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2010 Annual General Meeting Minutes

The 2010 CAFCA AGM was held at the Christchurch WEA on September 20. Ten members were present - the smallest turnout for years, possibly ever (six is the quorum in our incorporated society rules). By contrast, 27 attended the 2009 AGM, which featured Bill Rosenberg giving his farewell speech. But it is worth noting that the 2010 one took place just a fortnight after the Christchurch earthquake and while its thousands of aftershocks were still occurring every day at all hours of the day and night. It was held in a central city venue that had itself been closed for several days in the immediate aftermath. Tens of thousands of people, including CAFCA members, had sustained damage to their homes and businesses and suffered ongoing major disruption to their daily lives – getting to the CAFCA AGM was not their top priority. Indeed we received apologies after the AGM from previous regular attendees saying that the earthquake was the reason they couldn’t make it this year. Jeremy Agar chaired. Apologies were accepted from: Tony Orman, Gilbert van Reenen, Katherine Peet, Bill Rosenberg, Brendon Burns, Daniela Bagozzi, Danna Glendining, Viola Palmer, Marilyn Park, Ken Rae, Trish Murray, Robert Consedine, Geoff Morris, Denis O’Connor, Don Archer, Bill Willmott and Christine Dann. The 2009 Minutes were read by the Secretary, Murray Horton, and accepted.

The 2009/10 accounts, which had been distributed with Watchdog 124, August 2010, were accepted unanimously, without discussion. 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, in round figures (there are three term deposits of $10,000 each). He reported that there were 435 members, as of that date (slightly down from the number at the 2009 AGM and down from the nearly 500 members that CAFCA had for several years). The meeting noted the tragic recent death of Bruce Finnerty, who had been the voluntary reviewer of the accounts from 1999-2009 and the meeting resolved not to have the accounts reviewed in future (there is no requirement in our rules to do so, and we had received professional advice that there is no need to do so, as our financial accounting and reporting systems are professional and totally transparent).

Bob Leonard reported on the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which pays Murray Horton – his gross annual income is currently $31,172.12 ($15 per hour) plus $225 in cash donations which Murray pocketed and reported to Bob for accounting purposes. As of the March 31 end of the 2009/10 financial year the Organiser Westpac cheque account held $2,224. In the 2009/10 financial year the Account spent $33,858 and income was $32,569 (a deficit of $1,289, an increase on the deficit for the 08/09 year). Donations totalled $6,814 (21.1%) and regular pledgers $25,525 (78.9%). The ratio of donations to pledgers has slightly increased from the previous year. There are 50 regular pledgers (down from 51 the previous year), including those who pledge annually, half yearly and quarterly.

As of August 2010 the Account had $15,127 on term deposit with Kiwibank. At the August maturity date of that term deposit there was a human error resulting in the term deposit being rolled over until January 2011, whereas what was needed was for some of it to be transferred to the Westpac cheque account which had fallen too low. This oversight meant that the term deposit could not be broken without incurring a penalty, so both CAFCA and ABC resolved to each make a $1,500 interest free loan to the Westpac cheque account, which will be paid back when that Kiwibank term deposit next matures in January. Normally there is no financial connection between either CAFCA or ABC and the Organiser Account, the latter is self-supporting. It is important to make clear that there is no shortage of money in the Organiser Account, there was simply an oversight involving a routine transfer of funds between banks to top up the account used to pay Murray. As of September 2010, the Westpac cheque account has $3, 625. It was felt that the Organiser Account is running at capacity at present, so no recommendation was made for a pay increase. The meeting passed a vote of thanks for Bob Leonard, who has been in charge of the Organiser Account since the early 1990s.

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. Jeremy Agar is Chairperson. Bill Rosenberg and Lynda Boyd (who live in Wellington and Auckland respectively) are “distance” members of the committee. Murray Horton presented his annual Organiser’s Report (see below). The discussion that arose out of that constituted general business. The AGM concluded by screening a 2004 Australian TV current affairs programme on the gigantic American-owned Freeport copper and gold mine in Indonesian-occupied Papua and the central role that mine plays in Indonesia’s determination to ruthlessly suppress the 40 year old independence struggle. The programme described the whole sad Papuan situation as being motivated by the politics of profit.

CAFCA/ABC ORGANISER ACCOUNT 2009/10

Balance on 30/03/09
$3,513.30
     
Balance on 31/03/10
2,224.46
     
Difference
-1,288.84
     
 
     
Expenses
  Income  
Murray's pay
$31,172.12
  Donations (one-off) (21.1%)
6,814.60
Cash pocketed
225.00
  Cash pocketed
225.00
Other cheques
2,461.60
  Pledges (78.9%)
25,525.08
 
  Account interest
5.20
         
Total
33,858.72
 

Total

32,569.88
         
Income - Expenses = -1,288.84 (see annual balance change above)
         
Number of pledgers as of 4/03/10 = 50
         
Balance in Term Deposit as of 23/08/10 = $15,127.55
         
Reinvested for 150 days at 5.15%
         
Bob Leonard, Organiser Treasurer, 20/9/10

ORGANISER’S REPORT

- Murray Horton

My 2009 Report highlighted two things that made that year stand out from the usual – namely the permanent departure of Bill Rosenberg to Wellington (where he is doing an excellent job as the Economist and Policy Director for the Council of Trade Unions [CTU]) and the national hooha and major media coverage arising from CAFCA securing its Security Intelligence file, which started a flood of groups and individuals seeking their SIS files (we’ve regularly reported on this in Watchdog issues from 2009 onwards). So I intended to start my 2010 Report by saying that it had been a much more normal year, with nothing really out of the usual.

Earthquake Had Minimal Impact On CAFCA

But then Mother Earth intervened with the bloody great earthquake which shook me (and the rest of Christchurch) awake at some ungodly hour of a September Saturday morning, and it became clear that this would not, in fact, be an ordinary year. So the logical place to start this Report is by discussing the impact of this hopefully once in a lifetime event on CAFCA (I’ll deal with the personal impact later). The first thing to do is to state the obvious that none of us got killed or injured (the fact that there were no deaths at all, and only two seriously injured people in all of Christchurch and Canterbury, is absolutely amazing). None of the CAFCA committee lost a house or had it badly damaged (which is just as well, as we rotate our fortnightly meetings around committee members’ homes – so we haven’t missed a meeting). I work from home in a former bedroom converted to an office. All of CAFCA’s equipment and nearly all of its files, records, chequebooks, etc, are in there. I have floor to ceiling shelves of fileboxes filling one wall. Only one envelope of old receipts fell down (indeed the only thing that fell over in the whole house was an unsecured overloaded bookcase in the lounge, which was quickly set right and overloaded again). Nothing was broken, we didn’t lose power, phone or Internet for one second (we nearly but not quite lost water). We went straight online to find out what was happening and to communicate with the world. So we were among the very small minority in the surreal situation of apparently normal life going on throughout that most unusual of days, with CAFCA’s business operating uninterrupted.

I had a couple of truly bizarre experiences before sunrise that morning. We turned on the radio to find out what was going on and I realised after a while that I was listening to myself on the news, namely a soundbite from an interview that I’d done the previous afternoon on behalf of CAFCA, reacting to the ludicrous claims of senior Minister Maurice Williamson that opponents of foreign investment are “racists”. The second one was a little bit later, when I ventured out to check the garage, our numerous big trees and our derelict old shed (to my wife’s intense disappointment the latter survived totally unscathed). There I was confronted by a coffin on the floor. It was a Wahopai spybase protest cardboard prop one, labelled “Afghani child”. I duly put it back into the rafters. Various CAFCA and Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) things – ranging from the actual Roger Award to ABC’s portable Waihopai display, placards, banners, camping gear, etc – are kept in the garage. Nothing had moved or been damaged.

That’s not to say that CAFCA’s normal operations were unaffected, far from it. Leigh Cookson is Watchdog's Layout Editor and her home computer on which she does it hit the floor and died, so it was a good thing that it was several months before this issue. James Ayers, who writes up the Overseas Investment Office’s monthly Decisions for each Watchdog, earns his living from a central city shop in High Street. That was initially given the all clear by structural engineers and he reopened after the central city cordon was lifted but a month after the quake his was one of seven neighbouring shops in the block to be reclassified as dangerous and ordered immediately closed. James, the eternal optimist, told me, as we stood outside his fenced off livelihood, that this would give him several weeks in which to do the research for his OIO writeup (which is in this issue, delivered in full and to deadline). I’m pleased to report that his shop has since reopened, hopefully permanently this time.

Angus Donaldson, the Sydenham photocopying and printing firm where CAFCA has had an account since the early 90s (and where I have been a customer since the early 80s) became one of the most high profile piles of bricks and rubble. While they were sorting out if they could retrieve anything and find temporary premises, I found an alternative photocopier (in a modern central city building with a mere 28 smashed windows). I’m pleased to report that Angus Donaldson was up and running in a modern building just across the street from their old place within a couple of weeks, having salvaged all their machines and their records (as soon as I walked in the door, they gave me our monthly bill, which I was only too happy to promptly pay as an act of practical solidarity and appreciation for decades of good service). These guys have become friends over the many years I’ve been dealing with them, so I was relieved that they got back into business as soon as they could. None of the other firms with whom we have dealings (various printing businesses and our bookkeeper) suffered any damage or disruption. Our Annual General Meeting went ahead at the WEA a fortnight after the quake – but the WEA was shut for days in the immediate aftermath and we had to wait to confirm the venue. Only ten people came to the AGM, including the committee, which is probably our lowest ever attendance (six is the quorum in our incorporated society rules). We put that down to the quake factor, which includes months of powerful aftershocks that followed, some of them causing further damage. Attending the CAFCA AGM was not the top priority of a lot of our members who otherwise would do so (I received apologies after the event giving that as the reason).

Some organisations with which we’ve long had a close working relationship were both damaged and disrupted – for example, Christian World Service had to vacate its central city Manchester Street building for a month while it was being repaired. Colleagues and friends on other committees were hit hard – Anti-Bases Campaign holds most of its meetings in the 150 year old Woolston brick home of a committee member and it sustained structural damage which got worse with each powerful aftershock. The Avonside house of a Philippines Solidarity committee member (who lives in the same street as where I last rented before becoming the owner of a plain but strong old Addington house) was jolted off its foundations. I realised how lucky I was as a self-employed person working from home when I visited the Riccarton house of a nationally prominent peace activist who works from home – her place had three chimneys down, one having smashed through the roof into a bedroom narrowly missing an international guest; numerous bookcases and filing cabinets down, spilling their contents; a heavy duty photocopier knocked out of action. I have met CAFCA members whose homes, or those of family members, have been badly damaged (i.e. they are eligible for the Earthquake Commission’s maximum payout of $100,000 plus GST).

The most I’ve got to complain about was the sheer disruption to the city’s normal working life – for example, a routine job like doing the CAFCA banking the week after the quake involved having to go to a suburb I hardly ever visit, because it was the nearest place where Kiwibank had an open branch, and that trip involved traffic jams, detours, and having to walk down the middle of a busy Riccarton Road to get past the heaps of rubble outside neighbouring demolished shops and businesses. I’m happy that’s all I’ve got to moan about – we could have been spending weeks attending funerals and visiting people in hospital. So, it will take more than a bloody earthquake to shut us up.

SIS Files

Before moving on to reviewing 2010, I do need to briefly update those two 2009 topics that I mentioned in my first paragraph, namely Bill Rosenberg’s departure and the SIS files saga. Although Bill started working for the CTU, in Wellington, in May 2009 he and Dianne didn’t actually sell their home and move up there until January 2010. Throughout all those intervening months Bill was commuting home to Christchurch every weekend. They hosted a splendid “house cooling” party just before they left, which brought together friends and CAFCA founders who, in same cases, hadn’t seen each other for years. Bill is still an electronically very active CAFCA committee member (although he hasn’t attended a meeting since May 09 and I doubt that he ever will again) and he remains CAFCA’s Webmaster. The sheer busyness of his CTU work (at which he is doing an excellent job) means that he hasn’t written anything specifically for Watchdog since moving to Wellington but his CTU output is so prolific, including on foreign investment and free trade, that we have regularly been able to include articles that he has written for other publications or adapted papers that he has presented at conferences, both in NZ and overseas (there’s one in this issue). The saddest thing about his move north is that I now hardly ever see my close friend and colleague of nearly 40 years standing – only a handful of times in the past 18 months, in fact.

My 2009 Report devoted quite a lot of space to the SIS files and the consequences flowing from their release (the files themselves have been the subjects of several detailed Watchdog articles since 2009). That is an ongoing saga – in my 09 Report I mentioned that I had received part one of my SIS Personal File. Part two duly arrived this year. Unlike the first files that were released, back in 08 (to the likes of Bill Rosenberg and CAFCA) the more recent ones contain no more lists of other people or salacious tittle tattle about third parties. In fact they quite often contain no other names at all beyond that of the person who was the subject of the file (in my case that means that there is no mention of the woman who was my partner, in life and CAFCA, for the best part of two decades). Having received all of my file I duly appealed its copious deletions to the Privacy Commission which, to nobody’s surprise, backed the SIS. As a booby prize I received part three which consisted entirely of clippings about or by me which the SIS had dutifully collected over the 30 odd years it was spying on me. It’s an interesting exercise to read your own life as recorded and analysed by State agents who are viewing everything through their own particular political prism. If I ever get time I will write up my life according to the SIS but it’s not a high priority, because it’s all historical stuff, whereas Watchdog's emphasis is very much on the here and now. Maybe I’ll leave it for whoever writes my Watchdog obituary.

Mind you, you never know when it might come in handy. An old friend dating back to high school days paid us a surprise visit in 2010 (he’s now a professor at a prestigious US university; he was paying a flying visit home to see his elderly and ailing mother). I was able to show him the oldest entries in my SIS file, dating back to the late 1960s when he and I spent our summer holidays after sitting the former School Certificate exam writing a (never published) manuscript on the history of modern China – as you do when you’re a couple of precocious know it all 15 years olds (his Mum typed it up for us). Courtesy of the then Editor of the Christchurch Star being on the Board of Governors of our high school, it made the paper (my first ever media appearance). When the SIS opened their file on me a couple of years later they retrospectively hunted it out, clipped it and underlined the sentences where we said that we were sympathetic to the Chinese Communists. But Paul, my professorial mate, had a more pressing concern when he looked at the copy of this 43 year old clipping. “Look, the photo has me wearing those dorky glasses!”.

