National Speaking Tour: my major project in 2014, in both of my CAFCA and Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) capacities, was my national speaking tour, entitled “Who’s Running The Show? And In Whose Interests?” This took place between March and July, in three separate sections (plus there also came to be a fourth section, devoted to speaking at various venues around Christchurch). You can read my speech at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/docs/speaking-tour-speech-notes-2014.doc and, if you’re so inclined, you can watch a video of me delivering it, at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/murray-horton-speaking-tour-2014.html. You can read my full tour report in Watchdog 137 (December 2014, “On The Road”, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/37/03.html).

Committee: Bill Rosenberg, Brian Turner, Colleen Hughes, James Ayers, Jeremy Agar (Chairperson), John Ring, Lynda Boyd, Murray Horton (Secretary/Organiser), and Paul Piesse. We started 2014 with a Committee of ten but it dropped to nine as of the Annual General Meeting (in September) when Warren Brewer resigned on an indefinite leave of absence (meaning that he may come back onto it in the future). The AGM unanimously recorded its thanks to Warren, with a round of applause. He had been on the Committee since 2009.

Warren confirmed that he will still administer the Watchblog, Keep Our Assets Canterbury, Roger Award People’s Choice and New Zealand Not For Sale Websites, plus CAFCA’s Twitter account (not to mention helping with Watchdog mailouts). Even reduced by one the Committee is still the biggest it’s ever been and is going very well. Bill Rosenberg, in Wellington, is our “distance” member but remains actively involved in all major decision making (he has been a Committee member continuously since our foundation 40 years ago).

Website: Bill Rosenberg was the only Webmaster that CAFCA had ever had. He set up our Website in the 1990s and ran it for the best part of 20 years, until 2014 (Watchdog has always had a separate site, set up and run for more than a decade by Greg Waite, and now by Cass Daley). In 2009 Bill moved to Wellington after a lifetime in Christchurch, to become the Economist and Policy Director of the NZ Council of Trade Unions (CTU), which marked the end of his long stretch as Chairperson (succeeded by Jeremy Agar). Bill had made clear to us for several years that he had little or no time to devote to the Website.

I’m pleased to report that, in 2014, we found a replacement, a volunteer no less. Chris Oakley has a lengthy background in information technology (IT) and Website work in his native London (marriage to a Kiwi, our very own Melanie Oakley, née Thomson, brought him to Ashburton in 2012). He hit the ground running as Webmaster. On his own initiative he introduced some welcome upgrades (for example, we were able to have our first ever online Roger Award nomination form. And people attending CAFCA’s 40th anniversary celebration in 2015 could register online). He reformatted the Homepage to make it much more attractive and user friendly. And he started the daunting task of reformatting every page on the site (all 375 of them). That is a very labour intensive task and will take Chris a long time, fitted in around the demands of work and family. This is all much appreciated, because our Website is a vital resource and the first point of contact with CAFCA for many people, including the media. So, welcome aboard Chris, you’re doing a great job.

Other Means Of Electronic Communication: Warren Brewer does an excellent job at maintaining the Watchblog site (which is separate from the CAFCA one) and he also administers our Twitter account. Colleen Hughes administers our Facebook group, which has around 650 members (which is more than our “real” membership) but, of course, they don’t pay membership subs. The issue is to get any kind of cross-over from “virtual” to “real” membership. We’re far from the only group facing this issue. I personally am not on Facebook and have no plans to be, but can see that it has some advantages – for instance, it proved to be the only way to track down and identify one or two people who made online deposits into our bank account without giving us any contact details (finding one such person via Facebook led directly to that person becoming a local organiser for one of the meetings on my speaking tour). And Warren did an excellent job of running the Facebook side of the publicity for my speaking tour.

Membership: It is hovering at 440+, which is a bit higher than when I wrote my previous annual Report. Then it was in the 430s. But this is being written before the annual purge of non-payers, which will drop it back to around 410. After the 2014 purge the number dropped from 430+ to just below 400, the lowest it has been in many years. So, in the intervening 12 months we got it back up to 440+, which meant that we not only regained the number lost but added some more. But many of those new members (or old ones rejoining) were gained from my speaking tour, which is not an annual event. The overall membership trend is stable to declining.

We lose members for a variety of reasons – death, old age, financial reasons, or simply deciding not to renew. Gaining new members is a permanent project. In 2013 we targeted churches; in 2014 we targeted unions, which proved to be productive in terms of money and publicity for my speaking tour, but not in terms of picking up workers or union activists as members. We have always emphasised paying members – if we had retained all those who stopped paying, we could claim a “membership” of thousands. We reach a much bigger audience than our actual membership.

