I’m mindful of the fact that this Watchdog was nearly full before I even began to write my annual report. So, I need to rein in my editorial self-indulgence (my 2006 report was 21 pages long) and present a severely truncated version this year, possibly the shortest ever. I apologise to those readers who contact me every year to say how much they’ve enjoyed reading my lengthy reports. Let’s call this an executive summary (what next – a Mission Statement? I might even start seeing some of these “visions” I keep reading about). Just the highlights.

Public Ownership Pledge Campaign

CAFCA’s unique campaign in 2006 was to be heavily involved in the successful fight to stop the Christchurch City Council selling the Lyttelton Port Company to a Hong Kong transnational. That was a classic reactive campaign. In 2007, we decided to build on that victory, to take the inititiative and take advantage of it being local body election year. For starters we offered to brief the newly reinvigorated Christchurch 2021 team on how foreign control affects local government and Christchurch in particular. A number of their candidates, including the Mayoral candidate, Megan Woods, attended this very productive meeting. At it we floated the idea of asking all candidates to sign a Public Ownership Pledge committing themselves, if elected, to supporting continued public ownership of City Council assets and services. 2021 seized upon this as a central policy plank, undertook to sign it en masse and to do so publicly at a July media conference, which was held on the historic tug moored at the Lyttelton wharf (to dramatise the continuity of the earlier battle to keep the port in public ownership). I and Megan Woods were the speakers (although, inevitably, the media only reported what the Mayoral candidate had to say, but that’s fine by us). This event was well reported. CAFCA does not endorse political parties but as a quid pro quo we were happy to allow 2021’s request to include a flyer (specially written for our Christchurch members) in the August Watchdog.

Having got one major grouping on side, we invited all other candidates to sign the Pledge, either electronically or in person. The response was very encouraging, and I met with a number of candidates in places ranging from home (from where I work) to central city cafes, to enable them to sign it. What was interesting was that the signatories didn’t all come from the Left – a number of independents signed it, as did a respectable number from Centre Right City Vision grouping and the Rightwing Independent Citizens. Several Mayoral candidates signed it (although we got no response at all from Bob Parker, the winner). Eventually it was signed by dozens of candidates of all persuasions and of those, 20 were actually elected, either to various Community Boards or to the City Council (one of the two successful 2021 candidates for the latter was my longstanding Anti-Bases Campaign committee colleague, Yani Johanson. And Jeremy Agar, from the CAFCA committee, was re-elected to the Lyttelton Mount Herbert Community Board, as an Independent. Congratulations to both of them). The Press resolutely refused to publish press releases that I sent them on this subject, so I had to resort to writing a Letter To The Editor urging readers, before voting, to contact CAFCA for the list of signatories. Despite the Press publishing that in an obscure place, dozens of people contacted us asking for that list. So we adjudge that campaign to have been very successful. Of course, the real test will come if, and when, the City Council next tries to privatise an asset or service.

That wasn’t our only foray into the battle against privatisation in 2007. I found myself being sought out by the national media – TV, radio, newspapers - to comment on the proposed sale of the Auckland local bodies’ shares in Auckland Airport (see Quentin Findlay’s cover story in this issue for the full details). At times like that CAFCA suddenly gets very busy media wise. In the event there was a very rapid public and political opposition to the proposals (first from Dubai and then Canada) and the privatisation of the country’s biggest airport does not look likely to be cleared for takeoff any time soon. Excellent. Indeed, privatisation is shaping up to be one of the issues of the 2008 election campaign. National has already signalled that it will push for the sale of more State Owned Enterprises, should it win. CAFCA came out strongly against that and got good media coverage as a result.

In fact CAFCA regularly gets good media coverage, and has done for years. We are seen as the experts on the subject, with no political party strings attached. Both Bill Rosenberg and I have appeared several times in major papers such as the Press and the New Zealand Herald. Bill and Sue Newberry have regularly featured in the Press and other papers with analytical articles on the 2006 collapse of Feltex, the causes, and the consequences arising from that. There are two articles on that subject in this issue and prior to publication I circulated Sue Newberry’s article to the media. They ran it, because Sue has name recognition and because she has the expertise to crunch the numbers and reveal, in plain English, just what is going on. CAFCA has featured in weekly papers as disparate as the Independent (a business paper) and Truth.  I’ve regularly done radio interviews, with Radio NZ, commercial, student, community and iwi stations, plus the odd TV interview. This year we made a decision to pump out more press releases, commenting on issues of the day (ranging from the latest secret power supply contract for the Bluff aluminium smelter to Westpac appointing All Black captain, Richie McCaw, as its “ambassador”) and that has resulted in even more media appearances than usual.

