The 2009 CAFCA Annual General Meeting was held at the Christchurch WEA on September 7. 27 members were present. Bill Rosenberg chaired up until the point when he finished his speech, then he was replaced by Jeremy Agar, who has succeeded him as Chairperson. Apologies were accepted from: Tony Orman, Don Murray, Gilbert van Reenen, Perry Spiller, David Zwartz, Jocelyn Brooks, Brian Turner, Katherine Peet, Steffan Browning, Brian Easton and Ron Currie. The 2008 Minutes were read by the Secretary, Murray Horton, and accepted.

The 2008/09 accounts, which had been distributed with Watchdog 121, August 2009, were accepted unanimously, without discussion (this was the first year that our accounts have been prepared by a paid commercial bookkeeper). The finances are in a very healthy situation. Murray Horton reported that, as of the day of the AGM, CAFCA’s total bank balance stood at $46,000+ (there are three term deposits of $10,000 each). He reported that there were 443 members, as of that date (down from the number at the 2008 AGM and down from the nearly 500 members that CAFCA had for several years). Bruce Finnerty is happy to continue as the voluntary reviewer of the accounts and the meeting thanked him for doing so.

Bob Leonard reported on the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which pays Murray Horton – his gross annual income is currently $29,120 ($14 per hour). In the 2008/09 financial year (ending March 31), the Account spent $30,047.87 and income was $29,740.20 (a deficit of $307.67, a noticeably smaller deficit than for the 07/08 year). The Account currently has $14,396.72 on term deposit. As of the August 09 bank statement, that cheque account had $ 6,207.09 in it, which is a marked improvement. All year a special appeal has been sent to various groups and individuals, soliciting donations and new pledgers, with some success.

Donations accounted for 18 % of the Account’s annual income (as opposed to 34% the previous year). Regular pledgers now comprise 82% of annual income (66% the previous year). Donations have dropped to $5,295 from $8,000 the previous year. There were 51 pledgers as of July 09 (up from 47 the previous year), including those who pledge annually, half yearly and quarterly. The meeting passed a vote of thanks for Bob Leonard, who has been in charge of the Organiser Account since the early 1990s. Since the AGM Bob has recommended that the Account can sustain increasing Murray’s pay to $15 per hour.

Election of officers. Murray Horton was re-elected as Secretary/Organiser. The committee was re-elected unopposed - Bill Rosenberg, John Ring, Jeremy Agar, Lynda Boyd, Quentin Findlay, Colleen Hughes and Warren Brewer (who has joined the committee this year). Bill Rosenberg has resigned as Chairperson, having moved permanently to Wellington, and has been replaced by Jeremy Agar. Bill and Lynda Boyd (who has been going to university in Auckland for several years) are “distance” members of the committee.

Murray Horton did not present his annual Organiser’s Report to the AGM, on a one off basis, as that slot was filled by Bill Rosenberg’s farewell address, to mark the last time he will chair the AGM (after 20 odd years of doing so) and quite likely the last time he will be able to attend an AGM. Before Bill spoke, Murray paid tribute to his extraordinary record of 35 years service to CAFCA, since its foundation and thanked him for all his work. Murray said: “If I have been seen as the face of CAFCA, then Bill has been the brains of the outfit”. Murray led the members in a prolonged standing ovation for Bill.

Bill then delivered his speech “Forward And Leftward” (which is elsewhere in this issue), accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation (special thanks to Liz Gordon for lending us her data projector). That speech and PowerPoint slides are now on the CAFCA Website. There were plenty of questions and discussion at the end of the speech. At that point, Bill stepped down from the chair, to be replaced by Jeremy Agar. There was no general business (unusually, but a lot of what would normally constitute general business was covered in the discussion arising from Bill’s speech). A unique feature of this year’s AGM was the presence of the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) file on CAFCA, which had been received in late 2008. It was available to be inspected by members on the night and proved to be extremely popular. This will be a one off.

The AGM concluded by screening “Out Of Sight, Out Of Mined”, an Oxfam Australia documentary on the shocking record of a Canadian mining TNC in the Philippines. Following that, an unadvertised DVD was screened, namely a short compilation of some of the documentaries made by Vanguard Films of Wellington, to mark its 30 th anniversary. CAFCA, ABC and Murray have had a long working relationship with Vanguard.

CAFCA/ABC ORGANISER ACCOUNT 2008/09

Term deposit amount reinvested in KiwiBank 28/05/09 $14,396.72 for 150 days at 3.75% (tax exempt)

Bob Leonard
Organiser Treasurer
7/9/09

ORGANISER’S REPORT

- Murray Horton

Two things happened in 2009 that mean that it was very definitely not a run of the mill year. Firstly, there was the quite unexpected departure of Bill Rosenberg; and secondly, there was the unprecedented frenzy of media and public interest following the revelation that CAFCA was in possession of a censored version of the file that the NZ Security Intelligence Service (SIS) had kept on us for quarter of a century (chronologically, the second came before the first).

Bill Rosenberg ’s Departure

When Bill told me that, after living his entire life in Christchurch and having been a driving force in CAFCA since its foundation 35 years ago, he had got the job of Policy Director and Economist for the NZ Council of Trade Unions (CTU) and was permanently moving to Wellington within a few weeks, shock is a very mild way to describe my reaction. This had huge implications for CAFCA (our loss was very definitely the CTU’s gain). He and I had formed one of the most effective teams in the progressive movement for decades – if I was perceived as CAFCA’s face, then he was definitely our brain. For long periods during those 35 years, he has been CAFCA’s face and voice. I travelled a lot in the 70s and 80s and spent the best part of a total of between two and three years out of the country. I was made redundant from the Railways in 1991, went to the Philippines for several months and said I would work as a fulltime organiser upon my return if an income could be generated – in my absence Bill was one of those who set up the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account which has been providing my income ever since. When I went away on speaking tours Bill ran the show. When I have been in Auckland or Wellington or Dunedin, speaking at Roger Award events, Bill was the one uploading the Judges’ Report to our Website that night and dealing with media inquiries. A year ago when I was away in the Philippines for several weeks on a Christmas family holiday, Bill was left in sole charge once again.

He has acute political and economic nous, a very sound strategic sense, which has been exhibited time and again in the various campaigns we have run over the years, and which was demonstrated at every one of our fortnightly committee meetings. Over the years I have been greatly impressed by Bill’s writings (whether his 20 years of meticulous work on the Decisions of the Overseas Investment Commission [now the Overseas Investment Office]; Watchdog articles in general; or the authoritative submissions that he has produced on all manner of laws); his speeches on a whole variety of subjects; his many media articles and interviews on behalf of CAFCA; and his skills at chairing meetings, both big public ones and our regular committee ones.

Although Bill is still a committee member, it is from long distance now; and the pressures of his CTU work (at which he is doing an excellent job) mean that he can no longer write very much for us. We have lost him as our Chairperson after he had done that for the past 20 years (replaced by Jeremy Agar; Warren Brewer is the newest recruit to the committee) and as the chronicler in every issue of Watchdog of the official record of the sellout of the country ( James Ayers has replaced him in that role). Bill has played an invaluable role in so many other aspects of CAFCA’s behind the scenes work – years ago he used to personally print Watchdog (when he was cleaning out his garage this year, preparatory to shifting, he asked me if I wanted any of his collection of old gestetners – I politely declined). Much more recently, he has been my on call unpaid IT department for as long as I’ve been using a computer. He has installed each of the new machines that CAFCA has bought; he set up the broadband when we moved to that; he has spent countless hours, at nights and weekends, in my home office diagnosing and fixing technological problems. Two of the committee (I’m one) are non-drivers – he was our transport to every meeting, which we rotate between members’ homes. He was a signatory for all our bank accounts and a font of very good financial advice. His home groaned under the weight of numerous filing cabinets and bookcases full of CAFCA files, plus the volumes of magazines, books and reports that we have collected over the decades. All of those things had to be attended to at very short notice (it was a good dress rehearsal for what will be involved in the “succession issues” when the torch will inevitably be passed to a new generation of CAFCA activists) and I’m pleased to say that we came through it relatively unscathed. This is all very current and ongoing (at the time of writing, Bill is still in the process of selling the house and shifting north, commuting back to his Christchurch home every weekend), so there will doubtless be other unforeseen consequences of his departure.

