. It was even more of a shock because, although his death was not unexpected (he’d been crook and bedridden for some time, with serious health problems) the timing was. At very short notice she rushed up to the Philippines and spent three weeks there with her family. In my 2005 Report, I detailed how I, a lifelong childless person by choice, had become the surrogate father to Becky’s 19 year old niece who is living with us while Becky is sponsoring her through the University of Canterbury. Because of her university commitments, Katharine could not go home for her grandfather’s funeral, so for three weeks I was a surrogate solo father. She’s been with us for 18 months now and although there have been some issues (as one would expect with teenagers) it’s all been pretty cruisy. She came with me to Waihopai and found it very tame compared to Philippine rallies (“you don’t even march on the road!”). One influence that I have had on her is to turn her into a fanatical fan of British TV comedy, the more absurd and gross the better. So we’ve had DVD marathons of Little Britain or the Monty Python movies. See, it’s true what they say. Kids keep you young. Or at least give you an excuse to spend whole evenings watching hilariously offensive highlights from past and present.

The only health issues that I have to report are, firstly, that a burst cyst on my knee gave me a most impressively sore and swollen leg, leading to some after hours emergency centre fun where the doctor was concerned that it might be a potentially fatal blood clot and that, to misquote the Old Testament, I might be killed by the fatted calf. And, secondly, that an inconspicuous little lump on my left forearm was diagnosed as the mildest form of skin cancer, which I promptly got cut out. So now I can add cancer (albeit of the piddliest variety) to Type 2 diabetes. Ah, the joys of middle age.

The Fight To Keep Our Port Public

For two long years (2003-05 inclusive) CAFCA campaigned almost exclusively on what became the 2005 Overseas Investment Act. It’s all been exhaustively detailed in any issue of Watchdog from that period, plus on our Website and there’s an update in this issue, arising from an enterprising Dominion Post journalist approaching me for comment on his research into the first year of the new foreign investment regime. The resulting November article got front page lead in the Press, front page of the Dominion Post and featured prominently in every other Fairfax paper. It led to me being interviewed by two national radio networks and being invited to write an op ed for the Farmers Weekly, which is very definitely not CAFCA’s normal territory.

After two solid years focusing on one thing, 2006 was a much more normal and diverse one for us. Something always comes along to engage our full attention and, sure enough, this year we were presented by an attempted fait accompli from the most unlikely quarter, namely the People’s Republic of Christchurch. I am of course talking about the attempt by the Christchurch City Council to flog off the Lyttelton Port Company. This became our biggest such campaign in a decade (since we unsuccessfully fought Westpac’s takeover of TrustBank).

My very detailed account of this issue and campaign was the cover story in the August Watchdog (which can be read online at
http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/12/01.htm). CAFCA played a leading role in setting up Keep Our Port Public (we’re the good KOPPs), and it held regular meetings in the Green Party building. A number of unions, political parties and groups are involved – a branch has been set up in Dunedin (because Port of Otago, owned by the Otago Regional Council, now holds a blocking stake in Lyttelton Port Company). KOPP ran a petition to fight the sale and signatures were very easy to get (my local butcher kept ringing me to bring him a fresh sheet to fill, which ended up splattered with butcher shop blood) – the online version attracted signatures from around the country and the world. The Mayor, Garry Moore, refused us permission to present it at a Council meeting, with attendant speaking rights, so we booked a committee room in the Council building and presented it to a couple of sympathetic Councillors (one Centre Left, the other Centre Right), one of whom then presented it to the full Council meeting. Surprise, surprise, it was rejected (I’ve already mentioned that I spent a Sunday morning on an Owen Wilkes memorial walk with the Mayor and his wife. In case you’re wondering, the subject of the Port Company sale never came up in our conversation. In his dealings with me re Owen the Mayor is positively friendly, signing his correspondence “Gazza”).