One ongoing project that always gets excellent media coverage is the Roger Award. My detailed report on the 2006 Roger, including the March 2007 event in Wellington, was in Watchdog 114, May 2007, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/14/01.htm. The Roger just keeps going from strength to strength. Our judges for the 2007 one come from a range of professions, including unions, the church and sport (our first All Black). We are indebted to these very busy people who, every year, give up a chunk of their Christmas break to plough through the huge amount of reading necessary to pick a winner. Last time around they came agonisingly close to declaring a tie. They all take their responsibilities very seriously indeed. The winner of the 2007 Roger will be announced at a Christchurch event in March 08. That will be ten years since the first Roger event was held (also in Christchurch, in the course of the seminal Taking Control Conference). We’re still working through ideas but we’re thinking of holding this Roger event as part of some larger happening, as part of our attempt to insert our issues into the agenda of election year.

Watchdog

Not much needs to be said about Watchdog that hasn’t been said in my previous recent reports. Thanks to Leigh Cookson, our long serving and long suffering layout editor, it has a new look which has drawn a favourable response from members. It is the best illustrated that it has ever been (although it is a constant challenge to illustrate a subject that is so abstract and non-visual in many ways. Special thanks are due to Christchurch graphic designer, Ian Dalziel, whose brain I have taken to picking. It was his eyecatching graphic of NZ as the $2 Shop of the South Pacific that adorned both the front and back covers of the August issue). There are three issues a year and they always go close to our printer’s size limit of 80 pages (it’s not uncommon to have to remove articles in for space reasons. Sometimes they can be included in the next issue, or the one after that, if they remain relevant). The standard of writing is always high, as evidenced by the mainstream media’s interest in Sue Newberry’s article on Feltex in this issue. I have a role both as writer and editor, usually finding myself doing more of the latter (purely because there’s so much good copy from others). Unfortunately, with Joe Hendren’s permanent move to an Auckland union researcher’s job, it looks like we’ve lost him as a writer. But in this issue we welcome back our old friend and former committee colleague Dennis Small, who was a mainstay of Watchdog throughout the 90s and the first few years of this century. Hopefully Dennis will be a regular writer once again. And thd cover story in this issue is by Quentin Findlay, one of our newest committee members. Jeremy Agar’s reviews (which are essays actually) have acquired a fan base of their own and we actively solicit books (and some documentaries) for review from within NZ and from around the world. Bill Rosenberg’s month by month analysis of the rubberstampings of the Overseas Investment Office provides the core of each issue, plus he has written major articles on other topics, such as media ownership (which led to recognition from within that profession of Bill as an expert on the subject); my contributions have ranged from obituaries to things like indepth analyses of Telecom. It all makes for a very solid read, with its own unique Watchdog style, and we always get positive feedback after every single issue.

As already mentioned, we have lost one committee member in the last year, namely Joe Hendren (and Lynda Boyd is also up there indefinitely, attending Auckland University. She comes to meetings when she’s back in Christchurch during the holidays). But we have gained two new members, namely Quentin Findlay and Colleen Hughes (who is the daughter of veteran committee member, Reg Duder, who is now too old and crook to attend all but the most occasional meeting). Quentin works for a students’ association and Colleen is a union official, so they each bring skills to the committee.

Membership has stayed stable throughout the year, hovering just under 500, which is where it was at when I last reported, in 2006. Financially, CAFCA is in a very healthy position (the 06/07 Accounts were sent out with the August Watchdog). On the subject of money, I should mention that the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my income, is likewise in a healthy state (see above for the details). The number of regular pledgers has dropped from a recent high of 50 or so, down into the low 40s (some of the older ones who were there from the start, back in 1991, have died recently, such as Wolf and Ann Rosenberg) but donations still come in big dollops – one individual sent $1,500 recently; plus there was trhe very first bequest from a deceased estate. My hourly rate is now $13.50, which I can live on in frugal comfort. Thanks are due to Bob Leonard who has administered it and been my paymaster since the early 90s.