But we miss him as an invaluable friend and colleague. In my case, he is one of my oldest, closest and most trusted friends – we go back to before the birth of CAFCA (CAFCINZ in those days), to 1972 to be precise. Twice we’ve lived under the same roof, for a total of 2-3 years; over the decades we have helped each other out in a whole raft of ways in our personal and family lives (ranging from him being a witness in a court case arising from an eviction dispute and assault in the last house I rented; to me helping him and his family shift house). Basically, we are part of each other’s family. It should be stressed that there was no ill feeling, on either side, regarding his departure. His final committee meeting, in May, was a splendid social occasion (of which CAFCA has too few); he went to a lot of trouble to prepare his excellent speech to the Annual General Meeting in September (which you can read elsewhere in this issue) and that AGM saw the biggest turn out for years, as members came specially to take the opportunity to personally farewell Bill from Christchurch. And that’s the other point to be emphasised – he has left Christchurch but not CAFCA. He remains very much an active committee member (albeit from a distance) and our Webmaster, and is happy to continue writing for Watchdog, subject to the very real constraints imposed by his high pressure work commitments. We think it’s quite a coup to have a CAFCA leader assume such a vital role in the national trade union movement. In the few months that he has been in that job, he has been very high profile; he brings a very progressive analysis to it, plus decades of experience of political and economic research and campaigning. He’s loving the job, finally getting paid to do what he actually wants to do (I know that feeling) and will do great things for the CTU. Most recently he has produced, in his typically insightful and comprehensive fashion, a blueprint for an alternative economy, with the aim being to start a national discussion on what sort of economy that we want, and indeed what sort of country we want. And he assures us that he has no intention of following in the shoes of so many union officials and becoming a Labour MP. We’ll hold you to that, Bill!

SIS File Led To Unprecedented Publicity

And if he had to go, then he ensured that he went out in a blaze of publicity. Which brings me to the second thing that has made 2009 an extraordinary year for CAFCA. In my 2008 Organiser’s Report I mentioned, without going into any detail, that we had received our SIS file but, that because of the extremely indiscreet title tattle and gossip about named third parties in it, we were mulling about what to do with it, how to make it public or, indeed, whether we could. That decision was made for us in January when I was rung by senior Press journalist, Martin van Beynen, who had inadvertently found out about our possession of the file in the course of a conversation with a mutual friend (and veteran CAFCA member). We had been developing a media strategy to publicise the file but that was blown out of the water by the Press, which wanted an “Exclusive” right now. Bill and I decided that as the cat was now out of the bag we might as well go along for the wild ride.

So, the whole thing kicked off with the Press devoting the top half of its front page to the CAFCA file (28/1/09, “SIS reveals secret files”, Martin van Beynen), illustrated by photos of Bill and I. In the same issue, virtually all of page 9 was devoted to Martin van Beynen’s analysis of the actual contents of that file and the Personal File of Paul Corliss (“SIS dossiers detail dalliances, dances and very little drama”). I can’t remember a previous occasion when CAFCA dominated the front page of the Press, along with photos of its two old warhorses (and they actually published a photo of me looking semi-human. For years, the Press file photo of me was of a close up of my face locked in a snarl, taken at a Waihopai spybase protest, an absolutely dreadful photo. But this time, because we were doing them a favour, they sent out a photographer to take a series of shots of me with the file).

There were quite a number of follow up articles. For example, Maire Leadbeater’s Personal File featured on the front page of the next day’s Press (“Activist tracked from age 10”, Martin van Beynen). The Personal File of Green MP Keith Locke was a major story in the Sunday Star Times (8/2/09, “SIS file on MP ‘an affront to our parliamentary system’ – Locke”, Anthony Hubbard). The Press felt the need to put us in our place by way of an editorial (29/1/09, “Return of SIS files”) which lambasted Bill and I (‘the ageing Leftwing agitator, Murray Horton” who is given to a “wildly hyperbolic flourish”, etc). The whole issue of the SIS files, particularly the revelations that Keith Locke was spied on for seven years after he was elected as an MP (and that he and his sister, Maire Leadbeater, had each been spied on for 50 years, starting from when they were kids) was a major media story. For the details of what is in our file, see Watchdog 120, May 2009, “SIS Spied On CAFCA For A Quarter Of A Century”, by Murray Horton, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/20/06.htm. Precisely because of all the indiscreet gossip in it about third parties, we have not made the CAFCA file public - you won’t find it on our Website, nor have we reproduced any of it in Watchdog. But as a one off we made it available to members at the AGM (but they couldn’t borrow it, photocopy or photograph it). It proved to be extremely popular on the night.

I have also received Volume 1 of my SIS Personal File, covering 1969-81 inclusive, which will get written up for Watchdog in due course. I have been told that I will have to wait until sometime in 2010 for the rest, which goes up until 2002, when they said that my file was closed. And I have received my laughably slim Police Intelligence file, consisting of a handful of printouts from the Police database – needless to say I have disputed that this could possibly be my full file. I appealed to the Privacy Commissioner about the deletions in both my SIS and Police files. The Commissioner upheld the Police deletions saying, cryptically: “I am unable to provide any further information with regard to the information that has been withheld from you as this may prejudice the reasons why the information has been withheld. I understand that this may leave you feeling more in the dark than you would like, however, please be assured by the fact that the information has been independently reviewed by our Office and we are satisfied that the Police have applied the Act correctly” (letter to me from Privacy Commissioner, 9/11/09). Funnily enough, I don’t feel assured. In the case of the deletions from my SIS file, the Commissioner and I have agreed to wait until I receive the rest of it so that the whole lot can be reviewed in one hit.

Ongoing Clamour

The revelation that CAFCA had its SIS file (and, to my knowledge, we remain the only organisation to receive it, as opposed to individuals who have received their Personal Files) set off a clamour that shows no signs of dying down anytime yet. We have received inquiries by all known means of communications (my favourite was the cyclist who shouted at me from the middle of rush hour traffic: “Murray Horton! How do I apply for my SIS file?” I shouted the necessary details back to him). We have received letters, phone calls and e-mails from people wanting to know how to apply for their files or to discuss the response that they have received. In nearly all cases now the SIS “neither confirms nor denies” that it holds anything on the applicant. They’ve also started asking people to pay the exorbitant rates allowed for under the Official Information Act. I’ve been rung (and I have an unlisted number) by total strangers and people with whom I’ve had no contact for decades. Many of the people who have received their files have been happy to meet CAFCA’s request to give us a copy for archiving purposes, so that there is at least one central collection. Some are happy for us to make public use of their file; some authorise us only making use that doesn’t identify them; a few don’t want any public use at all. That’s fine by us, and those files are still arriving, a year after we kicked off this whole process.

Those SIS Personal Files released to people more recently (including my own part file) come with virtually all other names removed. In my case, that means that there is no mention of the woman, and fellow CAFCA founder, who was my partner, personal and political, for 18 years. But the CAFCA file is full of lists and lists of names of people, which is why it is so absolutely invaluable (and obviously regarded by the SIS as a mistake which it has no intention of repeating). For example, those who attended numerous private meetings of the Christchurch branch of the former Communist Party in the 1970s and 80s – those reports were released to CAFCA because we were discussed at those meetings. Or lists of those who attended protests, pickets, public meetings, our AGMs, etc, etc. And the SIS had kindly recorded which of those people were the subjects of Personal Files (including that very same ex-partner of mine whose existence has been deleted from my Personal File). Bill and I must have spent hundreds of hours in the past year alerting people to their being in our SIS file and advising them to apply for the Personal File held on them (ranging from former Communists to old unionists, from veteran peace activists to current MPs, and including people who are most definitely not on our side of the argument now). We have advised people how to go about applying for the Personal File on deceased family members. All of this has led to the SIS being absolutely inundated by people requesting their files, with the result that applicants are being told that it will be many, many months before they will receive any response. I am one of those in that position but I am happy to wait. If CAFCA (and I) have achieved nothing else this year, we have triggered off a major exercise in democratic accountability. NZ applauded when the secret police files of the old Eastern European police states were thrown open 20 years ago; now it’s time for us to shine a light on how the NZ State has monitored and spied upon its dissidents, with no indication that it has stopped (just the emphasis has changed, as new sets of “enemies” have to be found to spy on, to justify the continued existence of the SIS).

Premature Obituary

The Press must have felt compelled to make amends for its appalling editorial by devoting the first two pages of its weekend Mainlander section to a feature on me (14&15/2/09, “The last radical”, Martin van Beynen). It was very nice of them to write my obituary without me having to go through all the bother of dying. For someone who has been in the media since my teens even I felt over-exposed. That was the only such profile of me that has ever appeared in the mainstream media and it was an interesting experience being interviewed, in person and over the phone, over a number of days. Some of the questions amused me – the day before publication he rang to check that I am, in fact, a rugby fan but only watch it on free to air TV. This led to questions about my political views on pay TV. It was a positive article, which was a relief in itself, because van Beynen specialises in putting the boot in and writes a weekly column that he described to me as being that “of a grumpy old man”. As his visit coincided with the first time in 18 years that I had hired a painter, he could report with a straight face that I live in a “well maintained” home. I think he also appreciated my honesty – he arrived just as I was opening a letter from the SIS Director. I gave it to him to read before I’d finished doing so myself, which could have been disastrous, I suppose. But he ended up quoting that letter to present me in a positive light (although I’m not sure that getting a character reference from the SIS is something to brag about).