We’re still collecting and archiving the SIS files on various individuals and organisations. Between us Bill and I have quite a collection now. To give one of the most recent examples – I assisted Larry Ross, the face of the nuclear free campaign from the 1960s-90s, to get his SIS Personal File. The accompanying letter denied that the SIS had ever had a file on the NZ Nuclear Free Zone Committee or its successor the NZ Nuclear Free Peacemaking Association. That flatly contradicted what the SIS Director had told another prominent peace activist in a letter in which he itemised the four peace groups which he said were the subject of SIS files. So we helped Larry, who is in his 80s and now lives in a retirement home, to successfully pursue the file on the Association (there had been a “misunderstanding” said the SIS). So both Larry’s Personal File and the one on the peace group that he headed have been added to our archive. Patience is definitely required – that project alone took 18 months.

Committee

The committee is unchanged from 2009, namely myself, Bill Rosenberg, John Ring, Jeremy Agar, Lynda Boyd, Quentin Findlay, Colleen Hughes and Warren Brewer. I am the Secretary/Organiser; Jeremy Agar is Chairperson. Bill Rosenberg and Lynda Boyd (who live in Wellington and Auckland respectively) are “distance” members of the committee. The age range is from 60s down to 20s with some 50s and one 40s. At eight, it is the largest ever CAFCA committee but with two of them living in the North Island we never get all of them at a meeting (Lynda Boyd makes it to the occasional one when she’s back in her home town; Bill is strictly an electronic member). There is always a core of four or five at every meeting. I am the sole paid staff but I’m certainly not the only one doing the work – for instance, Bill is the Webmaster; Lynda established the Historic Watchdog Website and set us up on Facebook (she did that on her laptop in the course of the committee’s annual strategy meeting); she and Warren and Quentin run that and Watchblog; Jeremy is Watchdog's prolific Reviews Editor; Quentin is also a regular writer and Warren has both written and edited articles for it; Colleen, Jeremy and Warren take turns doing the numerous driving tasks (ranging from getting non-drivers John and I to every meeting to picking up hundreds of Watchdogs from the printer and getting them posted). So we work as a team and a very democratic one at that – all subjects are discussed by the committee, no matter whether it is what piece of office equipment to buy or our policy on major political and economic issues of the day. Those meetings are lengthy but stimulating and out of them emerge new suggestions, fresh ideas, activities and campaigns. We work well together and, even better, we all get on as friends as well as committee colleagues. This is best seen at the three times a year Watchdog mailouts, held around our dining table, when committee members are joined for several hours by other members and we all have a great old time, capped off by a potluck lunch (the quality of which increases dramatically if Becky’s home that day).

Membership & Finances

In my 2009 Report I said that the membership was 449 (and it was 460 in 08). At the time of writing it is 440. Every year we purge non-payers from our membership and in 2010 the post-purge number stood at 420. We keep picking up new members, one at a time. This year we decided to tap into the electronic database on which we have stored the most recent of our ex-members and write to a few of them at a time and invite them to rejoin. Several have done so; others have said that they don’t wish to but sent a donation. We also included a CAFCA flyer in one of the monthly issues of New Internationalist (an exercise we’ve done a couple of times before over the past quarter of a century) and picked up several new members. As I said in my 09 Report, membership had dropped over the past few years – it used to hover just under 500. There are several explanations for this, ranging from death, old age and changed financial circumstances to people moving and not giving us their new address. There are always some who decide that CAFCA is no longer a priority for them, which is fair enough. It is worth stressing that, for as long as we have existed (35+ years now) CAFCA has always made a point of having as members people who actually want to be members and who are prepared to pay the necessary annual amount. We would boast a much bigger “membership” (at a guess, in the thousands) if we had kept on our books even a fraction of those whose annual payments have lapsed over the years. That, however, would present an entirely misleading picture – our membership may be small but they’re paying members (not to mention the much larger number of non-members, well into the thousands, who either receive our material via one of the several e-mail lists that I operate or by directly accessing the CAFCA and/or Watchdog Websites, where it is freely available).

Rest assured that the drop in membership numbers is not matched by any drop in our bank accounts, quite the opposite in fact. CAFCA is in an extremely healthy financial situation (the 09/10 Accounts were sent to you with the August Watchdog). We have a cheque account to pay our bills and three term deposits, all with Kiwibank. At the time of writing those four accounts between them hold around $47,000 (and that doesn’t include the $1,500 interest free loan to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account mentioned below. That will be repaid in January 2011). CAFCA members are both extremely loyal and generous, with many including donations of various sizes with their annual membership payment. Your continued generosity means that we have been able (thus far) to absorb the fairly savage price increases involved in producing Watchdog, without having to increase our annual membership fee. I’m talking about the fact that, within the space of only a couple of years, the cost of posting Watchdog has risen 80% from $1 to $1.80. As we did the last time New Zealand Post put up its rates we have stockpiled a year’s worth of postage paid envelopes, bought at the old price and which New Zealand Post honours at that price. Once they run out, sometime in 2011, then we will feel the delayed effect of the 2010 price rise. And I’m pleased to report that the stockpile of envelopes, along with everything else in the CAFCA office, survived the earthquake and aftershocks unscathed. Buying five boxes of postage paid envelopes (a year’s supply) cost us more than $2,200 but it is money well spent as it will save us several hundred dollars over the next year.

Being in such a financially healthy situation means that we are completely financially independent; we don’t have to compromise ourselves by going cap in hand to any funding agencies (I spend precisely none of my time writing funding applications). We are beholden to nobody except our own members and supporters; we can say what we think without fear or favour and without worrying about biting the hand that feeds us. It enables us to finance regular campaigns like the Roger Award, including paying to fly me and the Chief Judge, Christine Dann, to speak at the Wellington event to announce the winner in March 2010. For the first time in nine years, CAFCA plans to send me on an election year speaking tour in 2011 – we have the money to cover that as well.

Plus we have the wherewithal to keep the vital office equipment up to date – we recently spent more than $1,000 to buy a new computer for the first time since 2005 (indeed, we actually got it built from scratch, which was a first). So, I started writing this Report on one computer and finished it on the new one. A major reason was that the previous one had reached, indeed exceeded, its 40 GB capacity (the new one has a 500 GB capacity and is lightning fast). As a temporary fix we bought an external hard drive and I moved a whole lot of material onto it to free up space. But the perils of that storage approach were brought home to me when, only a few months after purchase, it developed a problem and had to go away for repair, only to discover that all the data on it had vanished without trace (fortunately not stuff that I need very often. The retailer gave us another one, free of charge, under the warranty but I now have to painstakingly reassemble everything that was on it, ranging from the electronic scans of CAFCA’s SIS file and the full set of historic Watchdogs to all of my personal photos. Replacing the latter is the biggest job and not one guaranteed to be 100% successful).

We had to face the actual cost of getting a new computer built, installed and the vital job of transferring everything across from the old to the new machine (throughout the past two decades since we got the first of several computers, that very tricky job had been done, free of charge and in his own time, by Bill Rosenberg when he was our in-house and on-call IT department). Naturally there were “teething troubles”. There always are, and the technician had to make a lengthy house call to get it all working. Don’t you love it when professionals exclaim in exasperation: “I’ve never seen that before!”.

Likewise we are now paying the true cost of operating a printer in what amounts to a small business. Bill got the “pre-loved” last one for us from the University of Canterbury when he worked there, for a fraction of its cost, and it was such an industrial strength behemoth it went nearly nine months before needing a new toner cartridge. We bought the present printer/fax/scanner/copier brand new in “the real world” and are lucky if a cartridge lasts three or four months. It is a well-used printer. Plus we decided to also spend some money strengthening the existing floor to ceiling file box shelves in the CAFCA office and adding a few more shelves to take the overflow (recently, if I’ve wanted to add a new file box, I’ve had to first chuck out an old one. The shelves are chocker). They are buckling a bit under the sheer weight of paper but they are rock solid and have taken everything that Mother Earth has thrown at us in recent months with no damage and absolutely nothing falling out of them – which is just amazing. I have been in the office more than once when an extremely violent aftershock has struck and experienced firsthand the incredible shaking - the shelves and their contents have come through unscathed. This job of strengthening and adding a few more shelves is a bit of unfinished business from 1998, when we had the house renovated and I moved into my present office (which used to be our bedroom). The work was done by a member who was a union official before turning professional handyman. It is money well spent when you consider what CAFCA could have been spending to repair or replace the office and contents if the house had been badly damaged or destroyed. I have been able to use it continuously and with no disruption whatsoever throughout the whole drama.

Organiser Account

The CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my income and has done so since 1991, continues to be in good shape. However there was one hiccup in 2010. I’m paid from a Westpac cheque account but the bulk of the money is kept in an interest earning Kiwibank term deposit. As of August 2010 that had $15,127 in it. At the August maturity date of that term deposit there was a human error resulting in it being rolled over until January 2011, whereas what was needed was for some of it to be transferred to the Westpac cheque account which had fallen too low (as low as $850; whereas my fortnightly pay cheque is for $1,200). This oversight meant that the term deposit could not be broken without incurring a penalty, so both CAFCA and ABC resolved to each make a $1,500 interest free loan to the Westpac cheque account, which will be paid back when that Kiwibank term deposit next matures in January. Normally there is no financial connection between either CAFCA or ABC and the Organiser Account, the latter is self-supporting.

It is important to make clear that there is no shortage of money in the Organiser Account, there was simply an oversight involving a routine transfer of funds between banks to top up the account used to pay me. It’s the first time this oversight has happened and it is embarrassing but it has been dealt with (it arose because the Kiwibank term deposit matured on a Monday; and we didn’t learn the Westpac balance until the previous Saturday. We don’t have Internet or phone banking – all transactions require two signatures – so Bob Leonard had to go personally to Kiwibank on the Monday and stand in a queue, only to be told he was too late and, besides, he would have needed a letter signed by two signatories to authorise the transfer, which couldn’t be organised in time).

That cockup aside, the Account is in good shape, although it is felt that it is running at close to capacity at the moment, so there are no immediate plans to increase my pay beyond the present $15 an hour, and I’m fine with that. Since 2009 the trend has continued that the ratio of regular pledges to donations is 80/20 (up until 08 it was more like 66/33). So although donations are down it is much securely based on regular pledges, some from people who have been there from the beginning, in 1991; others from people who have started just this year. At the time of writing there are 49 pledgers (as you can see in Bob Leonard’s 2009/10 accounts, above, there were 50 but one, Ron Resnick, recently died. He was the second pledger to die in the past year. You can read my obituary of the other one, Hugh Price, in Watchdog 123, May 2010, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/23/15.htm). That number is still higher than what it was in 2008, so the support base for the Organiser Account is growing. And I don’t want to give the impression that donations have diminished into insignificance – one national organisation makes an annual $1,000 donation; some individuals donate hundreds of dollars at a time.

And not all of those donations are in money. I want to single out Paul Evans, a long term pledger, for special thanks. I went to a midwinter peace movement book launch where, somewhat to my surprise, Paul engaged me in an animated conversation about rugby (not my usual topic of conversation at such gatherings), having learned of my love of the game from an assiduous reading of Watchdog over the years. To my even greater surprise he proceeded to not only offer to accompany me to the upcoming All Blacks/Wallabies test but to shout me the ticket. He may have had cause to regret that rush of blood to the head when he found out just how much they cost, but he was true to his word and I had the pleasure of accompanying Paul and his teenage daughter Heather to the game (the first All Blacks test I had attended since 1977). Not only that, he drove me to and from the park. I had a great night (and the All Blacks won), made even more memorable when Paul told me that he’d just been reading one of the judgments of his late father, Harold Evans, Christchurch magistrate and internationally renowned peace activist (you can read Kate Dewes’ obituary of Harold in Peace Researcher 33, November 2006, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr33-132a.html, accompanied by my short piece entitled “A ‘Criminal’s’ Fond Memories Of A Judge”). Yes, you guessed it, the judgment was that for the early 1970s’ case where I had unsuccessfully claimed exemption from military service on the grounds of being a minister of religion (there were a lot of clippings about it in my SIS file, which I received in 2010). It’s a hilarious story which you can read about in my obituary. So, thanks Paul and Heather for sharing that great night with me. As I say every year (19 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. Special thanks are due to Bob Leonard, my old friend and colleague, who has administered the Account and been my paymaster since the mid 1990s.

Watchdog

Watchdog is CAFCA’s face and voice to the world. As I said in my 09 Report it now looks the best it ever has (I’ve basically achieved my goal of having 100% of the illustrations for each issue sourced digitally, which makes for easier layout and printing, and for better quality graphics and photos. Where I do only have a hard copy I scan it to turn it into a digital image). Ian Dalziel does a graphic, free of charge, for the cover of each issue and they’re uniformly bloody good – it’s just a pity that they have to be reduced to a fraction of their size in order to fit in with the cover text. I’ve recycled a number of them in subsequent issues to illustrate specific articles, because they’re too good to be only ever published once. Once again, many thanks to Leigh Cookson, who has made a damned good job of the layout since the late 1990s (and has, so far successfully, resisted our blandishments to join the committee). This year we lashed out and spent nearly $800 buying her some new layout software to upgrade and improve the quality of the layout.