Administratively, the biggest project has been the creation of a whole new membership database, a massive job undertaken over many months by Cass Daley (who just happens to be Lynda Boyd’s Mum) and one which has involved her in endless fine tuning as she deals with the quirks we built up in our old database over 16 years. For good measure, she has also created new membership databases for the Anti-Bases Campaign and the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa while she was at it. Once this new system was up and running, I was freed from reliance on an obsolete and increasingly more difficult to operate dot matrix printer to print our labels for mailouts. The new database means that we can do that on either of the other two printers in the office and we were able to sell the old printer – our first ventue into the alternative universe that is Trade Me – for the princely sum of $41 (we paid $600 for it back in 1991 but depreciation and obsolescence had long ago eaten all of that up). That was the last of our original office equipment to go.

Waihopai

My Anti-Bases Campaign work has kept me busy throughout 2007. Once again ABC organised a well attended and well covered January protest at the Waihopai spybase. The unique feature this time was a Blenheim public meeting addressed by Nicky Hager, tying together the themes of his two blockbuster books from a decade apart – “Secret Power” (1996, about Waihopai and NZ’s part in the US-led global spy network) and “The Hollow Men” (2006, about who was pulling the National Party’s strings when they nearly won the 2005 election. You can read Jeremy Agar’s review of that book in Watchdog 114, May 2007, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/14/03.htm). Nicky attracted a crowd of more than a hundred, packed into the venue on a typically hot Marlborough summer night, and it was covered by the national media. You can read the full transcript of his speech in that same issue, online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/14/02.htm. It was far and away the most successful public meeting that ABC has ever held there. In Blenheim and at the spybase itself, ABC highlighted the fact that it had been 20 years since Waihopai was first announced and we carried a specially made big cheque for $500 million, which is part of what the spy agency that runs Waihopai has cost NZ taxpayers over those years (thanks again to Ian Dalziel, who made the cheque and who designed us a poster. Thanks also to Jim Wilson, head of national billboard company Phantom Billstickers, who gave us free distribution of several hundred of those posters on his company’s central city sites in the main centres). My very detailed report of the 2007 Waihopai protest is in Peace Researcher 34, July 2007, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr34-145.html.  ABC is going back to Waihopai in January 2008, and, in a positive demonstration of international anti-bases solidarity, may be joined by a group of Japanese peace activists who will be touring NZ at that time (Bob Leonard accompanied a previous Japanese group to Waihopai in 2005).

One of my regular ABC jobs is as editor of Peace Researcher, which covers a whole different set of subjects from Watchdog and I do more writing for it than I do for Watchdog. I can only commit to getting out two issues per year (Watchdog, which is my top publishing priority, produces three whopper issues per year) and sometimes I end up having to simultaneously juggle both. It’s a good little newsletter which needs a lot more readers. My wife, Becky Horton, does a very good job with its layout, as a labour of love and the standard of writing (we get articles from around NZ and from around the world) is very high. ABC hasn’t been so visible in cyberspace this year (www.converge.org.nz/abc) for the simple reason that our Webmaster, Yani Johanson, was preoccupied all year with (successfully) campaigning for election to the Christchurch City Council. So the ABC Website sat frozen in time for most of the year and only just sprang back into life at the very end of 2007, when Yani was able to have a life again.

ABC still has our excellent Waihopai spybase portable display and this made several out of town trips in 2007 – to Palmerston North, Nelson and Dunedin, including to the annual conferences of both the Greens and the Alliance. The North Island trip ended prematurely and controversially when it was taken down in the Palmerston North trade union centre by a Public Service Association official who considered that it was an insult to her members, the spies (there is another spybase, at Tangimoana, near Palmerston North). You can read my full report about that in Peace Researcher 34, July 2007, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr34-148.html. The display also spent time in our local café/gallery in Christchurch. And the other ABC project (actually a joint one with CAFCA) to finally come to fruition in 2007 was the Mayoral opening of a memorial park bench for Owen Wilkes (who committed suicide in 2005. My obituary of him is in Watchdog 109, August 2005, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/09/09.htm). Getting a humble park bench for Owen approved and installed in Christchurch’s Beckenham Park (he grew up in that suburb, just metres from the park and went to the primary school which adjoins it) proved to be a long and tedious process, taking well over a year. But, on a gloriously sunny September Saturday morning, the honours were duly done by outgoing Mayor, Garry Moore, in one of the last acts of his Mayoralty – he had played a key role in making it happen, approving the all important Council money to pay for it. My full report on that project and the opening is in Peace Researcher 35, December 2007.