For my part, I took the opportunity to talk to him about the internal politics and dynamics of the Press and learned some interesting stuff – I interviewed the interviewer. The article was all about me, a typical personality piece, not about the boring old issues on which I’ve been campaigning for 40 years (even seeing that figure in writing makes me do a double take) but reaction to it was completely positive and an awful lot of friends, neighbours and total strangers took it upon themselves to tell me they’d read about me in the paper. My favourite encounter was when, as a hospital visitor waiting for the lift, an orderly leaned right into my ear and said: “You don’t look too bad in person. My brother saw your photo in the paper and said to me ‘’he’s gone all old and ugly and jowly’”, then without another word, he walked off. I have no idea who he was.

Tories Can’t Help Themselves

The Awesome Foursome (National, Act, Maori Party and United Future) have been in Government for a year now and the direction in which they plan to take New Zealand is plain for all to see – I spelled it out in my analysis of the 2008 election in “Heeeere’s Johnny!!” in Watchdog 1119, February 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/19/02.htm, so read that rather than me rehash it all here. I think you’ll find my predictions pretty spot on. CAFCA campaigned hard against privatisation from 2006-08 inclusive, and you can see that agenda unfolding right now – not as a Rogernomics-type Big Bang (electoral suicide) but as incremental steps, the death of a thousand cuts. As I write this, ACC presents the perfect case study of how to set up a publicly owned State corporation for privatisation or, alternatively, to make it such an unattractive and expensive option, that people will desert it for the transnational insurance providers that will suddenly appear on the scene waving the banner of “competition”. I’ve been through this once before, the last time National was in office, and I well remember the shiny brochures and seductive offers directed at self-employed workers such as myself (Labour closed that particular door as soon as it came to power; National and Act want to throw it open again).

Nor did it take long for National’s more Neanderthal tendencies to emerge – for instance, Gerry Brownlee’s outrageous proposal to “investigate” mining in national parks. Or the perverted version of the carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS), which puts the burden fully onto the taxpayer and lets the country’s biggest transnational industrial polluters get away almost scot free, by parroting the line from the likes of Comalco that “if you don’t do what we want, we’ll leave the country”. This latter was too much to swallow even for some of the traditional supporters of both National governments and transnational Big Business. In an editorial (19/9/09) the Press said: “National pointed to Comalco as one company which might have headed overseas. Where else would Comalco get hydro power at the cheap prices it does in New Zealand through its secret deal with the Government? If this company shifted across the Tasman it would inevitably face higher electricity prices as much of Australia’s energy is from coal generation. Not only is this more expensive to produce but it would also attract emissions charges. And other companies would only have contemplated moving to Australia if that nation’s ETS was less rigorous than Labour’s scheme here and that is unlikely”. CAFCA couldn’t have said it better, except to repeat our longstanding invitation for Comalco to go ahead and bugger off.

Looking further ahead, National has ordered a binding referendum on MMP, to be held in conjunction with the 2011 election. This has always been a target of Big Business, who campaigned hard (unsuccessfully) to stop its introduction in the 90s. Big Business, whether transnational or local, has always yearned to go back to the elected dictatorship which allowed bloodless coups such as Rogernomics. The Old Guard of politicians, from both major parties, who came into Parliament under First Past The Post and who have a visceral dislike of MMP, are fading into the past; so National under the leadership of a new generation Tory are unlikely to champion a naked return to such a discredited system. Key has shown an ability to work MMP to his advantage (the coalition with the Maori Party being the prime example), but National will try to concoct some bastardised electoral system that will preserve the veneer of MMP (which is what a majority of the NZ people have consistently shown that they want), while really restoring FPP under another name. It’s called having it both ways. Mark my words.

An Act In Danger Of Being Liberalised To Death

Both National and Labour are inextricably wedded to the “open economy” cult, central features of which are a slavish devotion to foreign “investment” and “free” trade. So both feel the need to liberalise even further the already shredded and porous Overseas Investment Act, to make things even easier for the poor old transnational corporations (TNCs) who apparently find New Zealand a terribly difficult country in which to make a killing. When National was last in power, in the 90s, they amended the Act; Labour did so again in 2005. A mere four years later National is having another go. So, once again, CAFCA is running a campaign about this bloody Act. The same lazy old lies are being parroted by its proponent, Bill English, namely that “we” need “their” money and jobs. I won’t go into the details here; you will find them in previous 2009 issues of Watchdog. At the time of writing we’re still waiting for the Government to make public its planned changes to the Act, so our campaign is currently in a holding pattern. But enough has been released for the direction to be abundantly clear – for instance, the new Investment Protocol with Australia under the Closer Economic Relations (CER) agreement dramatically increases the threshold requiring any kind of foreign investment “oversight” approval from $100m to $477m. This is for Australian investors but as they are the biggest percentage of foreign investors in NZ, that will become the benchmark for all others. There is an exact precedent for this – in 1999, just days before the election that brought Labour to power, the dying National government signed a CER Investment Protocol which increased the threshold from $10m to $50m. That became the benchmark for all other foreign investors and Labour ignored CAFCA’s demand that it be wound back. Indeed it was increased to $100m under Michael Cullen’s 2005 Overseas Investment Act (for details of the 2009 CER Investment Protocol, see Quentin Findlay’s cover story in this issue, “ No Entrance Refused – How New Zealand’s New Investment Protocols Are An Open Door for Australian And Other Foreign Investment”).

Thus far we have concentrated on putting out press releases opposing every liberalising detail being drip fed to us by the Government and we have also cast our net far and wide to garner the support of other groups and individuals to join us in our opposition. There is a page on our Website devoted to this campaign and it features the list of those who have signed our call to oppose the liberalisation of the Act. You will find that at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/OIReview/OIReview2009.html. As far as the media is concerned, CAFCA is the go to organisation for comment and analysis on this issue, so there were two distinct bursts of national media coverage – when the Government first announced that it was ordering a review of the whole foreign investment regime, and several months later, when the first recommendations of that were announced. In both cases I did a flurry of interviews in all media – newspapers, radio, TV – most by phone, but also the odd live TV appearance at some godforsaken pre-dawn hour on a breakfast show. The second flurry was going to include studio interviews on both TVNZ and TV3 but both were cancelled because they couldn’t get somebody else along at short notice to provide the opposing view “for balance”. So they both pulled the plug on me instead. Funnily enough, this scrupulous need for balance is never so apparent when the boot is on the other foot. As it is, some journalists (but only a small minority, I’m pleased to say) don’t disguise their bias. On one live TV interview I had the (invisible to me) front man shouting into my earpiece: “Come on, Mr Horton, you can’t close the country off from the global economy!” CAFCA has never said that we want to.

Bipartisan Free Trade Obsession

The other half of this campaign is one that we launched in 2008, and which I wrote about in my last Organiser’s Report, namely the campaign to oppose a US/NZ Free Trade Agreement, to be achieved by the US joining an expanded Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (commonly called the P4 Agreement). The prospect of such a Free Trade Agreement, seen by both Labour and National as the Holy Grail, was breathlessly announced by Labour in its final couple of months in office. CAFCA hurriedly geared up for a fight, soliciting allies in the process and then – nothing. Although the change of government in NZ made no difference to what is a bipartisan consensus on “free” trade in this country, the simultaneous change of government in the US definitely did. The Obama Administration put a freeze on all new negotiations for free trade agreements until it had completed a review of its whole policy on the subject. In November 09 it was announced that negotiations will commence in 2010 for the US to join the expanded P4, with 2011 as the target to seal the deal, so it looks like the battle is about to begin. CAFCA will crank up the campaign for which the groundwork was laid in 08.

As detailed in my 2008 Report, we set up a specialist Website, New Zealand Not For Sale ( www.nznotforsale.org), administered by Victor Billot. That is chock full of information on the subject and features an identical list of people and organisations to the one on the CAFCA Website, because we linked the two halves of the campaign together and asked people to sign (hard copy or electronically) a letter opposing both the liberalisation of the Overseas Investment Act and the proposed US/NZ Free Trade Agreement. Only one member responded negatively, saying that we should treat them as separate issues; everybody else who signed was only too happy to sign up to opposing both. To refresh your memory about the proposed Agreement, see Bill Rosenberg’s “Who Gains If We Get A Free Trade Agreement With The US?” in Watchdog 119, February 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/19/01.htm. Of course the Government is not twiddling its thumbs while it has been waiting for Obama and the World Trade Organisation’s deep frozen Doha Round to get their act together and, with the full backing of Labour, is rushing helter skelter into a dizzying variety of multilateral and bilateral free trade agreements with a whole range of countries, the latest one being with Malaysia (with the Gulf States and Hong Kong following immediately behind).