There has been one change in the Watchdog team in the past year and that was the replacement of Webmaster Greg Waite with Cass Daley. A heartfelt vote of thanks is needed for Greg who offered to set up the Watchdog Website and ran it (for no reward other than a free copy of each issue) from 1999-2010 inclusive. Greg has been a good friend and colleague since the late 1970s and long before he was our Webmaster he helped both CAFCA and Watchdog in his capacity as a printer. He continued to run the Website despite moving firstly to Wellington and then to Brisbane, where he and Julie have lived for years. But he was finding that the demands of a busy life and demanding job were leaving less and less time for him to tend to the numerous and time consuming jobs involved in getting each issue uploaded, then going back through it to painstakingly add the corrections (proofreading, to a nitpicking degree, both the online and hard copy editions is my job). He offered to resign if we could find someone to replace and we did – namely Cass Daley (who just happens to be the mother of Lynda Boyd, the youngest member by far of the CAFCA committee). Cass had already put in an enormous amount of voluntary work a couple of years previously setting up our new membership database - plus ones for the Anti-Bases Campaign and Philippines Solidarity Network – and she still maintains those if any problems arise. She volunteered to take over the Website for the indefinite future and the August issue was her first solo online edition. One immediate issue was what title should she have? For obvious reasons she didn’t want to be called the Webmaster, and definitely not the Webmistress. We settled on Web Content Organiser. So, welcome aboard, Cass. Just as the CAFCA Website (run by Bill Rosenberg) attracts considerably more readers and visitors than CAFCA’s actual members, so it is with the Watchdog site. Our online presence has become a more and more important part of our work.

As I mentioned in my 09 Report, James Ayers has succeeded Bill Rosenberg in the onerous but absolutely vital task of recording and analysing the monthly Decisions of the Overseas Investment Office for every issue. Bill had previously done it for 20 years and set a very high benchmark – a nationally renowned journalist once told me that “Bill is the best economics writer in New Zealand”. Since the December 09 issue James has been doing it and I’m delighted to say that he’s done a bloody good job. There was a real possibility that section of Watchdog would have vanished with Bill’s departure (not just anyone has the time, dedication, patience and analytical and writing skills for that task – and I include myself in that category. I was not prepared to take it on). James has made that section of each issue his own and taken to it with gusto (for one issue he got it to me a month early because he and his wife were off on a weeks-long road trip across the States; and, as I reported above, he took consolation from the earthquake forcing him out of his central city shop, his livelihood, by telling me it would give him several weeks to research the next batch of OIO Decisions). Nor was there any need to worry that the OIO Decisions section of each issue would become any less substantial than it had been under Bill – James regularly fills 20-30 pages.

A Quantity Of Quality Writers

A hallmark of Watchdog since 2009 has been the sheer number and variety of writers, many of them with considerable name recognition. Bill’s departure gave us a further incentive to attract new writers and in this we have been very successful. Both Liz Gordon and John Minto have agreed to write us something for each issue. Just look at some of the people who have written for us over the past year – Jane Kelsey, Victor Billot, Bryan Gould, Brian Easton, Sue Newberry, Maire Leadbeater and Sue Bradford. This does not go unnoticed – for example, the editor of a British magazine asked our permission to republish Bryan Gould’s article (having been a British Labour MP for years and an unsuccessful contender for the Party leadership, Gould has a high profile in Britain). We have been happy to invite people from other organisations and campaigns to write for us, as evidenced by Vaughan Gunson’s two articles in the August issue. And we are happy to invite those that disagree with us to write for us – Don Franks, whose obituary of Jim Delahunty appears in this issue, is one of our friends on the Left who disagrees with CAFCA’s emphasis on foreign control (as opposed to capitalism per se). Nevertheless he accepted our invitation to write Jim’s obituary with alacrity, e-mailing me: “Watchdog does particularly good obituaries so this is a bit of a privilege for me” (Don also specially wrote and sang a bloody good song for the Roger Award event in Wellington in March). It’s worth repeating that none of these writers gets paid.

This is not to say that the Old Guard has turned the thing over to a bunch of newcomers. Far from it, Watchdog's regular writers are as prolific as ever, namely Dennis Small, Quentin Findlay and Jeremy Agar, our extraordinarily productive Reviews Editor (Jeremy is a very proud descendant of the influential early 19th Century English essayist, William Hazlitt, and is upholding the finest essaying tradition in his Watchdog writing). It is worth mentioning that Watchdog has name recognition when it comes to soliciting books to review – we (either I or Jeremy) frequently “cold call” major publishers, either here or overseas, for review copies. We have a very good strike rate, even from publishers who know that their book (or, more accurately, the book’s subject) will be savaged by our reviewer. Recent books about Theresa Gattung and by Alan Bollard come to mind. For this issue alone Jeremy has reviewed seven books, one movie and one online report. Plus he does book and film reviews for Peace Researcher, the Anti-Bases Campaign newsletter and Kapatiran, the Philippines Solidarity Network newsletter, both of which I also edit. It’s a good thing that he is “retired” because he told us that being Reviews Editor feels like a fulltime job. Bill Rosenberg no longer has time to write specifically for Watchdog but he generously gives us various conference papers, policy papers, speeches, reports and articles he has written for other publications and in several cases Warren Brewer has edited those into Watchdog articles. When you add up all the writers in a particular issue sometimes it comes to ten different people – several more than that for this issue - which is a remarkable number for such a small (but perfectly formed) publication.

I am the Editor, which involves a lot of work in its own right, but have also been able to do plenty of writing in the past year, which has not always been the case (and I still don’t have time to do anywhere near as much as I’d like to. You can be an activist organiser or a writer – being both is tricky). One thing I always get great satisfaction from is the obituaries (not all of which are written by me, by any means) because people are what interest me the most (as a kid I devoured hundreds of biographies from the old Christchurch Public Library) and I firmly believe that there are no “ordinary” people, and that our members are entitled to have their lives celebrated and honoured in the pages of the publication of the group to which they belonged and whose work they actively supported and financed. A lot of you seem to agree with me, because for years now we have received very positive feedback about Watchdog's obituaries, which humanise what can be an abstract, dense and even depressing subject. One member wrote recently: “Thanks for the great obituaries. It is one of the highlights of the newsletter”. We always get positive feedback from members about the total content of each issue, but particularly for the obituaries. Sometimes I am surprised by how intensely they affect some people – for instance at the Wellington Roger Award event in March 2010 a very senior national union official (no, not Bill) told me that he thought my 2005 obituary of my father was “the best bit of writing he’d ever read” (the old man would be spinning in his grave. Technically it was a Death In the Family piece rather than a proper obituary. My Dear Old Dad, most emphatically, was never a member of what he always referred to as CATFART).

It is fortunate that Watchdog has the luxury of size, because it’s a big bugger (we realise that its size is offputting to some people, but we firmly believe that it is that rarity which combines both quantity and quality). The three issues in the past year have been 96, 80 and 92 pages respectively, so it’s a good thing that our printers no longer have the 80 page limit imposed by their previous equipment. Since 2009 I’ve no longer had to worry about having to cut things out or hold them over until next time (a frequent occurrence in the past) but it still has to go the printers in multiples of four pages, so there can still be an issues of having to cut or add something to get it to fit that format. This is the first issue to crack the magic 100 page barrier but I hope that we don’t make it a habit, because I think that is too big (we’re treating this one as a bumper summer holiday issue. One reason why this one is so big is that a lot of the people that I approached a year ago to write an article for one of our three issues opted to do so for the December one – and they all did). Leigh Cookson truly does a remarkable job in converting a great big indigestible blob of raw copy into the finished product.

Historic Watchdogs Online

In my 09 Report I said that we were in the process of getting a full set of old Watchdogs online (covering the period 1974-99; the latter being when Greg Waite created the Watchdog Website). For reasons of sheer size we could not upload the 100+ old issues to the existing site, as our Web host could not give us the necessary amount of cyberspace free of charge. Lynda Boyd, who was the originator of the whole project, took it upon herself to create a new free Website to host it and you can access that at http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.com/. Have a look; it’s a fascinating trip down memory lane and a reminder of just how much work CAFCA has done on so many issues over the decades. It’s not just useful for nostalgic reasons either – I have used it for research whilst writing several Watchdog articles over the past year, including for this issue, as has at least one other writer.

Nor has it been used only for researching material for use in Watchdog – a few months ago I was contacted by a filmmaker who wanted our help on a particular research topic relating to the 1980s and he had found Watchdogs of that vintage to be an invaluable starting point (I agreed to respect the confidentiality of his project, so no further details at this stage). And not only do you get a full set of historic Watchdogs but, as a bonus, the site also includes publications such as our famous Comalco comic “Power Junky” (a great piece of work by Pete Lusk and Ron Currie; we still get requests for hard copies, of which, sadly, there are none left).

Roger Award

Along with Watchdog, CAFCA’s other old faithful (at least, since 1997) is the annual Roger Award, organised in partnership with GATT Watchdog. As you know, in 2009 it was won by ANZ, for its scandalous treatment of the so-called “frozen funds” investors in a couple of funds that the bank had run in partnership with fellow transnational ING. You can read the Judges Report at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/publications/Roger/Roger2009.pdf. An awful lot of totally unpaid work goes into the judging and report writing for the Roger Award and I want to single out Sue Newberry, of Sydney University, who does the annual Financial Analysis of the winner. She was frustrated that she had do the latest one when there was a lot of unfinished business (such as ANZ’s annual accounts not having been published in time; the final settlement between ANZ/ING and the ripped off investors had not been made). That has since all happened and Sue’s update article on the whole sad and sorry story is in this issue. Please read it, it’s fascinating and it’s a cautionary tale.

The 2009 Roger winners were announced at a splendid event in Wellington in March 2010, the first time it had been held there for three years (and the third time overall). It was jointly organised by CAFCA and Drinking Liberally, an informal group of union officials who meet in an inner city pub every couple of weeks to socialise and listen to a guest speaker. Thanks to them, we got the venue (a back bar) free of charge, meaning we only had to pay for the very delicious food and the musicians. It was a joint production which brought together an interesting mix of people. As I remarked in my speech, not only were we drinking liberally, we were rogering enthusiastically! It was all very professionally organised by our Wellington members Sam Huggard and Kane O’Connell (Sam went overseas the day before the event on a long planned trip, so Kane was in charge on the night). There were up to 80 people there, despite it being a wet night, including three of the five 2009 judges (none of whom are from Wellington), several former judges, one Green MP (who brought along her dear old dad, who had organised Wellington’s first Roger event, back in 01*), and CAFCA members and supporters from Wellington and around the country. A bloody good night was had by all. I spoke on behalf of the organisers (my full speech is at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/publications/Roger/2009Horton.pdf); Chief Judge Dr Christine Dann, from Banks Peninsula, announced the winners.

The formal part of the evening was wrapped up in fine style by veteran Wellington activist and musician, Don Franks* who, when asked to perform, had requested advance confidential knowledge of the winner so that he could write a special song, “Do Like Jesus Done”, to mark the occasion. This was performed, with great gusto, by Don and two other musos (one of whom is a very senior national union official; I’m not sure whether his organisation would approve of some of the song’s lyrics, which can be read at http://www.indymedia.org.nz/article/78346/anz-wins-roger-award). The crowd loved the song and it was a rousing way to wrap up the business of the evening (there had been a couple of other musical items planned, but one performer had to cancel at late notice because of a double booking, and the Brass Razoo Solidarity Band - which had performed at the 2001 Roger event in Wellington - could not serenade the crowd entering the pub because they can’t perform outside in the rain). *Jim Delahunty, the organiser of that first Roger Award event in Wellington, in 2001, died in September 2010, meaning that the March 2010 Roger event was the last time I saw him. His obituary by Don Franks (with contributions by his daughter, Catherine Delahunty, and myself) appears elsewhere in this issue.

It was a great night, I’ve always enjoyed the Roger events and it’s great to see that people in Wellington (and Auckland and Dunedin, where it has also been held in the past) have a solid sense of ownership of the Roger Award, despite the fact that it’s organised out of Christchurch. It has become a national institution which goes from strength to strength. Plus this one had a unique factor. To quote from my speech: “It is not coincidental that this event is taking place in Wellington this week. As you know, the trial is being held in the Wellington District Court this week of the three Christian peace activists who, in 2008, so spectacularly deflated one of the giant domes at the Waihopai spybase in Marlborough. I also work for the Anti-Bases Campaign and am in Wellington all this week wearing that hat, taking part in a whole raft of solidarity activities which we have helped to organise. These two things – the Roger Award and the spybase – are not unrelated. Waihopai is a small but vital cog in a global system of exploitation, intimidation, war and mass destruction that exists to make the world safe and profitable for the transnational corporations, many of whom are an integral part of that global war machine. By their symbolic action, a perfect example of non-violent direct action, the Waihopai Domebusters poked a finger into one of the eyes of the spying and enforcement mechanism of the system that we are talking about tonight. We all owe those guys a vote of thanks”. It sure as hell was a full on week; an extremely busy week (this was my second consecutive night as a speaker to a public meeting – the ABC one the night before, also organised by the indispensable Kane O’Connell, was to a bigger crowd; I spoke at a picket every day, sometimes two, with attendant media and logistics work; plus attending the trial every day); a wonderful week, capped off by the euphoria of the total acquittal of the Domebusters the following week. This was a victory to savour, and you can read my account of that hectic week of activities in Wellington in the Anti-Bases Campaign section of this Report (it capped off nearly two years of work, most of which could not be made public at the time, dating back to immediately after they deflated the dome in April 08). So the Roger Award event was just part of the fun in Wellington that heady March week, but it was definitely the icing on the cake.

Trans-Tasman Media Coverage; Auckland Political Scrap

The Roger Award always gets covered in the mainstream media and 2010 was no exception, with reports in both print media (hard copy and online) and on radio. For example, there was a comprehensive report in the Business Day section of Stuff, the Website for the Fairfax papers. At one point this report (“ANZ tops worst transnational list”, Adrian Hatwell, 19/3/10, http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/3476977/ANZ-tops-worst-transnational-list) headed the site’s Most Popular list. Major media coverage spread across the Tasman this year, doubtless because it was won by an Australian bank. Indeed, the Sydney Morning Herald reported it not once but twice. Here is one of those reports, in its entirety: “ANZ Bank has failed to live up to the NZ in its name, according to some of our friends across the Tasman. The bank won one of the so-called Roger Awards last night - for supposedly being the worst transnational company operating in the group of islands south-east of Lord Howe Island. Unlike here in Australia, apparently the bank in New Zealand has been practising a form of 'pure greed capitalism’. The award ceremony was held in a Wellington pub and was hosted by the anti-free-market activist group, Campaign against Foreign Control of Aotearoa. Rather than alluding to any particular act of getting done over by someone, the Rogers are named after the former New Zealand pro-market finance minister Roger Douglas” (SMH, 12/3/10, “Roger-ed”, Scott Rochfort, http://www.smh.com.au/business/guidance-from-the-grime-fighter-20100311-q1nx.html).