We lobbied politicians and succeeded in getting five local Government MPs (including a couple of senior Ministers) to emphatically and publicly come out against the sale. Not only that, they did so on the day of KOPP’s extremely successful Town Hall public meeting in April, which added extra oomph to our message of uncompromising opposition to any sale. KOPP had extensive dealings with relevant Ministers, the Mayor and Councillors; we picketed one City Council meeting; we laid complaints about the Council’s abuse of process with the Auditor-General and Ombudsman (no decisions yet); we had extensive media coverage. I had one major Perspective article published in the Press (just months after my Waihopai one on that page in my ABC capacity), I was several times in the Christchurch Star (including the whole front page, with a photo of me taken at Lyttelton), plus several TV & radio interviews (you can double this coverage when you realise that my media co-spokesperson, Christine Dann, did the same number of interviews).

Our April public meeting (whose lead speaker, Sir Kerry Burke, is the chairperson of the regional council and was a Minister and Speaker in the 1980s’ Lange government) was extensively covered by TV, radio and papers (I actually had the local chief reporter of TV3 ring me the next day to apologise for not having covered it). The deal is currently dead (courtesy of Port of Otago buying that blocking stake) and Hutchison Port Holdings of Hong Kong has walked away. But any respite may very well be only temporary, as the Council is still committed to port “rationalisation”. KOPP saw us working well with, not only the Greens and Alliance, but also the two port unions, continuing our good working relationships with unions. KOPP is in recess and is no longer meeting, until there’s a need to do so. But KOPP work keeps ticking over – the official complaints against the Council’s abuse of process are very much alive; I’ve still done the odd media interview about the issue. We’d like to think that the powers that be would see sense and drop the whole crazy idea of flogging off the Port Company. But we fear that they’ll try it all on again, in which event KOPP will spring back into life.

Working Closely With The Greens

This campaign resulted in CAFCA’s working relationship with the Greens being closer than it’s ever been. CAFCA and the local Greens were among the key members of KOPP. Our two organisations got it going and our energy drove it. All meetings were held at the local Green building. Green MP Metiria Turei was one of the speakers at KOPP’s big Town Hall public meeting. This was the closest that I’d ever worked with the Greens’ Christine Dann, despite having known her for more than 30 years (both as friend and a CAFCA member from the outset). She is extremely efficient, a whirlwind of optimistic energy. She and I were the media co-spokespeople for KOPP, and complemented each other very well. In my December 2005 Watchdog obituary of Rod Donald, I said that the future of CAFCA’s relationship with the Greens remained up in the air (because it had been very much personified in Rod). I’m pleased to report that any fears that I had were unfounded. Sue Bradford MP has stepped forward to “pick up one end of Rod’s banner” (her words). She met Bill and I for a working breakfast when she was in Christchurch early in 06 (the first time I’d seen Sue for years). Since then she has read great chunks of the 2005 Roger Award Judges’ Report into the Parliamentary record as part of her speech on a Bill about Westpac (which won the 2005 Roger, along with the BNZ), and written an article for this issue about the Feltex fiasco.

But the personal connection to the Greens has gone, with Rod’s death. No Green MP rings me up now from all sorts of improbable places (ranging from Young Nicks Head to the Bluff smelter and even Australia) asking for urgent facts and figures; no Green MP turns up unannounced on his bike to hand me, through my office window, various things of interest to CAFCA that he’d been sent at Parliament; no Party Co-Leader rings up Becky and I to sell us tickets to Green Party fundraising movie nights and then comes around in person to deliver them. All of that has gone and although Rod was never a friend or even a mate (he was a colleague in the broader sense), I miss his incredible energy and unique personality.

When I attended the first Christchurch screening, at the International Film Festival, of “The Last Resort” (which extensively features a 2004 interview with me; see Jeremy Agar’s review and filmmaker Abi King-Jones’ article about it elsewhere in this issue), it was an eerie sensation to have Rod’s partner and their youngest daughter sitting behind Bill and I (Bill also features prominently in it). It was strange to see Rod so vibrantly alive, filmed just months before his totally unexpected death. The film records the only time that Rod and I ever spoke together at a public meeting, namely in Napier in early 2005. I knew him for nearly 30 years and that’s the only time we ever shared a podium, the year that he died.