In response to the biggest crisis to confront global capitalism since the 1930s’ Great Depression, the major economic powers, the champions of “free” trade, blithely imposed tariffs and introduced subsidies to protect their own economies. It was a wonderful sight to see the likes of Labour’s Phil Goff and National’s Tim Groser (who should really be named Grosser) united in outrage at this departure from the One True Path. “How could they do this to us, when we have been such good and faithful servants of the cult?” was the common refrain from political and media acolytes alike.

Good Relations With Several Parties

CAFCA has a working relationship with a number of political parties, both inside and outside of Parliament. I’ll take just the few weeks before I wrote this as an example. In that time I was interviewed by a student doing a research project on behalf of a former Minister (and current MP) in the last Labour government. This was a rather intriguing proposal for a kind of a “progressive” Multilateral Agreement on Investment (check out the online Watchdogs – www.converge.org.nz/watchdog - from 1997 & 98 for details on the original MAI proposal and the global campaign against it) which would impose some sort of capital controls whilst simultaneously being “business friendly”. I solicited opinions on this from not only my committee colleagues but also wider afield, including from those who played a leading role in that successful 1990s’ campaign against the MAI. I received replies ranging from “have nothing to do with it” to “talk to the student”. I decided to do the latter and took the opportunity to make clear that this sort of proposal, whilst commendable in so far as it goes (which is not very far) could not even be entertained in isolation and that Labour would have to radically overhaul its slavish devotion to the cult of foreign “investment” and “free” trade. Coincidentally, on the day of the interview, I ran into the ex-Minister at a social event, so was able to reiterate that point in person.

I also met (at his request) with a Green Party worker to discuss a particular campaign that he is working on and to discuss his suggestion that CAFCA can help with it. I attended a farewell function for Green MP Sue Bradford, who resigned from Parliament (I‘m not a member of the Greens, or any party, but that didn’t stop the Greens inviting me). Sue is a great loss to the Green caucus and to Parliament in general, but she will be warmly welcomed back into the parliament of the streets from whence she came. Her talents are sorely needed back at the grassroots level. And I was a member of a panel that spoke to the Alliance’s conference on community activism. That was four different points of contact with three different political parties within just a few weeks. CAFCA is a broadbased group, possibly more so than you realise – this year one of our newest members went out of his way to tell us of his National Party history and has been forthright in telling us the numerous issues on which he completely disagrees with us. But he still joined us, his decision swayed by a particular Watchdog article by Bill, and he even sent in a Roger Award nomination.

Roger Award

Which brings me to the Roger Award, CAFCA’s regular campaign, one which has been running since 1997. In March 2009 I spoke at the Auckland event to announce the winner of the 2008 Roger (see my article “Tobacco Merchant Of Death Wins 2008 Roger Award”, in Watchdog 120, May 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/20/03.htm). That event was organised by our committee member, Lynda Boyd, who is spending several years in Auckland whilst attending university, and hosted by Global Peace and Justice Auckland. The winner was announced by the Chief Judge, Geoff Bertram, of Wellington. That marked his swansong as a Roger judge of several years’ standing. In fact, three judges resigned, the others being Brian Turner and Cee Payne, both of whom had also served for several years. The 2009 panel includes two new judges – Joce Jesson and Wayne Hope, both of Auckland; Christine Dann, from Banks Peninsula, is the new Chief Judge. So we have five judges this year (the other incumbents being Bryan Gould and Paul Corliss) – three men, two women; three North Islanders, two South Islanders. We never seem to have any problem attracting people, and high profile ones at that, to be judges, a task that involves zero pay, and having to work over the Christmas holiday period. Once again, I take the opportunity of thanking our judges, and everyone else around the country, who make the Roger Award the great success that it is. It continues to attract a generous amount of mainstream media coverage (I did several interviews during the few days that I was in Auckland and shortly after getting home). It is now well established in the public consciousness.

And we were able to get nomination forms to a greater number of people thanks to the invaluable help of the Greens who (for a not insignificant fee) were prepared, once again, to include them in a mailout of their Party newsletter to their several thousand members. We’ve always had a good response from Greens in the years in which the Party has been prepared to send out the nomination forms (not in election years). Unfortunately, a number of those nominations were for Fonterra which, of course, is not a foreign-owned company (technically, it’s not even a company but a farmer-owned cooperative). The Roger Award organisers (namely CAFCA and GATT Watchdog) had discussed this very point at our annual planning meeting earlier this year. We discussed very thoroughly whether to extend the Roger to include New Zealand transnationals (of which Fonterra is the biggest) and unanimously decided to stick with the status quo. There are practical reasons – for instance, it would greatly increase the amount of research we’d have to do when we select finalists and we don’t have the database of information on those companies (because they are not CAFCA’s target). But, more importantly, we believe that the Roger’s success lies in it being focused, quite narrowly, on the activities in NZ of foreign-owned transnationals (we use the legal definition of a company being foreign-owned i.e. if it is 25% or more foreign-owned) in the calendar year in question. And even if Fonterra was eligible as a company, then the majority of nominations we have received for it would still not be eligible because the reasons given by those nominators exclusively dealt with Fonterra’s activities overseas. We can sympathise with them and it is easy for people to get confused about whether Fonterra is eligible when, for example, it has been the subject of a high profile 2009 campaign by Greenpeace, which describes it as “New Zealand’s biggest multinational”. To reiterate – the Roger Award is not for the worst transnational corporation in the world, not for the worst New Zealand transnational, not for the worst company in New Zealand. There is doubtless scope for awards in each and all of those fields – we would welcome somebody else setting them up.

The Roger was also publicised by several other organisations and unions, to whom we are truly thankful. And apart from the nominations for Fonterra we received very few other ineligible ones (my favourite this year was the person who nominated “all of them!”). But I must record my disappointment at the low number of nominations received from actual CAFCA members. I’m not sure why – maybe familiarity breeds contempt. Surely our members don’t think that the TNCs have started behaving better (on the other hand, there was a very good response from members to our letter asking them to endorse our opposition to liberalising the Overseas Investment Act and any Free Trade Agreement with the US. The hard copy of this was sent out with the same Watchdog – the August issue – as the hard copy Roger nomination forms. So, I suppose, one out of two isn’t bad). The event to announce the winner/s will be held in Wellington in March, the first time back in the capital since 2007. I’m looking forward to it, Roger events are always great fun.

Watchdog

Watchdog is CAFCA’s voice and face to the world. It now looks the best it ever has (I try to have as near as possible to 100% of the illustrations sourced digitally, which makes for better quality graphics and photos). Ian Dalziel does a graphic for the cover of every issue, and they’re bloody good – it’s just a shame that they have to be reduced to a fraction of their size in order to fit in with the text. For the May issue, we were generously gifted a number of excellent US cartoons by their creator, Matt Wuerker. They attracted a lot of positive comment. Once again, many thanks to Leigh Cookson, who does the layout, and to Greg Waite, who is the Webmaster for the online edition. Despite its small circulation, Watchdog has a very high reputation and is read by many more people than those who actually subscribe to it. We know this from the number of people who contact us having checked out our Websites, both for CAFCA and Watchdog. The most fascinating evidence of that happened when Treasury contacted us urgently seeking a copy of Geoff Bertram’s article in Watchdog 120, May 2009 (“ New Zealand’s Overseas Debt, The Banks And The Crisis”, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/20/04.htm). I asked them for the requisite $5, which is what we charge for individual copies, and was asked if we take credit cards? When I replied no, Treasury said never mind, they’d get it photocopied in the Wellington City Library. How is that for fiscal tightfistedness? I could have easily e-mailed them the article as an attachment but I thought that Treasury, above all others, must practice what they preach vis a vis user pays. In short, bugger them.

The biggest single thing to happen to Watchdog in 2009 was Bill Rosenberg ceasing to write up the monthly Decisions of the Overseas Investment Office (and before that, the Overseas Investment Commission), something that he had unfailingly done for every issue for 20 years. For the full details on that, see my article, “The End Of An Era” in Watchdog 121, August 2009 (hard copy edition only). There was a very real possibility that Watchdog would no longer include our analysis of the official record of the relentless selloff of the nation. However, we are delighted that James Ayers has taken on the job and is doing a good job of it. It is definitely not one for the fainthearted. This issue marks his solo debut as Watchdog’s OIO writer.

New Writers, Name Writers

James is not the only new writer. Bill’s departure motivated us to cast around for some new writers, specifically ones with name recognition. We asked several likely candidates if they could commit to writing us one article for whichever 2009 or 2010 issue suited them best. It says a lot for the respect in which Watchdog is held that nearly all of them responded positively (there is no pay in it for them). We’ve already seen the fruits of this, with recent articles by Bryan Gould, Brian Easton, Jane Kelsey, John Minto, Peter A Thompson, Maire Leadbeater and Liz Gordon (not to forget Geoff Bertram, our writer who triggered Treasury’s interest). People are taking more notice of Watchdog – Bryan Gould’s article in the August issue was quoted by Chris Trotter in one of his regular mainstream media columns.