And it was not only the main winner which was the subject of media and public interest. For example, papers in both Waihi and Waiheke Island were very keen to publicise how “their” finalists got on, namely Newmont Mining and Transpacific Industries (TPI). A reporter on the Waihi Leader told us: “we ran a story saying Newmont were finalists and a story about them not making the final three!”. Auckland City Vision-Labour Councillors put out a press release congratulating the Auckland City Council and its officials for winning the Accomplice Award for contracting out Waiheke Island waste services from a local community company to transnational corporation Transpacific Industries. To quote just one of them: “…Councillor Leila Boyle said, ‘It is an unusual and interesting distinction that Auckland City Council has been the only council in New Zealand to ever ‘earn’ a Roger Award. It demonstrates the huge commitment by John Banks and his Citizens & Ratepayers Councillors to ensure Auckland’s total waste stream is all controlled by an overseas waste industry conglomerate’” (17/3/10, “Congratulations To Auckland City Council For Roger Award Win”, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1003/S00245.htm. That is not strictly true. In 2001 the Papakura District Council shared a special Egg On Face Award with United Water, for the Council having contracted out its water services to that transnational).

The two Auckland judges, Joce Jesson and Wayne Hope, both attended the Wellington event and they enthusiastically accepted the winners’ laminated certificates for the Auckland City Council and its officials (two certificates, one for the Mayor; the other for the Chief Executive Officer) and undertook to get them presented. One of those certificates duly came before the Council’s City Development Committee in April, having been referred there by the CEO, rather than to the full Council. The Committee Chairman refused to accept it, merely “noting” the Accomplice Award, “then added eight new (self-serving) clauses noting various aspects of the award to TPI of the Waiheke contract” (to quote our Auckland City Council source). This actually attracted quite a bit of media attention in Auckland. And to cap it all off a special event was held on Waiheke Island in May to present a sympathetic Auckland City Councillor, Cathy Casey, with that laminated certificate. This was the front page lead story, plus photo, in the Waiheke Gulf News (27/5/10; “Roger Award For Waste Scandal Delivered At Last”. Gulf Islands Councillor Denise Roche said: “The ‘Accomplice’ Award went to the ‘running dogs’ for encouraging multinationals. Traditionally every year nominees have been the Business Round Table. This year, Auckland City Council beat even the Business Round Table in the stakes for the organisation ‘that has done the most in extracting New Zealand capital and taking it overseas’”.

Transnationals Always Take It Very Seriously

As they always have done, the transnationals continue to take the Roger Award very seriously indeed. In Watchdog articles and annual Reports over the years I have detailed the various approaches, threats, blandishments and pleas that we have received from finalists, their public relations mouthpieces and their friends in high places (including one Embassy and one Cabinet Minister in the Labour government). The class of 2009 proved to be no exception, with very senior executives of two finalists – Rymans Healthcare and Infratil – both contacting us directly to protest them being in a contest for foreign companies. Neither of them disputed why they had been nominated for the Roger Award and for which they had been selected as finalists; they simply wanted to claim that they are actually New Zealand companies. For the record, they both qualified for the Roger Award because they both met the Overseas Investment Act’s definition of a foreign-owned company (one which is 24.9% or more foreign-owned). Infratil really likes to wrap itself in the flag, proving that patriotism really is the last refuge of the scoundrel. In March 2010, when a joint venture between it and NZ Superannuation Fund bought the downstream assets of Shell NZ, there was much media trumpeting about this meaning there is finally an NZ-owned petrol company. Sadly this is not so. CAFCA’s press release on the subject (“Don’t Be Fooled Into Thinking That Infratil Is A ‘New Zealand’ Company”, 30/3/10), is online at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/publications/Statements/Infratil.html. Seven months later this was still pissing off Infratil and in October 2010 I received an e-mail from a senior company executive wanting, once again, to argue that it is a New Zealand company. “It is unfair to brand Infratil as “Foreign Owned’ just because of a technical ‘line in the sand’ in one Act. It is very unfair, and incorrect, to suggest someone here is attempting to fool people into thinking anything false”. Ouch, obviously the truth hurts. And that “technical ‘line in the sand’ in one Act” just happens to be the NZ legal definition of a foreign-owned company, a definition which has been in place, unchanged, since the original 1973 Overseas Investment Act.

So, full speed ahead with the 2010 Roger Award. Bryan Gould has resigned after several much appreciated years as a judge (because he is such a high profile, influential and thoroughly respectable fellow he was singled out for criticism by the odd business columnist during his tenure on the Roger judiciary) and has been replaced by Sue Bradford, who was delighted to be invited. It is worth noting that we did not invite Sue until after she had resigned from Parliament and any role in the Green Party – to maintain our political independence we do not invite MPs or party officials to be Roger judges, event organisers or speakers. Sue is the first former MP to be a judge (well, the first former NZ MP. Bryan Gould was a British Labour MP for many years and an unsuccessful contender for the pre-Tony Blair Party leadership in the 90s).That said, we are grateful for the invaluable help of the Greens who (for a not insignificant fee) were prepared, once again, to include nomination forms in a mailout of their Party newsletter Te Awa to several thousand members. That enables us to reach many more people than our own membership and we always get a good response from Green members. The Roger was also publicised by several other organisations and unions, to whom we are truly grateful.

You will find the list of 2010 finalists elsewhere in this issue. Once again we received a range of nominations, some of them not even remotely eligible (my favourite was the person who nominated the National Party because they were “Communistic” in sacking ECan, the Canterbury Regional Council. I always suspected the Tories of being a bunch of commos). The event to announce the winner/s will be held in Auckland in April. I’m looking forward to it, as Roger events are always great fun. And also because that event marks the kick off of my 2011 election year CAFCA speaking tour, working back south from Auckland over two to three weeks. The last time I did one of those was in 2002, also starting from the Roger Award event in Auckland (the first time it was held there).

CAFCA’s High Media Profile

Mention of the always very good media coverage of the Roger Award leads me onto the subject of the wider media coverage of what CAFCA says and does. Every year my Report says that CAFCA enjoys a media presence disproportionate to our actual size. There was definitely a spike in 2009, which was accounted for by the SIS file on CAFCA being made public (including a front page lead in the Press, with photos of Bill and I; plenty of other articles; a Press editorial attacking us individually, balanced out by a two page Press profile of me entitled, inevitably, “The Last Radical”). That was quite a ride. 2010 has been a ”normal” year for CAFCA media coverage, which is good because it focuses on the issue and what we have to say about it, rather than on CAFCA as an organisation (specifically, how CAFCA was historically viewed by State spies and informers) or on me individually (the Press was fascinated enough by the fact that I’m a rugby fan to highlight that in its profile, but I don’t think that adds anything to the public’s understanding of the issue we’re on about).

“Normal” media coverage has still been pretty frequent in 2010. I have made an effort to get out press releases on a regular basis and they quite often get picked up and quoted or serve as a trigger for an interview. That can sometimes lead to quite bizarre outcomes. As I’ve already said, within an hour of the devastating September earthquake, we turned on the radio to find out what was going on and I realised after a while that I was listening to myself on the news, namely a soundbite from an interview that I’d done the previous afternoon on behalf of CAFCA, reacting to the ludicrous claims of senior Minister Maurice Williamson that opponents of foreign investment are “racists”. At that time of the pre-dawn Saturday morning reports of the earthquake were still quite sketchy, so the item featuring me got more airtime than the disaster. And I’ll tell you what, I bet that a whole lot of people who normally wouldn’t be awake, let alone listening to their radios, at that time of the morning, heard what I had to say on CAFCA’s behalf. Mind you they may not have been giving it the attention that it doubtless deserved!

A lot of the time the media comes to us, without us having to do anything to attract their attention – because of our well deserved reputation as the group to go for the facts about, and comments on, everything to do with foreign control, reporters seek us out. This happened recently when both TV3 News and Radio NZ’s Morning Report sought me out for comment about Labour’s new, tougher, policy on foreign investment. I’d circulated a press release the day before but neither was aware of that. The Morning Report producer actually rang while I was trying to watch myself on 3 News, so I had to mute that to talk to him. He set me up for a pre-recorded debate with Don Nicholson, President of Federated Farmers, and all I will say is if that is the calibre of farmers’ leadership, then I feel sorry for them. Sometimes I can’t help them about the actual purchase or transnational corporation that they’re seeking comment about (a recent example was both the New Zealand Herald and the National Business Review ringing me about Harvard University’s investment institution spending up large on South Island dairy farms) but am happy to be interviewed about the bigger picture behind the specific transaction. And sometimes media inquiries really come out of left field – the Dominion Post rang for my opinions of the Green Party and its leadership, based on the journalist having read my 2005 Watchdog obituary of Rod Donald (there’s the value of our Websites again, not to mention the impact of our trademark obituaries, years after the event).

This year the enormous publicity surrounding the bid by China’s Natural Dairy to buy the Crafar Farms has led to a lot of calls from mainstream media, particularly the Herald, radio stations (both Radio NZ and commercial ones) and, for the first time in years, from the Listener, which fleetingly quoted me (described as a “hardened Lefty”) and included a four year old photo taken for another publication and on another manifestation of the foreign control issue – it was taken in Lyttelton in 2006 when CAFCA was among those campaigning, successfully, to stop the sale of the Lyttelton Port Company to a Hong Kong transnational – in a cover story on foreigners buying dairy farms. It was a pretty superficial article, from our point of view, but that was all we would expect of a magazine that has veered sharply to the Right in recent years. There was a period, throughout the 90s and into the noughties, when all aspects of the foreign control issue was regularly examined in the Listener; CAFCA featured in it regularly, including being invited to write a guest Editorial (and they sent their own photographer to take my photo). As I say, not only was this the first time we’d been mentioned in the Listener for several years, it was our first contact with it of any kind for years. And that solitary appearance in the Listener led to me doing a lengthy interview for Radio NZ’s Mediawatch about how the whole issue of the foreign buy up of NZ farms is covered by the media, past and present; and did CAFCA think we should emulate the newly formed Save The Farms lobby group and garner huge media interest by taking out full page newspaper ads opposing such sales? Maybe if we had a spare few hundred thousand dollars, and even then I’m not convinced that it would be the best use of that hypothetical money.

It hasn’t only been “old” media that have approached us, more and more of our interviews and comments only appear online. And a lot of that is in direct response to our own excellent Website, which Bill Rosenberg does a very good job of running. Nor is it only mainstream media that wants to talk to us – to give two examples, I have done several interviews this year with each of the Farmers Weekly paper and a Wellington-based Maori radio station (my appearances in the agricultural media led to a North Island dairy farmer getting my unlisted number from a journalist and ringing me directly to say “I don’t normally agree with people like you but what you’ve said about the Free Trade Agreement with China leading to Chinese buying up dairy farms is spot on”). I have done community radio interviews, both in the studio, and over the phone. TV interviews tend to be a bit more hit and miss – on several occasions TV reporters haven’t got back to me after ringing to set up interviews, or I’ve actually been cut from the news item after they’ve come to the house and interviewed me (my five year old niece, visiting us from the Philippines, was very disappointed not to see Uncle Murray on TV after she stayed up way past her bedtime one night specially to see me, after she’d been fascinated to watch the film crew interview me). Some dealings with the media involve long term projects that may or may not come to anything – I had a long phone conversation with an independent documentary maker who was selling a pitch to the TV networks for a whole series on foreign control. Who knows if anything will come of that?

International Exposure

Nor have our media appearances been confined to NZ. I have already mentioned the Australian coverage of the 2009 Roger Award. One intriguing sequel to a press release we put out criticising further South Island high country purchases by Shania Twain was that CAFCA (“a left-wing lobby group”) got our message out to the big wide world, into the New York Times no less (to be precise, into the International Herald Tribune, which is the Times’ international edition). Maybe because it involves a globally known North American musical superstar and therefore registers on the radar of the American “journal of record”. The article “Debate Continues Over Foreign Ownership In New Zealand” (9/4/10), was published in the Great Homes And Destinations section of the Times. It was written by Auckland journalist Anne Gibson, who is the Property Editor of the New Zealand Herald. The article concludes: “Rules controlling land purchases by interests based overseas have been debated here several times. While the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa has not been successful in changing laws, its criticisms have drawn national attention in the media”. The International Herald Tribune is a truly global paper. We were alerted to the article by an e-mail to Bill Rosenberg from his brother George, an international lawyer, who frequently travels in Africa on business: “I am sitting here at Addis Ababa airport reading the IHT and whose name do I see? Murray Horton”. Actually this is not the first time that CAFCA has made the American papers – we appeared in a lengthy Los Angeles Times feature several years ago about American investment in NZ. Nor was that a one-off. The Pike River coal mine disaster was dominating the news when I was writing this, in late November, and CAFCA was contacted by a Sydney Morning Herald reporter who had found criticisms of the mine’s safety quoted in a 2007 Watchdog article and wanted to follow them up (we couldn’t help).

And we still have contact with the world the old fashioned way, meaning that I do some speaking appearances. They are small scale, but much more personal and rewarding in that you can get into a much more detailed discussion. This year I have spoken to a seminar of EPMU officials and delegates, at the invitation of a visiting Canadian union economist (EPMU = Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union); and to a branch meeting of the Ilam Greens, held in the home of Kennedy Graham MP. In 2011 I will be dramatically increasing the number of speaking engagements by undertaking CAFCA’s first election year national speaking tour since 2002. The title is New Zealand Not For Sale and I will be spending two to three weeks on the road, in April, starting at the Roger Award event in Auckland and working my way back south. The final itinerary remains to be worked out but preliminary organising has already led to confirmed invitations to speak in cities and towns from Whangarei to Dunedin, with other centres still to be confirmed. CAFCA has also decided to increase our visibility at events like rallies. We haven’t been a street marching organisation for decades and our one and only banner (simply stating our name and logo) was definitely looking its age – it was made maybe as long ago as the 80s, not more recently than the early 90s. Warren Brewer took the initiative and we spent nearly $400 getting a new banner professionally made.