“The Last Resort”

This is a very good film which I recommend that you see (and, no, not because I’m in it). It received very positive responses from Film Festival audiences wherever it was screened throughout the country. Land sales to foreigners, although a small part of a much bigger picture, are the things that tug at the heart strings of all New Zealanders (including those who don’t agree with us on anything else) and are still a regular reason for unsolicited approaches from the media. To give just two recent examples: the New Zealand Herald Property Editor rang me for comment on a proposed sale of Pakatoa Island in the Hauraki Gulf. That was duly published and put online. In turn, that led to my being interviewed (by phone) by the London editor of a new glossy magazine for expatriate Kiwis. She was writing a feature on the issue of rural land sales to foreigners, which appeared in their September issue. CAFCA’s media appearances in November were primarily about land sales, despite the original Press /Dominion Post article correctly pointing out that the real action is in corporate takeovers, they dwarf land sales. But as far as the issue of foreign control is concerned, the media is fixated on rural land sales. Maybe the fact that most NZ media are owned by transnational corporations has got something to do with that.

“The Last Resort” gives excellent coverage of the Parliamentary side of the two year struggle against the Overseas Investment Act, recording the presentation of many submissions against it (Bill is prominent), and a few in favour. It records numerous Parliamentary speeches against and for the Bill. This is where Rod features extensively. And it gives extensive coverage to the Roger Award. The filmmakers, Errol Wright and Abi King-Jones came to Christchurch in 2005 to film the 2004 Roger Award event, which is covered in all its glory.

Roger Award Comes To Queen Street

The 2005 Roger Award was jointly won by Westpac and the BNZ. CAFCA was responsible for organising that and it involved me in a lot of work, publicising it, getting in nominations, liaising with the media, the judges, the writers of the Judges’ Report and the Financial Analysis and the Auckland organisers of the March 2006 event. It was hosted by Global Peace and Justice Auckland (GPJA), which holds its meetings on the first Monday night of the month. By pure coincidence that was also the night ( New Zealand time) that the Oscars were announced, in Los Angeles. The Roger Award grew out of a Christchurch brainstorm meeting in 1996 when it was felt that such an award should be created and that it should be some sort of Oscars for the worst TNCs (even the name was chosen with that in mind). But it took a decade for these two great awards events to be held at the same time. The media wasn’t slow to take the point and play up the comparisons. Even the celebrity gossip columnist for a national weekly expressed interest (but, in the end, nothing was seen of her).

This was the third time that Auckland has hosted the Roger event, and the previous two occasions (which were organised by different people) had been extravaganzas of music, street theatre, video and general razzle dazzle. The first one had been entirely outdoors, which greatly impressed a simple South Island yokel such as me. The second one was held indoors, for the compelling reason that it was pissing down with good old Auckland rain (and the venue turned out to be an authentic Auckland leaky building). This, the third one, was much more what I was used to in Christchurch, although it was held in a wonderfully Auckland venue – namely a Queen Street comedy club (I only learned later that it used to be a porno cinema. I wondered why it came complete with a big movie screen). The banks tried to distract attention from their ignominy by saying that the venue for the Roger Award said everything that the NZ public needed to know about it.

The event, while plainer than the previous two occasions in Auckland, was a whole lot of fun. Approximately 50 people attended (it is a small club, so it felt full) and they threw themselves into it with gusto. GPJA’s Mike Treen was the MC; I was the opening speaker (some cruel people suggested that I appeared to be right at home behind the microphone and blinded by the spotlights at a stand-up comedy club). Roger himself took pride of place, having travelled up from Christchurch (where he normally lives in our garage) in his brand new and hopefully permanent travel crate. It had better be permanent, because it cost CAFCA $630 and the professional artworks packager who built it assured us that he kept the price down because he was sympathetic to us. There was some entertainment, in the form of a 12 minute clip of a documentary in the making about the drive by the Unite union to organise the young people, many of them Polynesian, who work in the junk food chains. Set to a throbbing beat, and full of the fantastic energy of the young discovering their own collective strength and finding out for themselves what every generation has to learn from scratch (“unions! strikes! sticking it up the boss! choice!”), it’s a great little movie. I enjoyed it so much that we borrowed it to show at the CAFCA AGM in September.