There are more such writers in the pipeline, although inevitably the pressures attending busy people who have to make a living means that some promised articles have had to be delayed or shortened (both of which have happened with this issue). These “name” writers are, of course, in addition to Watchdog’s regulars, namely myself, Bill (who won’t be so regular from now on because of his CTU job), Dennis Small, Quentin Findlay and Jeremy Agar, our exceptionally prolific Reviews Editor. I have been able to do more writing for Watchdog in 2009 than I have in recent years, contributing articles on subjects ranging from political and economic analysis to CAFCA’s SIS file. Plus my trademark obituaries, of course, which always receive a very positive response. This issue contains the first book review that I’ve written in many years, of the Elsie Locke biography. I had no intention of doing that but it arrived just days after Jeremy left for a month overseas and I started to read it out of personal interest (Elsie was a personal friend and colleague for decades) and one thing led to another. Watchdog’s long history comes in handy at such times – I was able to incorporate great chunks of my 2001 obituary of Elsie (why re-do the job of summarising her life when I’d done a perfectly good job of that eight years earlier) and I was also able to go back to an article in a 1990 issue to include relevant material that is not covered in the book – I drew that to the author’s attention and she was sufficiently intrigued as to make a special trip to the National Library in Wellington to read that article and to send me her thoughts on it.

The other noteworthy thing to happen this year is that, due to getting new equipment, our printers are no longer bound by the 80 page limit which was the rule since we started with them back in 1997. That had frequently meant that articles had to be held over until the next issue, as everything couldn’t always be fitted in. The copy still has to go to the printers in multiples of four pages. The previous three 2009 issues have been 84, 88 and 88 pages respectively – and I still held back articles in a couple of instances to stop the issue getting too big. There is no requirement that Watchdog has to be that size, it has just happened that for years it has never been smaller that 70+ pages. But I won’t be busting my guts to get it up to that size every issue. The three issues per year have to come out to a certain schedule (April, August and December) so I’ll go with how big, or small, each one is when it’s time for it to be signed off, laid out and printed. That means you may receive smaller issues in future than what you’re used to. I’m not going to pad it out with imports from other publications, for example, just to get it up to a certain size. As you will have noticed, this is the fourth issue this year. The explanation is simple. In 2008 there were only two issues, because I went away to the Philippines for a six week family Christmas holiday, so you get four this year to make up for it.

Uploading All Old Issues Online

There was one unique project involving the online Watchdog this year, namely the very ambitious attempt to get the whole set digitalised and uploaded, going right back to the very first tatty little gestetnered issues in 1974. The impetus for this came from Lynda Boyd. Naturally it all turned into a saga, at every stage of the process. Firstly we had to get every issue scanned (including a handful of one off booklets that we published decades ago). This all went pretty smoothly, albeit costing us around $800. Bill had volunteered to put the scans through a further process called optical character recognition. While he was doing that he drew our attention to the enormous size of each issue (each one was scanned as a PDF, meaning that the whole thing is one big image, not a text file). Apologies to members who don’t know what I’m talking about but, for instance, one issue alone came in at 45MB (and we had around 100 issues scanned). So, we took the whole job back and had them scanned them again in compressed format, reducing their size and with a corresponding reduction in visual quality, but still readable. That brought the 45MB issue down to 10MB, still a big issue but not impossible (still too big for the Internet service provider for one national organisation that I tried to e-mail it to recently – it was rejected). There was a period earlier this year when I seemed to spend weeks doing nothing else but taking old Watchdogs, in different states of fragility, to and from our photocopying company. That process alone was a big job.

Only when that was all done did we think to ask our Web host (who doesn’t charge us) if it had enough free cyberspace available for this big job. That’s when things got really interesting. I won’t go into the details, but the outcome – after everyone had calmed down – was that we were given a limit of free cyberspace on that site and we agreed to compromise. Instead of being able to upload the whole set, we have only uploaded the 11 most recent issues (covering 1996-99 inclusive). We need the rest of that free cyberspace for future issues of Watchdog, as they obviously have to be our priority, not issues from the 70s and 80s (fascinating though they are). All the issues from 1999 onwards are text only files, with no illustrations, meaning that the whole decade of online issues has only taken up about 10MB. So, you can now read at www.converge.org.nz/watchdog the online issues from 1996-99 inclusive. Sadly, we have been informed that, for technical reasons, those older issues (i.e. 1996-99) can not be found in any online searches. You need to know to go to the actual Watchdog site to read them; you won’t just stumble across them in a Google search. Rest assured that steps are afoot to get the rest of the old scanned issues online, by taking a different approach. That is a work in progress and hasn’t happened yet. And, regardless of the outcome of that, we now have the entire set scanned and stored on disc. In the meantime you can order an issue to be e-mailed to you as a PDF attachment, if you like, but don’t ask if your server can’t handle files of at least 10MB per issue.

Media Presence

As I’ve said in several consecutive Organiser’s Reports, CAFCA enjoys a media presence disproportionate to our actual size. I’ve already highlighted the quite unprecedented coverage that CAFCA, as an organisation, and Bill and I as its leading figures, got in the Press when it ran its front page lead “Exclusive” about our SIS file. Not only did we get the top half of the front page, plus photos, but we also got an editorial devoted to attacking us. Followed a couple of weeks later by the two page “personality” profile on me as the lead item in its Saturday Mainlander section (and I dispute its headline that I am “the last radical”. I’m sure there must be at least one more out there somewhere). But all that SIS file coverage was about us as individuals or historical spying on CAFCA. Anyone reading any of it would have been little the wiser about the issues that CAFCA has been on about for 35 years (and which led to the SIS spying on us for most of that time). I’m pleased to say that CAFCA does also get plenty of good coverage about the issues of concern to us. I’ve already mentioned the two distinct flurries of media coverage in connection with the Government’s intention to further liberalise the Overseas Investment Act. And we always get plenty of media interest before, during and after the announcement of the Roger Award winner.

I put out press releases on a regular basis, some of which get picked up and quoted. A very recent excellent example of this occurred in November, when Cedenco, a major American-owned vegetable processing company in Gisborne, was put into receivership because of a number of reasons, including criminal allegations against leading executives of its US owner. I put out a press release documenting that CAFCA had written to the OIO more than a year earlier, when the story first appeared in the NZ media, querying the “good character” of the people owning or exercising control over the company (being of “good character”, which is conveniently not defined, is one of the requirements for foreign investors under the Overseas Investment Act. It only applies to individuals, not companies). The OIO assured us that all was in order, as they always do (we’ve periodically put in such complaints, about various foreign investors, for the past dozen years. Not one of them has been upheld). I’d notified the media about this back in 2008, and nobody paid any attention. But in November 2009 CAFCA was able to say “we warned you about this more than a year ago” and suddenly the media paid attention, big time. I was interviewed live on Radio NZ’s flagship programme Morning Report, as was the OIO’s CEO (who didn’t acquit herself very well), and it was the lead item on RNZ’s News. It also ran for several days in the Business section of mainstream papers.

We have a good strike rate with the Herald, the country’s biggest paper. I’ve had a good relationship with one particular journalist there for years, and I made a special trip to the Herald building to make sure that we finally met in person when I was in Auckland in March for the last Roger Award event. Quotes from some of those press releases (described as “splendidly blunt” by a Sunday Star Times columnist) have cropped up in all sorts of mainstream papers and magazines and led to radio and TV interviews. On more than one occasion the Press has not used any of my press release, but run nearly all of it as a letter to the editor (sometimes giving it lead letter status and the headline for the page), despite it not having been written as such. But that’s fine by me, because instead of using just a soundbite of a few words, nearly all of it gets printed. As well as the mainstream media, I’ve done interviews this year with several community radio stations, both in Christchurch and around the country, as well as with Craccum, the Auckland University student paper.

A lot of the time we don’t have to do anything, the media comes to us for comment on a specific example of the ongoing transnational takeover. Recently, for instance, I have been interviewed by Radio NZ Business News for comment on Shell selling its NZ assets to Infratil and the Superannuation Fund, and I was contacted by journalists from the Dominion Post, Rural News and Farmers Weekly for information about, and comment on, the purchase of a stake in Pyne Gould Guinness Wrightson by a Chinese company. Sometimes journalists contact us in the outside hope that we might know something about whatever it is that they’re researching, and we can’t help them at all. Most recently I was approached by both TVNZ (re the closure of the Firestone factory in Christchurch) and TV3 (re the newly signed NZ/Malaysia Free Trade Agreement) with exactly those sorts of inquiries – in the latter case I turned down the chance of an interview and referred them to somebody else who is better informed than me on the subject. Sometimes totally confused journalists ring up – my favourite is the young woman who, a few years ago, asked me if I was the spokesperson for the Lyttelton Port Company. I told her that, on the contrary, I was the spokesperson for the campaign to stop it being sold. She then asked my help to find the Lyttelton Port Company, so I obligingly read her the number from the phone book. “I couldn’t find that”, was her response. “Now you’ll think that all reporters are stupid”. No, just you, lady.