Relations With Political Parties

I’ve mentioned being invited to speak to a Christchurch branch of the Greens and of that party’s help in distributing Roger Award nomination forms virtually every year. CAFCA is independent of all parties, endorses none of them and reserves the right to criticise all of them (a right which we vigorously exercise). Not only our membership but also the committee reflects a range of party affiliations and support – for example, two of the committee are very active in the Alliance and one in the Democrats, both of which are now extra-Parliamentary parties. But it’s no surprise that of the Parliamentary parties we have the best relationship with the Greens. Not only over things like the Roger Award but also on policy matters. Co-Leader Russel Norman sought our advice on his Private Member’s Bill (which wasn’t drawn from the ballot) to prohibit foreigners buying sensitive land. I told him I thought it was a step backwards from 2005 when, under the late Rod Donald’s leadership, the Greens ran a petition – which CAFCA supported and helped publicise and distribute – to ban foreigners buying land over more than a certain size. More recently the Greens asked our help in publicising their current Keep It Kiwi petition and campaign opposing the privatisation of public-owned assets (there is a copy of the petition with this issue). We told them that the campaign’s name suggested that they would be happy if NZ capitalists bought public assets (as happened in the 80s and 90s, with the likes of Fay Richwhite and the 40 thieves), which we know is not the intent of their campaign. We also told them we were happy to offer to distribute the petition via Watchdog and, what’s more, we wouldn’t charge them an insertion fee (unlike when the boot is on the other foot and we’re asking the Greens to include Roger Award nomination forms with Te Awa, the Party newsletter).

As per usual, CAFCA always has a number of campaigns on the go, in various stages of intensity. Throughout 2009 we steadily built one to oppose any further liberalisation of the 2005 Overseas Investment Act, prompted by the fact that Bill English announced that the Government was going to review it yet again (only a few years after it was last reviewed and liberalised by Labour under Michael Cullen). My 09 Report detailed what we had done and said that we were in a holding pattern until the Government announced the outcome of the review. We waited and waited and fully expected a further liberalisation that would kick off a major election year campaign spearheaded by CAFCA. Somewhat to our surprise, in September 2010, English announced that there would be no changes to the Act, except to add some new, essentially cosmetic, grounds that supposedly will make foreign purchases of rural land to be harder. This is the subject of my cover article in this issue, so I won’t repeat the details here, except to say that National’s backing away from its natural instinct to rip the door off its hinges to let in foreign investors is the product of a growing tide of unease about such sales, not only from the general public, but from its own voters, supporters (its own class, actually) and from within the Government itself at the highest levels (no leader of the last Labour government ever used language like Key’s saying that he didn’t want new Zealanders to become tenants in our own country). National’s reasons for doing so are very different from CAFCA’s (they’re driven by electoral expediency) but we’ll take a win, whatever the circumstances. Throughout 2009 and 10 we campaigned against any further liberalisation of the Overseas Investment Act and that is exactly what was achieved. We won (and have even removed the relevant page from our Website, as it is no longer necessary).

This is not to say that National has suddenly seen the light and changed its mind on foreign “investment” – the whole Warner Brothers/”Hobbit” fiasco shows very clearly that this is a Government that will go to any lengths to grovel to the transnationals and trample on NZ workers and unions in the process (not to mention blithely giving transnationals tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars as unabashed corporate welfare). That subject is also in my cover article in this issue, so I won’t repeat myself and go into details here. To sum it up on one sentence - National wants to quarantine the land sales issue, because that is a political hot potato, while proceeding with business even more flagrantly than usual in the bigger picture of giving the country away to transnational corporations, in fact paying them to do so.

NZ Not For Sale Campaign & Speaking Tour

The other major campaign, which will increasingly be our main focus throughout election year, is the New Zealand Not For Sale Campaign (NZNFSC). This is a network, a loose coalition of groups including ourselves, set up in 2010 to fight the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), an expansion of the existing P(acific)4 Free Trade Agreement to include a number of other countries, most importantly including the US. The aim of this exercise is to use it for NZ to effect a Free Trade Agreement with the US, which both National and Labour have long proclaimed to be the Holy Grail of trade deals. Negotiations have been going on throughout 2010 (with one round being held in Auckland), with the aim of having it done and dusted, ready for signing, by late 2011. NZNFSC has been slowly but steadily building a network of active members and supporters, setting up a Website www.nznotforsale.org. The Campaign was publicly launched in November with Christine Dann is its Secretary and spokesperson (I already wear a number of different hats, so it’s better that somebody else front this campaign and Christine is extremely good at it. My title is Convenor and I am happy to be media spokesperson whenever Christine is not available. That has already happened on a couple of occasions). NFNFSC has drawn up detailed plans for a campaign right through election year – included with this issue is a leaflet and a Statement of Sovereignty (not a petition as such), which will be open until the deliberately chosen date of July 4th; there will be activities in Christchurch in February 2011 to coincide with the meeting of the US/NZ Partnership Council, a gathering of high powered politicians and business leaders; we will be lobbying councillors throughout the country on the implications for local government (a tactic that paid rich dividends in the 1990s’ campaigns against a whole raft of free trade and foreign investment agreements, most spectacularly against the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment [MAI], which was globally defeated); likewise we will be lobbying MPs and candidates for the election. In the 2008 election CAFCA’s humble little anti-privatisation postcard was a runaway success (see my 08 Report), so we may well repeat the exercise for the 2011 election with an anti-TPP theme.

New Zealand Not For Sale is the title of my election year national speaking tour, the first since 2002. Provisionally scheduled for the first two or three weeks of April (starting from the Roger Award event in Auckland and heading back south to be home by Easter is the idea) it is shaping up well, with numerous venues in both islands already confirmed – so many that I may have to do some of them as one off trips, rather than as part of the actual tour. These are some, but by no means all, of the activities planned for this campaign in the next year. This also marks the first time that CAFCA has taken a leading role in a campaign on a free trade agreement, as opposed to a supporting role in a network or coalition. And the NZNFSC is far from alone on this issue. The indefatigable Jane Kelsey has been campaigning about the TPP since it was first announced; see elsewhere in this issue for Jeremy Agar’s review of her new book about it, “No Ordinary Deal” (the NFNFS Campaign was publicly launched at the Christchurch launch of the book).

Mention of privatisation reinforces the point that we haven’t forgotten about this huge and vital issue, and neither have the Tories. They might be backing away, for purely tactical reasons, from wanting to be seen as presiding over a landgrab by foreign buyers, but support for privatisation is hardwired into their DNA. In the 2008 campaign Key and his less smiley henchmen committed to no privatisation of any State assets in their first term. The obvious implication is that all bets are off in any second or subsequent term. Rather than go over it all again, re-read my cover article in the August 2010 Watchdog, “Stop Thief! The Not So Secret Agenda To Steal NZ People’s Assets” http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/24/01.htm. Part and parcel of that agenda is for the would be privatisers and the collaborators of the transnationals to get an electoral system more weighted in their favour, as it was in the good old days of First Past the Post; hence the importance of retaining MMP in the referendum which is being held in conjunction with the election. CAFCA declares our support for the Keep MMP Campaign and we are happy to help publicise it between now and the election. Finally, the issue of land sales to foreigners is a perennial; it remains the public and emotional face of this whole issue, and it has been as long as I can remember. So, although we aren’t running any specific campaign on that, it is always there, it will regularly flare up again in the future, and it is currently enjoying a high profile because of the Save The Farms campaign and their high profile and very expensive series of full page ads in mainstream media. Land sales are only a part of a much bigger issue but they are a very important part and provide a regular means to publicise and campaign on that much bigger issue.

Waihopai Spybase Protest

The other group for whom I am paid to work is, of course, the Anti-Bases Campaign. My last Report mentioned that 2009 was an unusually quiet year for ABC, with no Waihopai spybase protest and the vast amount of preparatory work for the March 2010 Domebusters’ trial in Wellington taking place behind closed doors and protected by legally enforceable secrecy. By contrast, 2010 has been a year of feverish activity for ABC, with nearly all of it taking place within two months from January to March, namely the Waihopai protest, followed by the Wellington trial and accompanying solidarity events.

ABC’s protest in Blenheim and at the Waihopai spybase in January 2010 was the first time we’d been there since the spectacular April 08 deflation of one of the base’s giant domes; we had decided not to hold a protest at the base in 09 but to concentrate on solidarity activities with the Waihopai Anzac Ploughshares trio – Adrian Leason, Peter Murnane and Sam Land (the Domebusters). We had made that decision because we believed that their trial would be in 2009, but due to the twists and turns in the legal system, it did not, in fact, take place until March 2010. When we decided to hold our spybase protest in the usual month of January we did not know that the trial would take place, in Wellington, just six weeks later. We had already committed to a range of solidarity activities throughout the duration of the trial. For a very small Christchurch-based group such as ABC it was a tall order to organise two such major activities, in different parts of the country, so close together – but, I’m delighted to report, we succeeded.

The deflation and impending trial did have one noticeable effect on the composition of our ranks in January 2010, namely that none of the three Domebusters nor their numerous family members and Catholic Worker supporters attended, in marked contrast to the 08 protest, when their group had made up a sizeable chunk of the participants, and two of them (Peter and Sam) had been among the speakers at the inner gate. The reason for their non-attendance in 2010 was simple – their bail conditions included a prohibition on entering the entire province of Marlborough, except to attend court or meet lawyers. As they had succeeded in getting the trial venue moved to Wellington, they had no legal reason to enter Marlborough. Nor did the spies want them anywhere near the base again – in their trial testimony they happily volunteered the information that they had used their participation in ABC’s 08 protest to get as close as possible to it and case the joint for their spectacular deflation three months later.

Even so, we managed to muster somewhere between 20 and 30 hardy souls (we consider 50 to be a really good turnout) and what was noticeable was the number of Waihopai protest veterans, some coming back into the fray after years away (the likes of Don Murray, who was on both the ABC and CAFCA committees in the 1980s and 90s; and Doug Craig, another stalwart of those early protests, who has gone on to join the ABC committee in 2010). Other ABC veterans, like Dick Keller and Maire Leadbeater, keep turning up year after year. And there were some first timers and young people this year as well. That number was particularly heartening because, for one of the few times in the 22 years that ABC has been holding these protests in Marlborough, the weather was not good. Usually the problem is blazing dry heat. In January it rained on each of the three days that we camped at beautiful Whites Bay and it wasn’t warm – I can’t remember the last time I had to wear a raincoat and/or a jersey throughout a Waihopai protest weekend. Even though it wasn’t heavy rain, it was persistent and any kind of rain and camping are not a good mix. Special heartfelt thanks are owed to ABC (and CAFCA) committee member Lynda Boyd who, as a last minute thought before we left Christchurch for Marlborough, picked up a gazebo from the office of the union she works for. That provided just enough shelter for the cooking and eating to take place and as a communal meeting place (it’s a Department of Conservation camp with no electricity, kitchen, or anything more than very basic facilities). It was barely sufficient to keep us and our cooking facilities dry – if one person turned around inside the gazebo his or her neighbour had to do likewise. Naturally the blazing sun came out as soon as we had packed up to leave for home. Next time we’re taking Bob Leonard’s 1980s-vintage family tent which is in mint condition after many years in storage.

Our activities are pretty much the same from one year to the next (it’s not really what we do that matters but the fact that we do it at all and keep the Waihopai issue in the public eye). On the Saturday morning we marched through Blenheim, starting and finishing at Seymour Square. There was some debate about whether we should march on the road (it certainly can get awkward manoeuvring our big banners, placards and other props, such as coffins, past pedestrians and shop awnings on the footpaths) but ABC felt that if we did, that could provoke a confrontation with the cops, or risk injury from enraged Blenheim motorists, and take the focus away from the issue. We stopped at the Rotunda in the Forum in the centre of town where there the same three speakers as in January 08 – Green MP Keith Locke; John Minto from Global Peace and Justice Auckland and myself, on behalf of ABC.

John Minto Praises The Real Heroes

John Minto was the speaker that the media were keen to report. Earlier in January 2010 he had been the most high profile person arrested at an Auckland protest against an Israeli player taking part in the NZ Tennis Open. The heavy handed cops overreacted, arresting a number of people and confiscating several megaphones. It was the first time that John had been arrested for many years (it is 30 years ago that he was “New Zealand’s most hated man”, as the leader of protests against the racist 1981 Springbok rugby tour, but he has lost none of his ability to get right up the noses of the redneck rump of this country. And he is completely fearless in doing so). So, media coverage before the Waihopai protest highlighted that John was going to be taking part and I had reporters ring me with questions like “will Mr Minto be bringing his megaphone?” (no, ABC supplied our own). The Marlborough Express specially sent a reporter to our camp on the day we arrived, to interview John – not only about his participation in the protest but also for some sort of lifestyle feature.

John knows what buttons to push when he speaks. Just days earlier, NZ papers had splashed huge front page photos of Willie Apiata, the Special Air Service (SAS) soldier who won the Victoria Cross during the Afghanistan War, back in guntoting action on the streets of Kabul. The timing was excellent, because Waihopai is NZ’s biggest contribution to that US-led war, much more so than any token SAS deployment. John said that Apiata was “no hero compared to Sam, Adrian and Peter. The real heroes of Afghanistan are the three Kiwis who popped the dome two years ago. They are real heroes because what they did goes against the mainstream of New Zealand public opinion and it was a truly brave, inspiring and courageous action. Unfortunately Apiata is involved in a very dirty war on behalf of America and the people of Afghanistan don’t want him there. I don’t see him as a hero because people have to take personal responsibility for their actions and I am not sure he realises the real reason why he is there in Afghanistan” (Press, 25/1/10; “Apiata no hero, says activist”). That got them going!

We’ll Keep The Spotlight On Waihopai For As Long As It Takes

We had coffins and crosses and white face masks to represent those killed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which Waihopai helps the Americans and their mates to wage. Thanks to an idea by Joe Hendren (a former CAFCA committee member, now in Auckland), we also had a number of white balloons (to represent the big white domes which cover and conceal the satellite interception dishes) to spell out “Close Waihopai”, and in solidarity with the Domebusters, those mini-domes were popped one by one – Phil Hunnisett wielded his pocket knife very enthusiastically. And, of course, we had that perennial gatecrasher, Uncle Sam (although this time Bob Leonard was taking a break and the Stars and Stripes suit was worn by Alice Leney. I should explain that Alice is a man – it’s a long story, literally, as those who heard him tell it can attest).