Three of the four judges were present ( Laila Harre had to put in her apologies) and Maire Leadbeater and Mary Ellen O’Connor – who had specially come up from Nelson – did a double act in announcing the winners, while Chief Justice John Minto ran a simultaneous PowerPoint presentation. In January those same three judges all took part in the Anti-Bases Campaign’s protest activities at the Waihopai spybase, so they took advantage of my suggestion that they meet up at our campground (physical meetings of the Roger Award judges are rare to the point of non-existence in these days of e-mail). That is the only time that I’ve ever witnessed the judging process at work and I was greatly impressed by how thoroughly they do their work (as have all previous judges). It’s worth noting that the judges receive absolutely nothing from us, beyond our heartfelt thanks, in return for their hard labour over the summer holidays.

Excellent Radio & TV Coverage: Papers Missing In Action

The two previous Roger events in Auckland attracted absolutely zero mainstream media coverage (the honourable exception being Alan Marston of Planet TV, whose documentaries of those two events were screened on Auckland’s Triangle TV and are still doing the rounds of regional channels around the country). But this time the media took an interest, big time. TV3 came along and filmed at the event, screening it on Nightline later that night. Radio New Zealand also sent a reporter and devoted a very respectable four minutes to it on the next day’s Morning Report. I, John Minto and Mary Ellen O’Connor all did interviews with various other radio stations and networks. However, in marked contrast to previous years, the mainstream print media didn’t touch it. It made the front page of the Marlborough Express (highlighting Toll’s coming third because of its appalling behaviour in the Marlborough Sounds) and the Business section of the Nelson Mail. But that’s it, as far as I’m aware. Nothing appeared in the Press, which had given it big coverage in the recent past (particularly when Dunedin’s former Mayor, Sukhi Turner, was a judge). When the Roger finalists were announced, back in December 2005, the Press had run a straight story about that in its Business section, shorn of any of the usual features such as the use of quotation marks or words such as “alleged” and “Leftist”. The Herald rang me to say that it would be running a story the next morning but nothing ever appeared (months later, when I asked the journalist, he confirmed that he’d written the story and could give no reason for its non-appearance, which disappointed him). An NZ Press Association story definitely went around all the papers, which is how it ended up in those two provincial South Island papers.

Your guess is as good as mine as to why the big papers decided not to touch it. I am, however, reminded of the very interesting meeting that the CAFCA committee held with a local journalist a few years ago, to discuss our media relations. This person was then in a senior position at the Press and has gone on to bigger things at the national level. The journalist specifically advised us to tone down our criticism of TNCs, to dump the Roger Award, and to be mindful that the Press (and by inference other papers, nearly all of whom are owned by TNCs) would do nothing to upset major advertisers. The banks certainly fall into that category. Nor is this conspiracy theory a hypothesis. Not long before the 2005 Roger event, we were approached, completely out of the blue, by the Chief Executive Officer of an NZ company with a national profile, to tell us that a previous Roger winner had pulled its six figure advertising from a major paper as a result of that paper having run an ad drawing attention to that company having won the Roger (an ad of which we, the Roger Award organisers, were completely oblivious, although it was written in such a way as to appear that we had placed it).

Never Fails To Get A Bite

The Roger Award has never failed to get a reaction in the past, from the TNC finalists themselves, and/or their public relations mouthpieces, an Embassy (the Japanese one, when a Japanese TNC won it) and a Cabinet Minister (Jim Anderton, when one of his pet TNCs was a placegetter). Westpac gave us a blistering reaction, communicated directly to us, when it was a finalist – not even a placegetter – in 2004. It must have learned its lesson, and both it and the BNZ bit their tongues this time, not contacting us or saying much of anything in the media. This is the line that Telecom has always taken, that of totally ignoring it (which is just what we’d expect from Telecom). This is not to say that the joint win by BNZ and Westpac went unnoticed. It drew public comment from Finsec, the union representing bank workers, and from the Democrats for Social Credit (now an extra-parliamentary party and independent once more, no longer part of the Alliance, they’ve always specialised in critiquing the banks).

But, true to form, as soon as the finalists were announced, in late 05, I was personally rung by a senior manager of one of them (Merck, Sharp and Dohme, the huge drug TNC). He was aggrieved that his firm, of whom he told me he was “proud” was in such a contest, wanted to know who had nominated it (we don’t divulge that information to anyone, let alone the nominated TNCs), wanted to argue the toss about the reasons why it was nominated and demanded the right to put the “truth” before the judges. We never heard from him again (and his type of approach is far from unique).