And sometimes media interviews get arranged and then cancelled (I’ve already mentioned this happening with both TVNZ and TV3, both in connection with the Overseas Investment Act liberalisation). When I was in Auckland for the Roger Award event I was rung by a Radio NZ Business journalist and asked to come to their building to be interviewed as part of a documentary about the crisis of capitalism. At some inconvenience to both myself and Lynda Boyd, my long suffering Auckland chauffeur, I did so, only to find the interview was not to be in a studio but into a tape recorder in the staff tea room (which mightily pissed off at least one worker who was trying to have morning tea). It was one of the strangest interview venues I’ve experienced and then, to cap it off, I was completely cut from the whole bloody programme. So it was a complete waste of my time (and Lynda’s).

Badge Of Honour From NBR

Of course, not all our dealings with the media are positive or friendly (as evidenced by the Press editorial about our SIS file, which had a go at me personally). One particular journalist, who obviously regards media objectivity as an alien concept, regularly e-mails me to vociferously and sometimes abusively argue the point after receiving one of my releases. Then again, he is just as likely to ring me up, as nice as pie, for an interview in which he is happy to present CAFCA’s case in a positive light (because he agrees with us on that particular point). He has occasionally given us information because it suits his purposes. The prize this year (and maybe for many other years) goes to the National Business Review (NBR) which included CAFCA in a two page “exposé” on June 5, entitled “Destructive protest groups: Companies count the cost of radical action”. Our fellow defendants in the dock were the Save Happy Valley Campaign, Save Animals From Exploitation, People’s Moratorium Enforcement Agency and Global Peace and Justice Auckland. The “indictment” against us (illustrated by a graphic of NZ with a sign across it reading “No Investment Allowed”) read: “They don’t tie themselves to trees or vandalise property but anti-foreign ownership groups such as CAFCA have played a more insidious part in destroying both shareholder and taxpayer wealth. CAFCA has been around since the mid 1970s and is perhaps best known for its annual presentation of the ‘Roger Award’, named after former Finance Minister Sir Roger Douglas and awarded to the worst transnational corporation in New Zealand. Past winners have included Telecom, Progressive Enterprises, Monsanto and Tranz Rail, the first inductee into the Roger Award ‘Hall of Shame’. While foreign ownership is no longer a dirty concept under National, the previous Labour government put some of CAFCA’s ideals into action, blocking a Canadian pension fund bid for Auckland Airport, bailing out Air New Zealand (costing taxpayers almost $900 million) and buying back the railways and creating KiwiRail, showing that governments can damage economies more than ‘transnational corporations’ ever can”. Phew, all I can say is that we must be doing something right to have so comprehensively got up the nose of the media mouthpiece of Big Business and the market forces ideologues. When we circulated that to members and supporters, we were inundated with congratulatory messages, saying that we should wear it as a badge of honour. If only our alleged influence with the Labour government had any basis in reality. Never mind, it’s enough that wildeyed, spittleflecked business rags think that we do.

A lot of our contact with the media and the wider world comes about as a result of our excellent Website, which Bill still manages as the Webmaster. It’s very common for journalists to use it – in the very recent past I’ve had a message from one saying “it’s a bloody good Website”. And it leads us into some strange territory. I’ll give you one recent example – we were contacted by the UK writer of a travel guide to Kenya, wanting our help to check out the owners of a lodge there. The sole references he could find to those owners anywhere in the world were decade-old ones on the CAFCA Website (because they had received approval from the former Overseas Investment Commission to buy land in NZ). That represented our total knowledge on the subject but we were happy to oblige him by applying, on his behalf, to the Overseas Investment Office for the whole file (because he is a foreigner he cannot use NZ’s Official Information Act). And we still have contact with the world the old fashioned way, meaning that I do some speaking appearances. When I was in Auckland in March, to speak at the Roger Award event, I also spoke at a well attended seminar on the SIS files held at the Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific Media Centre (headed by my old friend and host, David Robie). That is the only meeting that I’ve spoken to on that subject (having a sample of the file with me as I passed through Christchurch Airport came in handy as I chanced upon the widow of someone named in it – she doesn’t even live in NZ any more – and was able to show her there and then, on an airport café table, the references to her late husband and give her advice on how the family could apply for his file). I spoke at the Alliance Conference; in addition I have spoken to a WEA class and to a Workers’ Rights Campaign seminar. Bill also spoke at a Christchurch Alliance meeting this year.

Committee

Including our two long distance members (Bill and Lynda, in Wellington and Auckland respectively), the committee now stands at eight, the largest it has been. The newest member is Warren Brewer, who had helped at Watchdog mailouts for years beforehand. Warren has a long background in grassroots unionism and is involved in a whole variety of campaigns at present, so it’s excellent to have yet another activist on board. He is a great asset. In May I attended the funeral of Ray Scott, who had been a committee member from 1998-2002 (obituaries of Ray, by myself and Jim Consedine, can be read in Watchdog 120, August 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/21/12.htm). Following on from the 2008 death of serving committee member, Reg Duder (my obituary of him is in Watchdog 117, April 2008, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/17/07.htm) that marks the passing of our oldest two past or present committee members. The age range now is from 60s down to 20s (with some 50s and a 40 inbetween). For the record, the full committee is: myself, Bill Rosenberg, Jeremy Agar, John Ring, Colleen Hughes, Quentin Findlay, Lynda Boyd and Warren Brewer. They’re all busy people, so we’re lucky to get them all to a meeting (let alone the long distance members) but there is always a core of five or four at every meeting. CAFCA is a very democratic organisation, so all subjects are thoroughly discussed by the committee and all decisions taken there. I am the sole paid staff but I simply take recommendations, or make suggestions, to the committee, I don’t ask them to retrospectively rubberstamp things that I’ve already done.

Membership & Finances

In my 2008 Report I said that the membership was 460. At the time of writing it is 449. Every year we purge non-payers from our membership and this year was no exception. After the purge, membership stood at 425. So it’s a good achievement for it to have built back up to not far short of what it was; we keep on picking up new members, one at a time, at a steady rate. But the fact is that membership has dropped over the past couple of years – it used to hover just under 500 for several years. There are several explanations for this. Some of our members, many of whom have been with us for decades, are now old and their personal circumstances and/or health mean that they can no longer keep up with reading weighty publications like Watchdog. Others have written and told us that the recession has adversely affected them and that they no longer have the disposable income to spare for things like CAFCA membership. There are always some who move address and lose contact with us, or who simply decide that CAFCA is no longer a priority for them. Fair enough, we always manage to pick up some new members, plus we have plenty of supporters who are not actual members. CAFCA reaches a much bigger audience than just our actual members. I have built up e-mail lists of various categories of people (unions, political parties, peace activists, etc, etc), in addition to our actual membership database, and I routinely supply material to those other lists, reaching hundreds, if not thousands, more people.

And that drop in membership numbers is not matched by any drop in our bank accounts, quite the opposite. CAFCA is in an extremely healthy financial situation (the 08/09 Accounts were sent to you with the August Watchdog). We have a cheque account to pay our bills and three term deposits, with a fourth about to be added, all with Kiwibank. CAFCA members are incredibly generous – this year we have received two standout individual donations, one for $5,000, the other for $2,000. The former is the largest donation we’ve ever received from an individual. We asked the member if we could publicly acknowledge it but were told no; that was not necessary. So this brief mention is the least we can do. That is one explanation of why we don’t go out of our way to solicit donations – we don’t have to. CAFCA is not a pushy organisation.

This makes us completely financially independent; we don’t have to compromise ourselves by going cap in hand to any funding agencies. If we have to run an expensive campaign at short notice, we can finance it ourselves (or, at least, underwrite it until others can come to the party). CAFCA runs a tight financial operation – none of its money goes towards my pay; that is funded completely separately. As I am self-employed, I am responsible for my income tax – CAFCA is not involved with that. We pay nothing for office rent, as I work from home in a well equipped little home office. This year our major office expense was buying a new combination printer/copier/scanner to replace the magnificent old behemoth of a printer (which took up the whole top of a large filing cabinet and took two people to lift) and the fax. We spent over $900, including toner cartridges and paper. I would happily have kept the old printer indefinitely but it was obsolete and we could no longer get parts. Plus it was so noisy that after it had gone I thought I’d gone deaf until I got used to the silence associated with a modern machine (on the flipside, it runs out of toner months sooner than the old one did). The fax had stopped working, so was just wasting space. That was one of the very first pieces of office equipment we’d bought, back in the early 90s. I remember it vividly – it was before we had a car, so Becky and I picked it up by bike. As it was close to Christmas, the retailer’s gimmick was to throw in a Christmas ham. So we took them both home, one on each bike! From memory we did share (some of) the ham with the committee. Unlike our old dot matrix printer, which we sold for a few dollars on Trade Me a couple of years ago, we didn’t try to sell the printer and fax but nor did we just dump them – they went to a good home (an outfit which specialises in recycling old electronic equipment).