ABC Speaking Tour In 08

In 2008, ABC is undertaking a special project, namely a speaking tour by an international expert on, and activist about, the whole US military presence in the Asia Pacific region. Cora Fabros is the regional coordinator of a global network of groups fighting foreign military bases (not just US ones, but they’re the vast majority of them). She is a Filipina whom ABC has previously hosted through NZ, way back in 1990, as part of an international group that we hosted on our Touching the Bases Tour (although that was not a speaking tour). When Becky and I were in Manila in August (see below) she was one of the old colleagues with whom we caught up. She reminded me (I’d forgotten) that she’d been a guest at our 1991 wedding in Manila, when I was living there, and that was the last time we’d seen her.

ABC is doing this as our contribution to the once in 12 year coincidence that 2008 is election year in both NZ and the US. We want NZ’s military and Intelligence relationship with the world’s biggest warmonger to be a major issue in our election and we want an expert to give us the regional and global context for an issue (namely, the bases – Harewood, Waihopai and Tangimoana) which is seen, quite wrongly, as a fringe issue in this country. American bases, their local counterparts and the whole aggressive American military strategy in our part of the world are very big issues for any number of our neighbours and New Zealanders need to be aware of where we fit into that big picture. Our working title for the tour is “Empire”. You will be kept fully informed of details as they come to hand (at this stage, it’s planned for July, with the now retired Bob Leonard as her travel companion and opening speaker) and rest assured that you’ll be asked for money. ABC has already been turned down flat by the biggest single institutional donor to our last tour by an international speaker (former Canadian spy, Mike Frost, in 2001), so we’ll be shaking the begging bowl extra hard.

Ka Bel Is Free

2007 was an extremely busy and active year for the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa. From February 2006 until half way through 07 I was very busy coordinating people and organisations to lobby Helen Clark to put pressure on President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (with whom Clark had an unusually high number of meetings in 2006/07) about the appalling human rights crisis in the Philippines. Specifically, we were lobbying to secure the release of Congressman Crispin Beltran (“Ka Bel”), the most high profile political prisoner, who was in custody for all that time (dating back to Gloria’s sortlived declaration of a state of emergency in February 2006, when all six Leftwing Congresspeople were charged with rebellion but the other five avoided custody). Ka Bel is an old mate and colleague going back to the 80s. PSNA hosted him on an NZ speaking tour in 1999, in his previous capacity as a globally renowned militant trade union leader. All the lobbying of Clark actually had an impact (I later learned, through unofficial sources, that her intervention with Gloria in the case of one 2007 abduction – there are plenty to choose from – led to the guy’s life being saved, although he is still in prison on trumped up charges). Ka Bel was finally ordered released in July 07, when the courts forced the Philippine government to admit that it had no evidence against him. It never even got near a trial. That campaign, during which PSNA raised several thousand dollars for Ka Bel’s medical expenses (he was incarcerated in a hospital, for which he had to foot the bill) included my appearing in both the NZ and Philippine media on several occasions.

In August Becky and I visited Manila, the first time I’d been there (or anywhere outside NZ) since 1998. Although that city is not for the fainthearted, I love it – heat, humidity, squalor, crowds, floods, poverty, traffic, corruption, violence, inefficiency and all. This was my first holiday in many, many years and I got to spend whole days, as the sole adult male in my mother-in-law’s home, sitting around just reading the paper, or working up a sweat playing soccer with my ten year old godson. Although it was primarily a family trip (we went there for the first anniversary of the death of Becky’s father) and included a number of day trips out into the surrounding beautiful countryside, we also fitted in visits to old friends and colleagues. The absolute highlight was our attendance at the four hour long event to celebrate Ka Bel’s release. It was wonderful to see him again (for the first time since 99), he spent quite a bit of time with us that day, then he showed that he was uncowed by his recent ordeal by delivering a trademark stemwinding speech that took up nearly half of the event. As I’ve already mentioned, we also caught up with Cora Fabros; we visited leading anti-globalisation expert, Tony Tujan, at the research institute he heads (Tony had last visited us in 06); and we made a special trip to an international women’s conference to meet, for the first time, Amirah Ali Lidasan, the Moro (Muslim) woman leader whom PSNA toured through NZ in October.