The 2005 Roger Award generated fallout long after the event. Two MPs from different parties – namely the Greens’ Sue Bradford and the Maori Party’s Hone Harawira – have read great chunks of the Judges’ Report verbatim into the Parliamentary record during their speeches on the recent Bill forcing Westpac to become a stand alone bank, incorporated in New Zealand (previously it was the only bank to refuse to do that, operating as an NZ branch of an Australian bank). This is extremely encouraging, as much for the fact that it marks CAFCA’s first interaction with the Maori Party as for the fact that the Roger Award got recognition in Parliament.

New Judges For 06 Roger

In the latter months of 06 I have been flat out organising the 2006 Roger Award. The first job was to find some new judges, as John Minto and Maire Leadbeater both stepped down from the bench after years of excellent service ( Laila Harre and Mary Ellen O’Connor stayed on; Laila is the new Chief Justice). Then I struck an unprecedented situation - we had a list of five more people to ask and all of them turned it down, for various reasons. So we had to come up with some other likely candidates for the judiciary. All of the next four I asked accepted, meaning that we’ve gone from a famine to a feast and now have six judges, a record number – a balance of men and women, North and South Islanders, and occupations, spanning cities from Dunedin to Auckland. All were very pleased to have been asked and delighted to be a part of what New Internationalist has called the “prestigious” Roger Award (I’m not sure if that was tongue in cheek).

In 2005 we couldn’t get political parties such as the Greens to agree to include Roger Award nominations in their mailouts, because they were focusing exclusively on that year’s election. No such problem this year and the Greens both nationally and locally distributed the nomination forms (mind you, the national Greens then retrospectively asked for an insertion fee that would have cost us more than the combined cost of copying and posting the nomination forms. After I loudly protested, it was dropped to a more reasonable figure, but nonetheless it marks the first time we’ve been asked to pay for such a thing. I vaguely remember the subject coming up one previous year; I had a word with Rod and nothing more was ever heard of it. Another reason to miss Rod). The Greens were just one of several organisations and publications to either distribute Roger nomination forms or publicise the Award, which goes from strength to strength.

Building Ties With Unions

CAFCA has had a lot of media coverage this year, primarily in connection with the Roger Award or the Keep Our Port Public campaign, as well as some one off media approaches, which are most often about specific land sales to foreigners. Networking continues to be our priority and preferred modus operandi, particularly on big campaigns such as the KOPP campaign. As I’ve already mentioned, that involved us in our closest working relationship ever with the Greens at the local level. And 2006 has seen us heavily involved with a number of unions. The KOPP campaign saw us work closely with the port unions, namely the Maritime Union and the Rail and Maritime Transport Union; the 2005 Roger Award involved working with Finsec, the bank worker’s union; and we have a longstanding working relationship with the National Distribution Union. I routinely e-mail all manner of CAFCA material to unions, both in Christchurch and throughout the country. This sometimes pays unexpected dividends. When the Engineers Union organised a rally in Christchurch against National’s proposed Bill giving employers the right to fire new workers without reason within their first 90 days of employment, I was not alone in being surprised at being invited to speak on behalf of “the community”. I duly did so, taking the opportunity to urge the union movement to not only fight hypothetical threats from the Opposition but real threats from the Labour government, namely any number of industrial, economic and “free trade” pieces of legislation you care to name.

Last time I was invited to speak at a local union rally (1998) I was publicly berated afterwards by an outraged and besuited union bureaucrat because, in his opinion, I had “soured the collegiality of the occasion” by publicly criticising his union and the union movement in general. There was no such reaction this time, but I don’t expect to be on the Christmas card lists of the numerous Labour Party members, officials and MPs who listened to my speech (possibly through gritted teeth). After the rally, we marched right up to the plate glass windows of the Convention Centre and razzed up the delegates at the National Party Conference, who responded as you would expect Tory bastards to do. It was like the good old days. In September I took part in the march through central Christchurch of Progressive Enterprise’s locked out supermarket distribution centre workers. CAFCA supported their struggle against the profiteering Australian bullies and it was good to be in a march with rank and file workers, visibly poor but not cowed by the naked attempt to starve them into submission (see Joe Hendren’s article on the Progressive lockout elsewhere in this issue).