In my 2008 Report I said that CAFCA would review our costs this year, as domestic postage had gone up by 50% (a major component in the cost of each Watchdog) and overseas postage has been substantially increased a couple of times in the past year. And we have, for the first time ever, engaged the services of a commercial bookkeeper to prepare our annual accounts and neither he nor we knew how much that was going to cost until he’d done the first year’s worth (for the record it cost us $720, in round figures). We have reviewed our costs and decided that we can easily afford to keep our membership rates at the present figures ($20 or $15 for unwaged; $30 for institutions and overseas members. We charge online members, including overseas ones, at the same rate as for NZ ones). It is very expensive to post hard copies to overseas members but there are so few of them (it’s barely above single figures) that it’s, frankly, not worth quibbling about. So, I’m pleased to tell you that the status quo remains.

Organiser Account In Good Shape

Also in my 2008 Report I said that the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my income and has done since 1991, needed a boost as it had fallen too low. We’ve put in some work this year running a Special Appeal to supporters outside of our actual members and that has netted both donations and more pledgers. As a result that Account is now in a much healthier situation than it was a year ago – at the time of writing, the Westpac cheque account which is used to pay me holds $3,500 (in round figures – it had dropped to just below $1,000 at its lowest ebb last year). The bulk of the money - $14,600 (in round figures) is held in a Kiwibank term deposit and unlike the 2008 situation, none of that term deposit has had to be used in 2009 to top up the cheque account. The most remarkable thing about the Organiser Account is the huge swing from one off donations to regular pledges – it used to be approximately a split of two thirds to one third in favour of pledges, now it is four to one, which is the highest proportion of pledges ever. Including those who pledge quarterly, half yearly and annually (most do so monthly or fortnightly) the number of pledgers has increased to more than 50 (up from 47 in 2008), the best it has ever been. This puts the Account on the most secure footing it has ever had, because those are regular automatic payments. Of course pledgers also stop for a variety of reasons (financial, old age, overseas travel among the reasons for recent cancellations – not to mention death) so the donations are still vitally important. One national organisation makes an annual $1,000 donation; some individuals have donated several hundreds of dollars at a time this year. The Account is sufficiently flush for CAFCA and ABC to have recently decided to increase my hourly rate by another $1 (up to $15 which, coincidentally, is the target for the union campaign for the minimum wage). As I say every year (this has lasted an amazing 18 years so far), my heartfelt thanks to all of you who keep supporting my work, and therefore that of CAFCA and ABC, by your generosity. I (quite literally) couldn’t do it without you.

Anti-Bases Campaign: 09 Quiet, But 10 Will Be All Go

The other group for whom I work is, of course, the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) and my work for it filled a decent chunk of my 2008 Report, as that was an unusually busy year for ABC, with a protest at the Waihopai spybase, a national speaking tour by Cora Fabros from the Philippines and a whole lot of things arising from the splendid deflation of one of the Waihopai spybase domes by the Ploughshares activists. By contrast, 2009 has been an unusually quiet year for ABC. We decided not to hold a protest at the Waihopai spybase last January – the media has got the idea that it’s an annual event but that is not quite the case. We decided not to hold one in January 2009 for both tactical and practical reasons. The tactical reason is that we decided that our 2009 activity should be focused on solidarity with the Domebusters’ trial. The practical one is that I was not available to organise any such protest, which I always do, as I was away on holiday in the Philippines for six weeks from November 2008 until January 2009. And Bob Leonard was not available to do it in my absence, as he was away at his son’s wedding in January. We took this decision with some reluctance but an acceptance of its inevitability. We only received one or two negative responses from ABC members, saying we would “lose momentum” in the two decades long campaign to close Waihopai.

As it turned out, we were optimistic in thinking that the Domebusters’ trial would be in 2009 – in fact, it won’t be until March 2010, in Wellington. Before we knew that date and venue, we had resolved that we would hold another Waihopai spybase protest in January 2010. We are doing so and preparations are in full swing. I will report on that next year. ABC committed to both a Waihopai spybase protest in its usual January slot and a range of solidarity activities during the Domebusters’ trial, regardless of when and where that would be. So now we only have six weeks between the two events but we are confident that we can do them both justice. The jury trial is set down for a week in the Wellington District Court – I plan to go to Wellington for that week and at the time of writing am fully engaged, along with people in Wellington, in organising solidarity activities. In fact, preparations for the Domebusters’ trial have taken up a lot of my time and energy in the past year, but I’m afraid that I can’t tell you anything about that. Not yet anyway. All that I can legally say is that a District Court judge has directed that the jury trial will take place in Wellington. You will get a full report next year. And ABC also has another project on the go, but I can’t yet discuss that publicly, either, I’m sorry. All will be revealed in due course.

Peace Researcher

I edit Peace Researcher, so I’m biased but I reckon it’s a pretty good little newsletter (my only regret is that so few people get to see it). The fact that it looks so good is down to the flair and attention to detail of my wife, Becky, who is the layout editor. There is an inevitable degree of overlap with Watchdog but PR also carries a range of articles that don’t appear in Watchdog or anywhere else. The July 09 issue (online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/prcont38.html) had the theme of “Spies Amongst Us” and led off with three articles by three different writers (one of them being me) about Rob Gilchrist who was exposed, in December 2008, as having been a Police spy and agent provocateur within the activist movement around the country for the previous decade. One of the articles was by Gilchrist’s former partner who actually exposed him and who described in fascinating detail exactly how she did so, and how she in turn spied on him as he carried on oblivious to having been discovered. ABC and CAFCA were among the Christchurch-based groups that he was tasked to spy on but we smelled a rat as soon as he first came on the scene in the late 90s and he knew that we knew, so he didn’t waste time trying to worm his way into our affections. Not to mention the fact that neither group was doing anything of any possible interest to the cops, it was all very boring and above board. He had greater success with other, less suspicious, groups. And PR specialises in articles about US foreign policy and how little old NZ fits into the global war strategy. It includes articles about campaigns in countries such as Australia, the Philippines and Japan that don’t get covered by any other NZ movement publications, let alone the mainstream media. Until CAFCA got its SIS file, we had quite deliberately left all coverage of the SIS to Peace Researcher. For Watchdog to be currently covering SIS stories is a throwback to an earlier era, it hadn’t done so since the 90s and not in any great detail since the 80s.

I commit to getting out two issues of PR a year and, frankly, it’s a struggle to do that. I currently find myself simultaneously preparing an end of year issue of both publications (and you know what they say about men and multitasking). I was in a similar position towards the end of 2008, racing to get both done before going to the Philippines. Then I prioritised PR, because it was important that coverage of Cora Fabros’ midyear national speaking tour, ABC’s biggest international project for several years, appear in the same year it took place. The December Watchdog had to wait until February 09. But this year my emphasis is the reverse (not that I’m going away to the Philippines this Christmas), Watchdog takes priority, as it nearly always does, and PR will have to wait its turn. I continue to work closely with Bob Leonard on PR (although we haven’t been co-editors for years now) and special thanks are due to ABC’s Webmaster, Yani Johanson, who manages to fit in uploading the online edition along with his exhausting round of duties as a Christchurch City Councillor. Check out the Website at www.converge.org.nz/abc.

ABC is in good shape. We have a considerably smaller membership than CAFCA – it is a specialist niche subject – but plenty of active supporters who don’t need to be actual members. We have $11,000 in the bank. The committee has shrunk by one in the past year. Andre Prassinos had changed family circumstances (becoming a father) and moved back south. Lynda Boyd, who is on both committees, is still at Auckland University, but she attends ABC (and CAFCA) meetings when she’s back in Christchurch. The core of the committee is myself, Bob Leonard, Robyn Dann and Dan Rae. Yani Johanson attends meetings when his Council commitments don’t clash (which isn’t often). It is a lively little group and we are all good friends, which makes it fun. I am the ABC media spokesperson, but the lack of a Waihopai protest or anything much else happening (not publicly anyway) means that I haven’t done much in that capacity in 2009. I’ve put out the odd press release and done an interview or two. For instance, when the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau (the spy agency which runs Waihopai) this year replaced the dome deflated by the Domebusters in 08 and persisted with the laughable bullshit that the purpose of the domes is not to prevent people from being able to work what international communications satellites the base’s dishes are pointed at, but to simply protect them from the weather, I put out a release saying that Waihopai’s dishes must be uniquely fragile, because how come no other satellite dishes in the country (such as the huge dishes operated by Telecom and the TV networks, let alone the hundreds of thousands of satellite TV dishes) need such “weather protection”? The media thought that was so obvious it was good for a light hearted interview.