PSNA Speaking Tour Very Successful

Amirah’s tour was PSNA’s major project for 2007 (planning and preparation had been going on since early 06). Every few years we run a speaking tour and this was our fifth one since 1995 (four women, one man). Amirah was our first Muslim and our first speaker from the far south (actually, our first one to not be from Manila or the main island) where there’s been a full on war raging for more than 30 years and where the US military is now directly involved as part of the “War on Terror”. I accompanied Amirah for the whole fortnight of the tour, from Dunedin to Whangarei, the first time I’d done a national tour like that since accompanying our last Filipino speaker in 2004 (and the third time I’ve accompanied a Filipino woman on a speaking tour). A highlight was taking her to the inner gate of the Waihopai spybase, to make the connection between NZ’s main contribution to that “War on Terror” and a target group on the sharp end of it (she was the first member of such a target group that we’ve taken there). As expected, only small numbers of people attended the public meetings (if the Philippines per se is off the radar in NZ, then the situation of its Muslim minority is subterranean), but she got very good mainstream media, appearing in the Press, Otago Daily Times, Marlborough Express and Manawatu Standard (front page with several photos), plus community and specialist papers and all sorts of radio interviews, from commercial networks to access and iwi stations. I was also interviewed several times in the course of that trip and I was the opening speaker at every public meeting. It was a very successful tour on a number of grounds.

PSNA was also involved, in a minor way, in the very high profile speaking tour of Philippine unionist, Dennis Maga, whose protests in Wellington during the State visit of President Arroyo attracted major media attention in both countries. And I actually managed to get out a bumper issue of our newsletter, Kapatiran (Solidarity), for the first time in more than a year. One issue a year of that is about as much as I can manage, what with everything else, but I distribute a daily flow of e-mail from the Philippine movement to several e-lists in NZ.

Fightback Against “Anti-Terror” Raids

As I seem to say in every annual report, my ancient political past keeps coming back to haunt me. In 2007 I found myself featuring in a book about the history of anarchism in NZ (I was an anarchist way, way back at the beginning of my “career”), specifically in its coverage of the Progressive Youth Movement, the first group with whom I was involved in the late 60s and early 70s. My only previous contact with the author had been a decade ago, so it was a surprise to be invited to speak at his book’s Christchurch launch. By a strange coincidence that took place only days before the much hyped “anti-terror” raids. The book features a photo of (a much skinnier and younger) me with a rifle – although rest assured that I couldn’t shoot straight if my life depended on it. The whole launch event was a time warp of old clippings, photos and movies.

I took part in rallies against those “anti-terror” raids in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland on consecutive weekends (during Amirah’s tour). I was at the protest outside the Labour Party Conference at Takapuna, which reminded me of other militant Auckland protests that I’d been on over the decades. I spoke at a Christchurch protest vigil in the Square and I electronically distributed my cover article from the December 07 Peace Researcher, which is an analysis of those raids and the whole “terrorism” hysteria behind them. That received a lot of very positive feedback. These unprecedented raids are a very ominous development and they need to be fought hard, because if we let the State forces get away with this sort of bullshit, they’ll make a habit of it. They couldn’t come up with any scary bearded Muslim “terrorists” with whom to frighten the public (the whole Ahmed Zaoui shambles spectacularly backfired on them), so they turned their attention to scary tattooed Maori “terrorists”, with a few ragtag anarchists and environmentalists tossed in for good measure. The message is clear – the State will target domestic activists using the arsenal of repressive anti-terrorist laws that it has amassed in the past few years, exactly as was predicted by groups such as us. Unless vigorously opposed, this will lead to the sort of police State that the US is in the process of becoming.

At the personal level, 2007 was a good year. I actually had a break and got away overseas for a couple of weeks (using the $5,000 so unexpectedly given to me by the Orangi Kaupapa Trust in 2006, with the condition that it be used for something personal, like  a holiday, not work). I had a couple of weeks on the road from one end of the country to the other, plus a couple of other work trips away (such as to the Roger Award event in Wellington, which Becky and I combined with a couple of days of holiday). There have been visits from old friends that we haven’t seen for years, such as Aziz Choudry and Dennis Small. My health has been good, with the only problem being the quite unexpected and unpleasant occurrence of the first ever asthma attack I’ve suffered (my doctor regarded it as a one off). It was during the very worst of it that I spoke at the anarchist book launch, which made the whole thing even more surreal than it already was.

2008 is election year and if we believe the polls it’s likely to be a National-led government. This holds no fears for CAFCA, we’ve seen off many Labour and National governments in the nearly 35 years that we’ve been going. Our campaign has remained unchanged – to oppose and expose all aspects of the ongoing domination of New Zealand by transnational corporations and everything that arises from that. It is simply another form of colonisation, but by corporations, rather than by countries. CAFCA, and I, have always been in it for the long haul, indeed it is turning out to be a life’s work. But what worthwhile work, and what an interesting life it has led to.