On the Saturday afternoon we travelled out to the spybase. Ever since the 2008 dome deflation access to the inner gate, or any other part of the base’s property, has been denied to everyone. The spies got such a bad fright that they’ve been in lockdown ever since. We expected that, it was like a flashback to the late 1990s when that was the status quo. So we gathered at the public, outer, gate, had an open mike with a number of speakers and popped another batch of mini-domes (i.e. white balloons). John Minto spoke again: “New Zealand should be running independent foreign policy. It should be a small country with a big voice but, right now, we’re really speaking through America’s megaphone. It (the base) doesn’t have any real place in New Zealand. It’s not protecting New Zealand or defending democracy or promoting development” (Marlborough Express, 25/1/10, “Waihopai protest challenged. Satellite station ‘keeping Kiwis safe’”, Rachel Young). That headline is referring to the solitary pro-spybase picketer who turned up at the gate with a placard reading ”Waihopai Keeping Decent Kiwis Safe” (I guess that means that us indecent ones are buggered). Naturally the media, particularly TV news crews, homed in on him and headlined his presence. A number of our people talked to him and he didn’t really have anything terribly coherent to say about why he reckoned the spybase is a good thing.

It was a small protest, as it always is, but that is not a disincentive to us. Waihopai protests nearly always get national and local media coverage way out of proportion to their actual size and this one was no exception, with reports in newspapers, radio and TV. What is important is that the protests continue to take place; indeed, in 2010, the whole issue received a huge boost in media coverage and public awareness with the Domebusters’ trial, and acquittal, in Wellington just six weeks later (see below). ABC intends to go back to Blenheim and Waihopai in January 2011, and as long as we are able, we will shine a spotlight on this particular blot on the national landscape, this crime on the national conscience, and we will demand its closure. And, as the Domebusters were acquitted of all charges by the Wellington jury, they are no longer under any legal prohibition from entering Marlborough (that was one of their bail conditions) and we hope that at least some of them can join us.

Domebusters’ Trial: Pivotal Role In Venue Shift

Just weeks after the Waihopai protest I was privileged to be in Wellington as one of the key organisers of the solidarity events accompanying the extraordinary trial and acquittal of the Domebusters. This hasn’t been previously reported in Watchdog, indeed some of it couldn’t be because of court suppression orders (which lapsed at the end of the trial). It was a possibly unique occurrence, so it is worth covering in detail. Adrian Leason, Peter Murnane and Sam Land may be “poor” in the conventional sense of the word but they are billionaires when it comes to having the support of their fellow human beings. In the words of the old song, they definitely never walked alone. From the auspicious day in April 2008 when they popped that Waihopai dome they have had very active and public support from all manner of people. ABC was proud to publicly endorse them and their action from the outset. We donated money to their appeal. At the Blenheim court hearing at which they were granted bail, after five days locked up in the Police Station, they were supported by a crowd of up to 50 people (the papers said 20) organised by ABC (and CAFCA) committee member Lynda Boyd. The crowd included family members of the Domebusters and those who had come especially from Christchurch, Nelson, Motueka and as far north as Auckland, as well as from Blenheim itself. Despite the freezing cold weather, the people rallied with placards, banners and chants on the steps of the court, marched through Blenheim and went out to the base. It was the first time since 1997 that ABC had rallied support for Waihopai protesters appearing in the Blenheim District Court. In Christchurch, there was a support action, organised by women, at the US Air Force base at the airport. Both actions got media coverage (which they otherwise wouldn’t have). In September 2008 Bob Leonard and I went to Blenheim for the depositions hearing, to represent ABC and to join the Ploughshares group who had come down from the North Island with the Domebusters, plus other supporters from Christchurch and elsewhere around the country (see Peace Researcher 37, November 2008, “ABC In Blenheim In Solidarity With Domebusters”, by Murray Horton, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr37-168a.htm).

All of that was just a warm up. There was actually one more Blenheim District Court hearing before the Wellington trial, but nearly everything about it was suppressed until after the trial was over. This was the July 2009 application by the defence for a change of venue from Blenheim to Wellington, on the grounds that they wouldn’t get an unbiased jury in Marlborough. It was heard before Judge SM Harrop, the same judge who was to preside over the Wellington trial. Mike Knowles, the lead defence lawyer, relied heavily on an affidavit sworn by me on behalf of the Anti-Bases Campaign (I swore the affidavit in Christchurch in 2008; I didn’t have to appear at the Blenheim hearing). I simply itemised a long history of official and community Marlborough prejudice against the ABC and others protesting the base, and included evidence of such prejudice (the various instances of which have been reported in Peace Researcher over the years). Judge Harrop duly delivered a 13 page reserved decision in which he wrote:” The evidence of Mr Horton is therefore unchallenged by affidavit evidence from the Crown as to the facts and opinions expressed in it… In the end I have decided that there remains a real risk that, even with appropriate procedures, the risks to a fair trial that I have identified could still remain…I am therefore satisfied that the ends of justice make it expedient that the trial be held at a Court other than Blenheim. I direct that the trial take place in Wellington…”. He suppressed everything about the hearing, except for its outcome (but it can all be made public now that the trial is over).

That was my only personal involvement in the whole two year long legal process but I’m proud that it played a pivotal part in the case. As soon as the acquittal was announced in March 2010, the Marlborough Establishment exploded with rage. District Councillor Gerald Hope (a former Mayor) was quoted as saying: “If I was a juror I would have wanted a conviction” (Press, 19/3/10, “Spy-base verdict irks locals”). This illustrates perfectly why the defence applied for the venue change for the trial. The Marlborough Express editorial (19/3/10; “Verdict puzzles many in Marlborough”) ventured into conspiracy theories: “Palpably it was a very, very smart decision to move this trial to Wellington. The jury would have been middle class, possibly with many civil servants and at a guess, with enough women to bring in such a verdict. Wellington is a liberal city. If it had been moved to Auckland, for argument’s sake, it is doubtful the decision would have been the same…Would people here have listened to the same evidence and argument and come to the same conclusion? The men’s lawyers thought otherwise. There is more than just Cook Strait that separates Marlborough from Wellington”.

The decision that Wellington would be the venue was made in July 2009; as soon as we knew that the trial was set to take place in March 2010 we swung into action to make the most of this unique opportunity to have the attention of the capital city, and that of the rest of the country, focused on the Waihopai spybase. This whole trial saga took up a fair amount of my time as ABC Organiser throughout 2008 and 09, taking up more and more (and more) as the trial loomed larger. I won’t bore you with the details, which at times involved much tearing of hair and grinding of teeth. My job was to ensure that ABC played a full role in the solidarity activities that were to accompany the Wellington trial. It’s not the first time that ABC has organised, from long distance, activities in Wellington. We had most recently done so during Easter 2005 (you can read the details of that in my 2005 Organiser’s Report in Watchdog 110, December 2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/10/08.htm. Poignantly, that was to be our last ever activity with the late Rod Donald). That was a lot of fun but actual Wellingtonians were conspicuous by their absence from all our activities, for whatever reason. I’m pleased to report that was certainly not the case in March 2010, quite the opposite in fact.

Waihopai Display In Wellington City Library

ABC worked in coalition with the Wellington Ploughshares Support Group (which operated with the active backing of Peace Movement Aotearoa [PMA] and its veteran coordinator, Edwina Hughes). ABC itself organised a number of activities. Courtesy of Wellingtonian Mark Roach, an ABC activist since our very founding in the 80s, we got our excellent Waihopai display into the Wellington City Library for two separate stints, totalling three weeks, before and during the trial. It should be noted that this is the only venue we’ve ever had to pay for (by contrast, several other public libraries, including three in Christchurch, have hosted it free of charge). However we considered it money well spent. And the display never fails to get a bite. Just days before the trial started Mark contacted me to say that Library management had told him that maybe it should be removed as being too controversial during the trial (although they hadn’t received any actual complaints about it). Mark used his diplomatic skills to persuade them otherwise and it stayed there, in a prominent location in the main foyer, for its whole booked time. It would have been ironic if Wellington City Library had joined its counterpart in Blenheim in banishing our Waihopai display. My evidence about the Marlborough District Library refusing to have the display in 2005 (because it is “one sided and the base has no right of reply”) formed part of my affidavit to the Blenheim District Court hearing in July 2009 which led to the trial venue being moved to Wellington. I am reliably told that one example alone of Marlborough institutional prejudice against any opposition to the spybase made quite an impression on Judge Harrop, who granted the defence application for the change of venue (the same Judge Harrop who presided over the Wellington trial). Not only did Mark Roach arrange the booking, he also personally transported the display from Christchurch to Wellington, stored it for several months, and then personally delivered it to its next booking, at the National Peace Workshops in Whanganui. For years Mark has either personally transported the display all around the country or let ABC use his courier account to do so, free of charge. Likewise with the Roger Award (the actual trophy) and CAFCA. You’re a champion, Mark.

Public Meeting

ABC also organised a public meeting and several daytime pickets during the first week of the trial. Of these, the public meeting was definitely the highlight. Held on the Wednesday night, it attracted a crowd of well over 100 people, which is by far the biggest public meeting we’ve ever had in Wellington, and probably the biggest Wellington public meeting ever on the issue of Waihopai. It was great to see the hall decorated with ABC banners. Edwina Hughes of PMA facilitated. There were four speakers – myself, on behalf of ABC (you can read an extract from my speech, “Waihopai Must be Closed Now”, in Peace Researcher 40, July 2010, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr40-197a.htm); Green MP Keith Locke, who spoke about the frustrations of trying to find out anything about Waihopai, and spying generally, via the Parliamentary process; Moana Cole from Christchurch, about the Ploughshares movement (Moana, now a lawyer and mother of three, spent a year in a US prison and was deported to NZ after her involvement in a Ploughshares action at a US Air Force base during the buildup to the first Gulf War, 20 years ago; she was also an ABC committee member in the 90s); and Bryan Law, from Australia, who spoke on behalf of Christians Against All Terrorism. He had the full house alternatively aghast and in stitches with his PowerPoint presentation illustrating the US bases in Australia, such as the monstrous Pine Gap spybase, near Alice Springs, and the courageous and inventive tactics of Bryan and his fellow Christian peace activists in penetrating that base and, in 2009, infiltrating an ANZUS military exercise in Queensland (yes, the US and Australia still hold ANZUS exercises, even though there hasn’t been any “NZ” in ANZUS for a quarter of a century). Due to demand from the floor both Adrian Leason and Peter Murnane came to the front and each made an ad lib speech (Sam Land was also there that night but confined his public speaking to the courtroom).

It was a wonderful night and, what’s more, Wellingtonians are very generous – they gave so much to the collection that it went a long way towards covering ABC’s costs, not only for that night but for the week of activities. Special thanks are due to Kane O’Connell, ABC’s Wellington organiser (and a former committee member from his Christchurch years). He did all the vital work in ensuring that the public meeting was the resounding success that it was. What’s more he did it all again the next night when he was responsible for organising the event (different venue, different crowd and different vibe) to announce the winner of the 2009 Roger Award, at which I spoke in my CAFCA capacity. It was quite a week.

A Picket A Day & One Big March

The daily lunchtime pickets targeted Freyberg House, the central city high rise which is the head quarters for the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), which operates Waihopai; and the Embassies or High Commissions of the four other countries that comprise the top secret UKUSA Agreement which, since the 1940s, has governed the collecting and sharing of signals intelligence (SIGINT) and electronic intelligence (ELINT) between the relevant spy agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It is the most important intelligence agreement that NZ is party to and is the reason why Waihopai exists. So we held one picket per day for five consecutive days – they are all within easy walking distance of the District Court and the central business district. Of the five, the one at the GCSB building on the first day attracted the biggest crowd (around 50) and was the only one to get any media coverage. That was because it was on the first day of the trial, which the media attended in force, and it followed just a few hours after the wonderful big march and rally at the District Court Building which marked the start of the trial, with a lot of the Ploughshares supporters keen to make a day of it. Both TV networks included both of those events in their news coverage of the trial that night and highlighted the conspicuous absence of the GCSB from the whole case. The rest of the daily pickets were much smaller (but still very worthwhile) affairs, with usually just a dozen or so participants. At all five of them I spoke on behalf of ABC, sometimes with other speakers, and we held banners and placards and distributed leaflets.

Not only did Mark Roach take charge of ABC’s Waihopai display in Wellington, he made us a special big banner on suitably enormous poles, and he transported and stored several of our own banners and poles (which he later personally delivered back to us in Christchurch). ABC (and CAFCA) committee member Lynda Boyd (who had organised the May 2008 solidarity activities at the Blenheim District Court when the Domebusters appeared at their bail hearing) drove down from Auckland for the week and she and her car played a crucial role in transporting the banners and placards, and me, to and from the Wellington District Court every day. Special thanks are due to Valerie Morse, who got all the placards done, and laid out and printed our leaflets and posters (she also arranged distribution of the latter, and provided us with a megaphone); veteran ABC activist Dick Keller, who handed out the leaflets at every picket; Kane O’Connell who let us use his central city flat to store all ABC’s gear during that week; and John Darroch who came down from Auckland to spend the week photographing the activities. Lynda and I were the key ABC committee activists, responsible for a multitude of different tasks every day and night. Last, but definitely not least, heartfelt thanks to my old friend and colleague, Russell Campbell, who very generously gave me the guest “penthouse” in his Aro Valley home for the week I spent in Wellington. Not only that, he came to one of the lunchtime pickets and to a session of the trial (it wasn’t all work and no play for Russell and I – at night we went to pubs; to a movie; and to the wonderful Ravi Shankar concert, which was part of the International Arts Festival. I had previously seen Shankar play, in London, 26 years ago and was delighted to get the opportunity to do so again. He’s just as good now. Russell, Bob Leonard and I were treated to a private viewing of “Spies And Lies”, which didn’t screen on TV1 primetime until November 2010. It’s based on the book “The Plot To Subvert Wartime New Zealand”, by the late Hugh Price, a very generous and active member of both CAFCA and ABC for many years. You can read Jeremy Agar’s review of the book in PR 35, December 2007, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr35-151b.html). Plus I took the opportunity to check out the Pompeii exhibition at Te Papa; go to a circus; and catch up with my many Wellington friends. It was a bloody good week.