Philippines Solidarity: Disaster Relief & Speaking Tour

The other group for whom I work (but in an unpaid capacity) is the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA). I am the editor of its newsletter Kapatiran (Solidarity) – which has a very small readership - but because of my Watchdog and Peace Researcher obligations can only commit to one issue per year. Mind you, the October issue - online at http://www.converge.org.nz/psna/Kapatiran/KapNo32/Kap32list.htm was the biggest ever, at 56 pages (bigger than any issue of PR – the biggest of which, an 06 issue, was 52 pages. The July 09 PR was 48). It featured some familiar names too – Dennis Small is a regular writer and Joe Hendren, who used to be on the CAFCA committee and write for Watchdog (he’s now the Researcher for the National Distribution Union, in Auckland) contributed an excellent article on his 2008 visit to the Philippines. In fact, Kapatiran contained three first hand accounts of 2008 or 09 Philippine visits by NZ unionists, all from the same union. I aim to make it a publication with as much relevance for New Zealand readers as well as Philippine ones. And the one and only 2009 issue took me a long way back down memory lane – writing an obituary of former President Cory Aquino involved me digging out my 15 page typewritten report on my first ever Philippine trip, a 1987 exposure tour, reading it for the first time in years and incorporating parts of it into the obituary. As with Peace Researcher my wife Becky is the layout editor – she does a meticulous job. She is also the PSNA Webmaster www.converge.org.nz/psna.

My PSNA work filled several pages of my 2008 Report, because that had turned out to be an eventful and busy year. 2009 has been much more low key. For the past couple of years I have reported on the NZ Human Rights Commission setting up a project in the Philippines, in partnership with its local equivalent. The Commission here has included PSNA in its consultations and I attended a Christchurch meeting with a Commissioner earlier this year, at which there was a free and frank discussion (the October Kapatiran includes an open letter to the Commission from several groups, including PSNA, expressing our concerns about the project). This year has seen one unique activity by PSNA – we launched a disaster relief appeal, in October. We’ve run political fundraising appeals before – most recently in 2008. But disaster relief is not what we were set up to do, other groups are much more experienced and better equipped to do it than us and, besides, there is a never ending string of disasters to choose from in the Philippines, usually with a natural cause but made so much worse by official negligence, incompetence, corruption and callousness. The recent floods were of Biblical proportions, inundating 80% of Metro Manila (a city that is flooded several times annually during the rainy season – I’ve personally experienced that - but this was of a whole different magnitude). We received appeals for help from longstanding partners of ours, unions and human rights groups whose leaders we have hosted on NZ speaking tours. In some cases, their own offices and homes had been flooded. So we decided that we had to do something (as well as simply circulate other people’s appeals) and launched our own. The response was modest, primarily because the Samoan disaster happened just days later and likely donors would have felt overwhelmed. But we did something, however small.

PSNA’s big project for 2010 is organising, in partnership with other groups and individuals, a national speaking tour by a high profile leader of the Philippine Left. His wife is coming with him and as she is also a leading figure in her own right, we will effectively be hosting two speakers. Laying the groundwork for this has involved me in quite a lot of preparatory work in 2009 and put me in touch with someone with whom my only previous contact was as a member of the audience at his 1987 Christchurch public meeting, during his previous NZ speaking tour (the struggle for whom he speaks has been continuously underway for more than 40 years now). There is a leaflet giving details about it enclosed with this issue of Watchdog. The Philippine Presidential election is in May; the speaking tour, set down for November, is PSNA’s small contribution to pointing out that it doesn’t matter who occupies the Presidential Palace; that there will be no peace without justice and no improvement in the lives of the vast majority of Filipinos until there is major systemic change there.

Catching Up With Friends From Ancient Past

Personally, 2009 was an interesting year. It’s been very busy, across the full range of the three groups for whom I work (one of them unpaid) and, as I’ve said, I can’t yet publicly reveal quite a bit of what I’ve been working on. I’ve remained relatively sane and fit and healthy – all three of us at home survived the Great Swineflu Panic of Winter 2009 almost unscathed. But, courtesy of our youngest member, I got a cough that lasted a fortnight and was diagnosed as bronchitis, something that I haven’t had since I was a little kid. That didn’t slow me down, just meant that my days and nights were filled with rather more coughing and spitting than usual. Pedestrians were well advised to duck as I hurtled past on my bike. Another instance of “age related wear and tear” sent me to a physiotherapist for the first time in my life, but she told me: ”You’re a bit boring, mate, there’s nothing wrong with you”. We spent more time talking about impending changes to the physiotherapy regime under ACC before she sent me home. I’ve got around the country a bit more than usual. I had a few days in Auckland when I went up there in March for the Roger Award event and I made a point of making a couple of flying weekend visits to Wellington at the beginning and end of winter for significant birthdays of old friends and colleagues. Of course, it was impossible to separate these splendid social occasions from politics – one of those friends has the SIS Director as his ex-brother-in-law, so I got to meet him (and his wife and one of their sons) at the party. The other party was a combined celebration of the 30 th anniversary of Vanguard Films with whom I, and CAFCA and ABC, have had a very long and productive working relationship. Greg Waite, the Watchdog Webmaster, has lived in Brisbane for years, meaning that the online Watchdog is a trans-Tasman production. He visited Christchurch this year, which was the first time I’d seen him in a long time (Greg is an old mate, going back to the 70s).

There was one particularly special Australian visitor to Christchurch this year. Neil Riethmuller made his first visit back here from his Queensland home since he was deported in 1975, after serving part of a four year prison sentence for firebombing the US Consulate here (along with his then partner – she got three years). That happened during the turmoil arising from the Vietnam War protest movement. The Government gave him a visa to attend the Labour Weekend wedding of his son. I hadn’t seen Neil since 1988 when I and my then partner had visited him. But we’ve kept in touch through all those years and he’s regularly sent me a splendid selection of Australian political T shirts. Plus I have a family connection to Toowoomba, the Queensland city where he lives. I am ¼ Australian and my convict ancestor (transported to Aussie as a 16 year old) ended up there as one of its 19 th Century founding landowners and a publican. One of his pubs is preserved as a historic place and was the venue, earlier in the year, for a family gathering for the launch of a biography of him. I didn’t go but Neil did and got me a copy of the book. There was delicious irony in Neil’s choice of accommodation for his week in Christchurch – the old Addington Prison (which is now a boutique backpackers’) where he had spent six weeks on remand in 1973. He was the only inmate I had ever visited there and it was quite surreal to stroll around to the old prison (it’s only a few minutes walk from home) to see him for the first time in 21 years and be given a guided tour of the cells, etc, by an ex-resident. On a dark and stormy night (it really was) I took him on a walking tour of central Christchurch, his first time in the city as a free man in 36 years. Naturally we visited the scene of the crime and both burst out laughing when we discovered that the old US Consulate building now houses a major transnational security firm. And for the first time ever he was able to look through every issue of my bound volume of the 1974 edition of Canta, the University of Canterbury student paper (which I edited that year and in which he, and his then partner, featured on a very regular basis). It was great to see him again.

Sometimes members ask me what I do for relaxation. Well, among other things, I’m an unashamed sports fan (of the strictly spectator variety). When we were in the Philippines over Christmas 08, I was one among tens of millions of Filipinos who watched the great Manny Pacquiao win his Las Vegas fight against Oscar de la Hoya (he’s gone on to greater things more recently). The whole country went nuts, putting into the shade any recent manifestation of sports mania in NZ. I’ve been a boxing fan since the days of Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali in the 1960s, and even earlier. And I’m a rugby fan. I only got to one live game this year, but it was the provincial final between Canterbury and Wellington, where I surprised even myself by leaping to my feet screaming and shouting with the best of them.

No Shortage Of Things To Do

I look forward to 2010 as an actionpacked year. The bullshit merchants keep telling us that the recession is over and capitalism will soon be restored to its former glory. It doesn’t look that way from where I’m standing, nor does it look that way to the tens of thousands of unemployed and workers whose pay and conditions are coming under attack as the rich, globally and nationally, seek to make the poor pay for their own gross negligence and criminal greed.

Politically things will hot up as the effects of the 2008 election year nice pills wear off on National and their true tendencies come surging to the surface (we’ve already seen plenty of that in 09), aided (or rather, led) by their knuckledragging Act sidekicks. Don’t you think that Rodney Hide even looks like Mussolini now? He must have decided that if he was going to act like Musso, he might as well look the part as well. His approach to running the country is the same as to his poor partner in Dancing With The Stars – drop it on its head and see if that will do the trick. And of course there’s always dear old Sir Roger “I’m Entitled” Douglas ready to lurch out of the crypt every now and again to remind us of the bipartisan history of our politicians’ obsessive compulsive disorder which manifests itself in robotically chanting “more market”. So CAFCA won’t be short of things to do. And both ABC and PSNA have got busy years planned. No rest for the wicked but, at the same time, it’s bloody good fun. So, full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.