It’s not surprising that CAFCA should have an active relationship with unions. Individual committee members are union activists. Bill has a long history with the Association of University Staff, including several years as national President, in two separate terms in the 90s and 00s, and is on the International Committee of the CTU. Our newest member, Lynda Boyd, has been a local organiser with both the National Union of Public Employees and Unite. She spent the final months of 06 working, temporarily, in Auckland for Unite running its McDonald’s campaign and was not afraid to get amongst it. She was one of those arrested at an Auckland picket in support of Progressive’s locked out distribution centre workers. And Joe Hendren is now the National Distribution Union’s Researcher. He was thrown in at the deep end, with the Progressive dispute erupting on his first day on the job. It must seem familiar to Joe. Becky and I first met him way back in the mid 1990s (long before he was involved with CAFCA) as a checkout boy at the (since closed) Countdown branch where we used to do our weekly shopping.

All this was on top of our usual CAFCA work, which is itself on top of humdrum administrative work. The committee meets fortnightly, rotated among the homes of members, year in and year out. 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, Jeremy Agar, Joe Hendren, John Ring Lynda Boyd and Reg Duder (in Reg’s case, he is pushing 80 and has been in poor health for years, with frequent hospitalisations, so we only see him every couple of months or so when we hold a meeting at his place. He remains a valued and keen member of the committee). 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.

The Future: We Fight Imperialism In All Its Guises

There is no obvious “big issue” that I can identify right now. But rest assured that there will be. A year ago nobody predicted that the Christchurch City Council (formerly self-proclaimed as the People’s Republic of Christchurch) would suddenly decide to try and flog off the Lyttelton Port Company to a Hong Kong transnational corporation owned by the tenth richest man in the world. 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. We remain 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 and multilateral free trade deals being entered into by the Government. We will continue to support New Zealand unions and workers fighting their greedy and oppressive transnational bosses

In the space of less than a week in September I took part in two Christchurch marches. One was against the murderous violence of naked military imperialism in Lebanon and Palestine (an extension, by America’s Israeli proxy, of its attempt to “remould” the Middle East, with disastrous results in Iraq and the possibility of more of the same in Iran, if the Yanks are gluttons for even more punishment). The other was against the economic violence of transnational corporate imperialism manifested in an Australian supermarket chain trying to starve its low paid Kiwi workers into submission and smash their unions in the process. Different symptoms of the same disease.

“Globalisation” = “corporate globalisation” = imperialism and that goes to the heart of our reason for being. More than 30 years ago we grew out of the anti-war, anti-bases movement, and we maintain that continuity. We fight imperialism, either of the naked military variety or the economic variety, which has been correctly described as colonisation by company rather than by country. The Waihopai spybase is NZ’s single biggest contribution to all and any of America’s wars and CAFCA fully supports the Anti-Bases Campaign’s long struggle to expose it and have it shut down. We take heart from the fact that things are not going swimmingly in the American Empire. Iraqi patriots have exactly the same reaction to being forcibly annexed to the American Empire as American patriots did to being forcibly annexed to the British Empire. I take my hat off to the Iraqi Resistance – every movement fighting for national liberation is routinely smeared as “terrorist”. I know who the terrorists are in that war.

Our core issue is foreign control, in all its manifestations. And we put our money where our mouth is. At one committee meeting in September we decided to donate $250 each to ABC for the 2007 Waihopai protest and to the National Distribution Union to help the locked out Progressive Enterprises workers. 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, whether that involves the ownership of a port or the behaviour of the supermarket transnational towards its New Zealand workers. 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. Every year I conclude this Report by saying the bigger they are, the harder they fall. So, it’s nice to actually have that proved by winning the odd victory, such as the shelving of the proposed sale of the Lyttelton Port Company (at least temporarily). We win a battle here and a battle there. Who knows, we might even dare to think that we can win the war. Let’s not die wondering.