I’ve already mentioned the big march on the Monday morning that kicked off the whole week. This was one activity where ABC only played a supporting role (although I was one of the speakers and all our banners and placards were there). The great majority of the 100+ people on it were Ploughshares supporters who came with Adrian, Peter and Sam (not to mention family members - Sam told me that more than 20 of his family had come with him from Hokianga). The march assembled at the Cenotaph and marched the short distance to the District Court. It was a wonderful occasion of music, song, colour and a tangible feeling of both aroha and power (maybe the power of aroha is the best way to describe it). The purpose was to escort the Domebusters to court and to make it plain for all to see that they had a lot of support. Those supporters maintained a presence on the street outside the court throughout and packed the public gallery of the court room – I bet the court officials had never seen so many kids attend a trial before.

Ploughshares Comes To Wellington

Ploughshares had a whole week of its own activities which, not surprisingly, were infused with religious significance. They set up a shrine (the Wellington City Council wouldn’t let them actually camp there) in a park directly outside the fortress-like US Embassy in Thorndon and that was the hub of their activities for ten days. Meetings and rallies were held there; I was one of the speakers at the biggest one, held the Saturday night before the trial and attended by more than 100 people (Wellington’s notoriously inclement weather was uncharacteristically benign for several consecutive days and nights); communal meals were served there. They held events like a Stations of the Cross tour of Wellington sites with significance for both war and peace; there were special women-only events to mark International Women’s Day, which coincided with the first day of the trial; they held a big party in the central city one night.

To quote from Catholic Worker’s The Common Good (Pentecost 2010; “Waihopai Wrap-up: A Victory for Peacemaking”, Jim Consedine http://www.catholicworker.org.nz/cg/CG53-WaihopaiWrap-up.htm ): “To have up to 100 peacemakers, most of them actively Christian, to witness to a trial involving a confrontation between the non-violent power of Christ and the violence and power of the State lock-stepping in tune with the war plans of the US military and its allies, is a pretty special thing to do. Two days prior to the trial, a shrine featuring icons of saints like Mohandas Gandhi, St Francis, Oscar Romero, Phillip Berrigan, Franz Jägerstätter, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others was established in Katharine Mansfield Park opposite the US Embassy. It remained for ten days. Candles were lit and regular payer was held morning and evening there, concluding with a Taize vigil each evening at dusk. People prayed for the victims of war and the success of the trial.

“One feature made a defining difference to this trial. The presence of the Holy Spirit was palpable. A spirit of family, peaceful cooperation, sharing, feeding of hungry mouths at appointed times, prayer at frequent intervals, the creation of community. Everyone noticed it – and many remarked on it. The presence was reflected in the huge help the Marist priests gave in providing marae-style accommodation to about 40 travellers at Emmaus House near the US Embassy. Many social justice folk from Wellington dropped by to offer support. The wonderful Urban Vision young people of Wellington were everywhere supporting the trial and providing help to the community of the willing. These evangelical Christians certainly have some energy and great generosity of spirit. Catholic Workers and their friends and families came to support three of their number on trial. Collectively they all formed a community of the willing, peacemaking People of God, witnessing in the central city, a stone’s throw from Parliament, the centre of State power. This court verdict was backed by prayer from religious communities, parishes and individuals across the country. In the courtroom, Catholic Worker kuia Aunty Raina Paniora faithfully prayed her rosary, as a spirit of community, peaceful cooperation, sharing, song, humour, prayer and family was formed around the trial. The jury had to be affected by the power of the Spirit present”.

In case you’re wondering – ABC is very definitely a secular organisation, but we have a long history of working with Ploughshares, going back to the 80s, indeed going back to before there was an ABC. We don’t share their religious beliefs and I’m sure we could find plenty of things of things to argue about if we were so inclined but why would we want to when we have such a strong and active partnership with these wonderful radical Christian peace activists, sharing the common goal of closing the Waihopai spybase and cutting the ties that continue to bind NZ to the US war machine. That week in Wellington was a personal highlight of the year for me, and was the most exhilarating and productive burst of activity by ABC in many a long year. ABC is eternally indebted to the Domebusters for risking their liberty (indeed they risked more than that when they cut the electric fence at the base) for the cause of shutting down this abomination, this stain on the collective conscience of all New Zealanders. They took a huge gamble – and they won (at least insofar as they were fully vindicated by the jury; the spybase, of course, is still very much there and functional).

Civil Damages Trial

I won’t go into details of the trial itself (which I attended daily throughout my week in Wellington, the longest time I’ve ever spent in court. I had to come home before it finished, as it actually ran for eight days. ABC’s Bob Leonard had to stay there until the bitter end as he was slated to be called as an expert witness for the defence but the prosecution objected to that and the judge ruled that he could not be called. In the end he wasn’t needed). You can read very detailed accounts of the trial in Peace Researcher 40, July 2010, specifically the articles: “Vindicated! Waihopai Domebusters Acquitted Of All Charges” by Murray Horton http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr40-198.htm; “’Come Help Us, Stop War, Stop More Killing’ Domebusters’ Defence Lawyer’s Closing Address” by Mike Knowles http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr40-196.htm: and “Domebusters’ Trial Suppressed Evidence. Bob Leonard’s ‘Inadmissible’ Defence Affidavit” http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr40-192b.htm.

I strongly recommend that you read my PR article (details above) for full coverage of the trial, acquittal and ensuing public, media and political reaction (hysteria is putting it mildly). A lot of the ignorance displayed after the jury verdict was quite wilful, arising from the fact the media only turned up to cover the first and last days of an eight day trial, ignoring all the evidence presented. I did a lot of media interviews with angry and uninformed journalists after the trial (“where is this Waihopai? What’s it all about?” was one fellow’s opening line). And, of course, we will get to do it all over again. The Government reluctantly announced that it couldn’t appeal as it had no legal grounds on which to do so; but it has plunged ahead with suing the three Domebusters personally for the $1.2 million cost of replacing the dome that they deflated (right down to the cost of the workers’ pies and beer). Plus it is changing the law to remove the legal ground (claim of right) which they successfully used to defend themselves and win their stunning acquittal. The Government and its biggest spy agency are showing themselves to be not only very poor losers but also fools. By keeping up the legal persecution of the Domebusters they guarantee that the spotlight will stay firmly fixed on the top secret Waihopai spybase – something with which both the Domebusters and ABC couldn’t be happier. ABC has actively backed the Domebusters from the outset, back in 08, and has continued to work with them since the trial. I chaired a small Christchurch public meeting addressed by Peter Murnane in August 2010; and Bob Leonard and I are actively involved in helping the defence for the forthcoming civil damages trial (which will also be in Wellington, at a date yet to be fixed). Bring it on!

Peace Researcher

I edit Peace Researcher and I reckon it’s a pretty good little newsletter (although smaller than Watchdog and with a much smaller readership, it is produced using more sophisticated technology – a fact which brings its own unique pitfalls, some of which have slipped past my proofreading eye at the very last stage before it goes to the printer). It looks a million bucks and that is down to the meticulous care taken by my wife Becky who is the Layout Editor. Working on the January 2010 issue her laptop crashed and the whole thing was lost. Undaunted, she started from scratch and laid out the whole 46 pages again, working straight through until 5.a.m. to get it done. That is dedication. PR covers topics that don’t appear in Watchdog and I appreciate the chance to write about the sort of subjects that originally got me involved in political activism (as a child of the 60s it was foreign policy issues that motivated me then; an interest in, and understanding of, economics came later). So in the two 2010 PR issues I’ve been able to write about subjects such as the war in Afghanistan; the contracting out of war to mercenaries; and the murderous activities of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. Other subjects unique to PR have included an analysis of Hillary Clinton’s career by Doug Craig. And, of course, the whole Waihopai Domebusters’ saga, from deflation to acquittal, has been covered by PR since 2008 in the most detailed fashion of any publication. It is the journal of record on that subject. There are regular writers – Jeremy Agar is also PR’s Reviews Editor, as well as Watchdog's and he reviews books and films specifically for PR (there is some overlap between reviews for both publications); Bob Leonard, who was PR’s Editor and Co-Editor for nearly 20 years, still writes for it; Dennis Small, who is well known to Watchdog readers (he has an article in this issue) is writing a couple of his blockbuster articles for the next PR.

I commit to getting out two issues per year and it is a struggle. I’ve got out two in this calendar year but the first of those was actually supposed to appear in December 2009 – it was too late for the printers before they closed for Christmas, so it appeared in the first work week of January. The July issue, at 56 pages, was the biggest ever (hard to believe that once upon a time Watchdog used to be that size. It seems a distant memory now). Special thanks are due to ABC’s Webmaster Yani Johanson who manages to fit in uploading the online edition with his exhausting round of duties as a Christchurch City Councillor (we’re pleased to say that he was re-elected with a greatly increased majority in the October 2010 local body elections).

Preserving Old PRs & Videos

ABC is in good shape and has had a very active year, as I’ve already detailed. The committee has grown by one in the past year – veteran peace activist Doug Craig (who started going to Waihopai protests in the 80s) has joined and become a highly valued member. The core of the committee is myself, Bob Leonard, Roby Dann and Doug. Dan Rae gets along when he can, which isn’t often as he has become a father for the second time and has his hands full; we see Yani once in a blue moon. Lynda Boyd is on both the ABC and CAFCA committees but has lived in Auckland for several years (she’s working for a union there now) and attends meetings of one or both committees whenever she’s back in her hometown.

Lynda’s major contribution to ABC in 2010 was to get all the historic issues of Peace Researcher uploaded to a new site http://www.historicalpeaceresearcher.blogspot.com/, thus repeating what she had already done for the historic Watchdogs (once again I was responsible for getting them scanned, although it was nothing like on the same scale as having all the old Watchdogs scanned). They cover the years 1983-2000 inclusive (when PR went online at the ABC site http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/prfront.html). One bonus is that, unlike the issues online at the actual PR site, these old ones come complete with illustrations. Readability quality varies, affected both by the scans having to be reduced to make the individual issues a manageable size, and their sheer age (the very first three issues were A4 sheets folded in half, to make an A5 newsletter, which causes those online versions to look a bit odd). A total of 54 historic issues are online at this new site.

This is actually the second series of PR, the first one of 34 issues spanned 1983-93 inclusive; this one started in 1994. Now that the whole set has been uploaded, it can be seen as a testament to the wonderful work of Bob Leonard, who was Co-Editor from 1983-2002 inclusive. Throughout those 20 years there were a number of other Co-Editors – Keith Burgess, Dennis Small, Warren Thomson and myself – working with Bob. I have been the Editor since 2003 (Bob is still very much involved, as a writer). A perusal of the full set shows just what a wealth of information and analysis has been published in PR for nearly 30 years.

Lynda’s other “historic” suggestion, at ABC’s annual strategy meeting, was to get all, or at least some of, our old videotapes transferred to DVD (as video cassette recorders and videotapes join the pile of obsolete technology). This is a work in progress and we owe a big vote of thanks to Wellington filmmaker Errol Wright who agreed to take it on, as a labour of love. The first project was “Base Deception” a short 1990s’ film actually made for ABC by Christchurch filmmaker Sam Miller, about the US military base at Christchurch Airport (you can read about “Base Deception” in Watchdog 79, August 1995, http://historicalwatchdog.blogspot.com/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-august-1995.html). Before we could begin, I had to locate Sam, with whom we’d had no dealings since the 90s, and then he had to locate his master tapes, from which Errol recut the film before transferring it to DVD. So, one down, and quite a lot more to go. Next in line to be transferred are a number of lengthy tapes of 1990s’ Waihopai spybase protests tapes, some shot by Wellington’s Vanguard Films. It is a time consuming but absolutely fascinating trip down memory lane.

Philippine Speaking Tour

The other group for whom I work, but in an unpaid capacity, is the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA). For a chunk of 2009 and all of 2010 there was only one PSNA project which consumed more and more of my time and that was organising the national speaking tour by Luis Jalandoni and his wife Coni Ledesma (the sixth such speaking tour I’ve organised since 1995 – plus a couple on behalf of ABC, one of which also involved a Filipina). This is not the place for a detailed report on Luis and Coni’s October/November 2010 tour, firstly because this Report of mine is already even longer than usual, in the biggest ever issue of Watchdog; and secondly, because it is not CAFCA (or ABC) business. Having said that I will make some brief observations about it. I found it immensely satisfying to accomplish such a tour by two top leaders of the National Democratic Front (NDF), the coalition which comprises the political wing of the underground armed struggle in the Philippines, one which has gone on continuously for more than 40 years. Luis Jalandoni, who is the NDF’s International Representative and Chairman of its Peace Negotiations Panel during the long running and oft-interrupted peace talks with the Philippines government (facilitated by Norway), had previously toured NZ, in 1987, and I was among those who had heard him speak in Christchurch. Although that was the year that I first visited the Philippines, I was not yet involved in the solidarity movement. So I was delighted to be able to organise his return visit, along with his wife (the tour was collectively organised by PSNA, Auckland Philippines Solidarity and Wellington Kiwi Pinoy). It’s not cheap bringing two people all the way from The Netherlands (where Luis and Coni have lived in exile since the mid 1970s) and we had to fund raise for our biggest ever budget - $10,000 – to enable it to happen. I’m pleased to report that we exceeded that target. I haven’t tallied up the costs yet but there were some unbudgeted ones. For example, the damage and disruption caused by the Christchurch earthquake meant that, for the first time, the PSNA committee couldn’t offer guests private accommodation in our home town. We paid to put them up in a hotel for three nights (ironically, Becky and I had only been in their hotel room for a few minutes with them, after arriving from the airport, when a major aftershock rocked the inner city high rise building, knocking out the lifts. Luis and Coni were delighted to have experienced an authentic Christchurch earthquake).

Unlike PSNA’s last Filipino speaker (Amirah Ali Lidasan, a young Muslim woman, in 2007) I did not accompany them around the country, which is another reason why I can’t, yet, provide a detailed report. But Leigh Cookson, Bob Leonard and I did accompany them, by car, to the Waihopai spy base, which they were very interested to see for themselves, and to declare their support for the Domebusters’ 2008 dome deflation when asked by the Marlborough Express (they also got to meet two of the three Domebusters, in the North Island). The Express was one of only two mainstream papers to cover their visit (the New Plymouth Daily News being the other) and audience sizes were small, reflecting the fact that the Philippines is well beneath the radar for the NZ media, let alone the public. But we did score a coup when one of our co-organisers got Luis a 20 minute interview with Chris Laidlaw on his highly popular Radio NZ Sunday Morning programme, which has a very big national listenership. Luis and Coni visited Christchurch, Blenheim, Wellington, New Plymouth, Parihaka (a place which had made such a big impression on Luis in 1987), Hamilton, Whangarei and Auckland. They got to meet several politicians, including Green MP, Keith Locke who, in his previous role as Philippines Solidarity’s National Coordinator, had organised Luis’ 1987 tour and accompanied him on it. This being New Zealand I got them an impromptu audience with the previous Mayor of Christchurch when I was greeted by Garry Moore in the middle of an central city pedestrian crossing whilst walking them back to their hotel. They had a most entertaining footpath chat with Garry for several minutes after getting over their surprise that this seemingly anonymous bearded fellow walking the streets alone had been the Mayor of the country’s second biggest city for nine years. They were wonderful company and they not only found their NZ visit extremely worthwhile, but also highly enjoyable. After leaving NZ, Luis e-mailed me to thank PSNA “for the very well prepared tour we had of Aotearoa. We consider it a very successful tour with the development of further solidarity between the people of Aotearoa and the Filipino people, with concrete proposals and ideas of developing very important solidarity”.

It was particularly satisfying for me, because after more than a year of preparation it suddenly looked like it wouldn’t happen when, just a fortnight before their arrival, the Government added the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army (two of the constituent groups of the National Democratic Front) to NZ’s list of international terrorist organisations – years after the various other Western countries had followed the US in doing so. The NDF is not, and never has been, on the “terrorism” list in any country, including NZ. But we wouldn’t know until they arrived at Auckland Airport whether they would be let in (as Dutch passport holders they didn’t need to apply for NZ visas). We arranged to have both a lawyer and an MP on standby in case they were needed. As it happened they had no hassles with Immigration but Customs spent so long searching their bags that they missed their flight to Christchurch (fortunately they caught the next one, at no extra cost). An Australian tour had been hastily arranged to follow their NZ one and they needed visas for that – the Aussies immediately issued one for Coni but sat on Luis’ application for three weeks, while intense lobbying went on to grant him entry (the Attorney General was being advised by the Director of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation), finally succeeding after he’d been in NZ for more than a week and not knowing whether his next destination would be Sydney or Hong Kong. Ironically, when they did fly to Sydney, they were just waved through by both Immigration and Customs. A least likely pair of “terrorists” is harder to imagine (they are both in the 70s; in their previous life, before they joined the revolution, he was a priest and she was a nun, with 25 years in the clergy between them). They were a pleasure to be with, and it was one of the most satisfying speaking tours that I’ve coordinated. But it left no time to do any other PSNA work (there was no 2010 issue of the newsletter Kapatiran, which I edit). Fortunately Auckland Philippines Solidarity and Migrante Aotearoa (which organises Philippine migrant workers in NZ) are now very active and kept up a steady stream of press releases to the Philippine media throughout the year, not only on the Jalandoni tour but also on the never ending stream of human rights violations in the Philippines. A lot of these were issued in my name (although not written by me but by Amie Dural, an invaluable addition to the ranks of Filipino political activists now living in Auckland), meaning that despite having virtually zero luck in getting any NZ media coverage of the Jalandoni tour and Philippine issues in general, I’ve made several appearances in the Philippine media in the past year, most recently in November.

Yes, The Earth Did Move For Me – Thousands Of Times

Personally, 2010 was an interesting year (as in the old Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times”). Along with the rest of Christchurch the 7.1 earthquake on September 4th, not to mention the several thousand aftershocks, gave us a jolt in the very literal sense of the word. I’m no stranger to powerful earthquakes, starting with the little ripper in Inangahua in 1968 (that got the family up and under door frames in double quick time). I have experienced them in a variety of settings, including while sitting upstairs at a packed concert; in a nearly deserted cinema; and, most memorably, whilst having a whiskey with my Dear Old Dad (I thought the blind old bugger was pouring quadruples instead of doubles but we both soon worked out that it wasn’t the booze we were feeling and ended up sharing a doorframe in his flat). Becky and I have also experienced several whilst in bed and that’s where we were when this one woke us up. We stayed there until the house stopped shaking (so if we were going to die, it would have been there and then). There was no sense of panic, because as I’ve already detailed in this report about its impact on the CAFCA office, we never lost power, phone, Internet and only ran out of water for a short time. We just turned on the lights, the radio, TV and computer to see what was going on. I’ve already mentioned that we had no contents damage (one unsecured and overloaded bookcase dumped its contents on the lounge floor). The most exciting thing to happen that morning was the pre-dawn arrival of refugees from Cashmere, who had fled to their mates in the flatlands. This was our old friend Warren Thomson (the legendary Waihopai Warren, so named by ABC because of his numerous arrests at spybase protests in the 80s and 90s) who returned to Christchurch in 2010 after 13 years teaching English in Bangkok, accompanied by his lovely Thai wife, Noi. She had never experienced an earthquake before and definitely didn’t get the joke, so Becky set about comforting her and cooking us all pancakes for breakfast. So that’s how we spent the time of the earthquake morning whilst waiting for the sun to come up – having a pyjama party (I think Warren was the only one dressed). It was a surreal day watching it all on TV, knowing that what we were seeing was walking distance from our place; fielding anxious calls from friends elsewhere in the country and overseas; worrying about the extent of the damage to this most beautiful of cities (the best way to describe what parts of it look like now is by comparing it to a beautiful woman who has had a number of teeth kicked out).

There was no disruption to daily life in the following weeks and months, apart from our niece Katharine having to sleep in the dining room for a week as a precaution (her bedroom is dominated by an old disused fireplace and brick chimney). The thousands of aftershocks have tested our nerves and I didn’t get much sleep for the first week (waking up a couple of times with a pounding heart). The plain but sturdy old house has been given a bloody good workout by the whole business. Just days after the quake and the day after the first big aftershock we got several layers of loosened bricks removed from our chimney as a precaution (it is still fully functional, but we’re not allowed to use it as our logburner is no longer compliant with clean air regulations. It is now draped with a most fetching Tory-blue tarpaulin, which has become the latest must-have addition to thousands of Christchurch houses). The months of jolts have caused an increasingly large number of hairline cracks in our interior plaster walls and ceilings and in the exterior roughcast and foundations; a couple of windows have cracked; the floor is noticeably more bouncy; and there is an old disconnected pipe (gas or water) banging around inside the wall of one room. We filed our Earthquake Commission claim on the Monday after the quake (it reads: “Chimney/Fireplace etc” – it’s the “etc” that we’re more interested in). Our house was assessed in December, so now we’re waiting to be told the cost of the damage. When it will be repaired is another story. The assessor was a retired Sydney cop (“there’s 150 of us over here on this”) and we had a good old yarn – although I thought it not politic to fondly reminisce about the time I stomped flat a cop’s hat during a particularly boisterous 1970s’ march up the middle of Sydney’s main street (it might have been his hat). And I am deeply thankful that I no longer live in Avonside, where I used to be a tenant, decades ago, and where I would have bought a house if I could have afforded that suburb (I had to settle for Addington which, with the benefit of hindsight, was a wise move).

Life Goes On

The aftershocks have struck at all hours of the days and night, without warning – I’ve been in the office more than once when it has been very violently shaken; I’ve been asleep in bed; on the toilet; in a high rise hotel room with Filipino visitors; even standing in an MP’s driveway after speaking to a Green Party branch meeting at his house. Two of my closest colleagues have told me that they’ve been “traumatised” by the whole experience; by contrast it has not greatly bothered me, in fact I’ve become rather blasé. Becky complained that when she woke me during one aftershock which was shaking the bedroom I told her to be quiet and went back to sleep. Perhaps I’ve got nerves of steel. My philosophy has been that life and work goes on. Within 30 minutes of the most violent aftershock (which knocked out power to the central city – but not our place – and brought thousands of workers pouring out of their buildings) I biked into the central city to keep a restaurant lunch appointment with one of the Waihopai Domebusters and their lawyer. It was a highly enjoyable occasion. I am fully aware of the fact that I mightn’t be so cool, calm and collected if our house had been badly damaged or rendered uninhabitable; and my memories of the quake wouldn’t be so benign if we’d been floundering around in the dark with stuff falling and smashing around us (as happened to so many others). The three of us living at our place know only too well how lucky we were. To me, the best thing that has come out of the whole experience is that, despite decades of the Rogernauts trying to turn us into a dog eat dog society, community spirit is as strong as ever. People still care about each other and will work together to help each other (that’s not to say that there aren’t still plenty of dogs out there. My PSNA committee colleague had his badly damaged Avonside home burgled during the couple of days it was unoccupied). It’s provided a guaranteed conversation opener with total strangers of all social classes (“how’s your house? Was that a 4.8 or a 5.1 last night?”) and made people look at their city in a whole different way. For instance, Becky became an eagle eyed spotter of munted chimneys. I nominate liquefaction as the Word of 2010.

Kids & Cops

Prior to this the other 2010 earthquake was of the two legged variety. Becky brought several members of her family over from the Philippines to attend the University of Canterbury graduation of our oldest niece Katharine, who has lived with us since 2005 (I didn’t attend my own graduation, nearly 40 years ago, regarding it as feudal mumbo jumbo and, having attended the 2010 version, my opinion hasn’t changed). Accommodating seven people for three months involved all sorts of domestic upheaval, with people moving rooms, and necessitating the use of the lounge couch and a rental caravan on the front lawn. I found myself the sole male in a house with six females, ranging in age from 76 to five (I started to feel positively patriarchal). It was the latter to whom I was referring as the two legged earthquake, namely Mori, our youngest niece and Katharine’s baby sister. I don’t have kids, by deliberate choice, and friends with children know that I have a well-founded reputation as being a grumpy old bugger around kids. So here I was, facing three months in close quarters with a kid who, if tantrum throwing was an Olympic sport, would be a gold medallist. We eyed each other up warily for a couple of days and then she realised, to her undisguised delight, that the funny, hairy, wrinkled old white man with whom she was sharing a house was even more childish than her. Whammo, that was it! She attached herself to me like a limpet, we got on like a house on fire, and I became her constant companion, playmate, and punching bag at any hour of the day and night. “Uncle Murray, look at me!” resounded through the house innumerable times every day. It was a decidedly unique experience for me, even including having to wear something pink for her fifth birthday party (another first for the house) – she’s one of those little girls into princesses and everything pink. It was the only time that the CAFCA office chair has ever been used as a merry go round. She was quite something, that kid, and I look forward to embarrassing her when she’s an ever so cool teenage girl by reminding her what she was like was a four and five year old. That family visit was the occasion of my only health problem worth reporting, namely I fell flat on my face whilst out on a neighbourhood walk with the in-laws (my poor mother-in-law thought I’d had a heart attack), buggering one leg for about a week. That just goes to prove the old adage that no man is ever too old to avoid making a fool of himself while showing off in front of girls. But I am glad that they’d all gone home long before the earthquake – we’d never have all fitted under a doorframe (maybe not even under the table).

As I’ve said in several previous Reports, my ancient past always catches up with me in one way or another. This year it led to me being contacted by a former cop (a high profile one too, who’s featured in two recent primetime TV series about the Police). He’s now doing a thesis about bikie gangs and wanted information about a 1969 anti-Vietnam War protest in which Christchurch’s first such gang dipped its toe into politics and tried to disrupt the rally (held right opposite the central Police Station). Bad move, as they encountered an immediate and brutally effective response from Lyttelton seamen. When the melee ended, the bikies had to carry away one of their own, the splendidly named Filthy Phil. Seamen 1, bikies 0. The latter never came near a demo again. I was able to give the ex-cop a little bit of information about it, for which he was duly grateful (particularly as he’d never previously heard of the incident, which was front page headlines at the time).

Another Full On Year Ahead

I look forward to 2011 as yet another action packed year. I will be undertaking my first CAFCA election year speaking tour since 02 and already it has a packed itinerary, because the initial response to it has been so positive from members and supporters wanting to be involved. The election campaign itself will be fascinating, because foreign “investment’”, specifically land sales to foreigners, is already shaping up as a major issue, with Labour having finally taken some tentative steps to differentiate itself from National on this issue (and from its own appalling past). It will be up to the NZ Not For Sale Campaign, and CAFCA, to get the issue of “free” trade onto the election agenda. During the 08 election campaign National promised not to sell any publicly owned assets in its first term – meaning that if it is re-elected (and there has never been a single term National government) all bets are off on the privatisation issue. So, foreign investment, free trade and privatisation – there’s three meaty subjects for starters for the MPs and candidates to be getting their teeth into, with CAFCA playing an active role to ensure that our side of the argument is well represented, and I am more optimistic than for many years that our side of the argument might actually prevail, at least in some of the battles if not the war itself. Capitalism is still very much under the weather of the global financial crisis, with workers and the middle class being made to pay for the crimes of the thieves and banksters who got us into this mess. National is well along the path of its tried and true practices of bashing unions, workers and beneficiaries. CAFCA certainly won’t be short of things to do. ABC will have another busy year focusing on the Waihopai spybase (and maybe the Domebusters’ Trial: The Sequel), as National bends over backwards to prove that NZ is the most loyal of American satellites, whether in Afghanistan or in American-dominated free trade agreements such as the Trans Pacific Partnership. So it’s going to be yet another full on year. I wouldn’t have it any other way. As my Dear Old Mum used to say: “You’re a long time dead”, so make the most of now.


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Foreign Control Watchdog, P O Box 2258, Christchurch, New Zealand/Aotearoa. August 2008.

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