Finances: between them, our operating cheque account and three term deposits hold $58, 000, in round figures (and this is after spending thousands on my speaking tour). This is more than we had before the tour, so we continue to be in a very healthy financial situation. For example, we are able to fund major projects like the speaking tour out of our own resources (despite not asking anyone for money for it we received $1,500 in unsolicited donations). The tour also generated around $1,350 in income from Watchdog sales and donations, not including subs paid by new members and rejoining old ones. Special mention is due for our Chairperson, Jeremy Agar, who voluntarily drove me (a non-driver) several thousand kms around the country for six weeks and personally paid all car-related expenses while declining any reimbursement for things like food – effectively a personal donation of thousands of dollars.

The speaking tour was not our only major cost in 2014 – we routinely pay a goodly amount towards the annual event to announce the winner/s of the Roger Award. In 2014 that meant paying for the Chief Judge’s return fare from Auckland to Nelson, plus several hundred dollars for food and entertainment. CAFCA also pays a lot of the running costs of Keep Our Assets Canterbury, which is not an organisation in its own right and which, at the time of writing, is just in the process of opening its own bank account and launching an appeal to raise its own money. CAFCA has paid for KOA expenses like copying and room hire for meetings. In terms of long term fundraising, Brian Turner took responsibility for a project to ask members and supporters to include either CAFCA and/or the Organiser Account in their wills (we have had the odd, very welcome, bequest in the past). You can find the details of this on our Website at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/will.html.

Organiser Account: special thanks to Warren Brewer, who was in charge of this, and to James Ayers, who is now in charge. As noted above, Warren has taken an indefinite leave of absence from the Committee. That includes resigning as CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account Treasurer at the 2014 AGM and being replaced by James. I would like to reiterate my heartfelt thanks to Warren, who replaced long-time Organiser Treasurer Bob Leonard when the February 2011 killer quake made Bob and his wife Barbara permanent quake refugees in Wellington. Bob never saw Christchurch or his home again, dying in August 2013. Warren took over at very short notice and in unprecedented circumstances. He was hampered by a lack of basic data (rendered inaccessible in Bob’s home by earthquake damage and by Bob’s abrupt departure).Throughout 2011 Warren had to spend a considerable amount of time on Organiser Account business, getting signatories replaced and reconstructing data (we weren’t able to get anything out of Bob’s quake-buggered house until February 2013). And he instituted a number of welcome improvements – for instance, I now get paid by a fortnightly automatic payment into my bank account rather than by a fortnightly cheque issued at a meeting, which was the practice for the previous 20 years. Many thanks mate. And thanks to James for taking it on. Likewise he has also instituted improvements. His background is in accountancy, so all the figures now go onto a spreadsheet, making it all so much easier to track and analyse.

The Account is actually up on what it was at the time of my previous Report (despite my pay having been increased), with 60+ regular pledgers and not far short of $30, 000 in the bank (one account is used to pay me; the other one is a term deposit). Recruiting new pledgers is a permanent project; many of the existing ones are old or getting that way (indeed, a few have died); some have been doing it since the Account started in 1991. In 2013 we launched a project to attract more pledgers and donors in order to be able to increase the Organiser’s pay rate to that set by the Living Wage Campaign (currently $19.25 per hour). This became a major project in its own right and I’m pleased to report that, as of April 2015, my pay rate has been increased to that (having gone up from $18.25 per hour). The challenge from now on is whether the Organiser Account can afford to keep paying me the Living Wage rate. Any further increase will be dependent on the health of the Organiser Account.

We have attracted some new pledgers, plus a number of existing ones have increased their pledges. Once again I would like to thank the incredibly generous members and supporters who pledge or donate to the Organiser Account (donations range right up to thousands at a time). Without you I literally could not do my job. I want to single out the late John Case (who died in June 2014 and whose obituary is in Watchdog 137, December 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/37/14.html). Uniquely, John is posthumously pledging to the Organiser Account on a fortnightly basis.

Watchdog: I am the Editor; it is our flagship, our “face”, our voice to our members and the world at large. It looks the best it ever has. Thanks to Layout Editor Leigh Cookson and cover artist Ian Dalziel. Thanks to my Committee colleagues, Jeremy Agar (Reviews Editor) and James Ayers (who writes up the Overseas Investment Office Decisions). Thanks to our regular writers such as John Minto and the prolific Dennis Small. The variety and quality of writers is very high; some of them are people with a national profile (and none of them get paid).Thanks to Cass Daley who is in charge of the Watchdog Website (our online-only readers receive each issue as a PDF but the actual online edition on the Website is a plain, text-only affair. We get free Web hosting for both Watchdog and CAFCA but the trade-off is that there is a size restriction on the total amount of cyberspace we can have free of charge). Courtesy of Warren Brewer you can read online the most recent issues as PDFs, on Watchblog.

We don’t have a free hand with Watchdog, we have to work within a printer’s size limit of 100 pages. How it is printed means that Leigh has to lay to it out in multiples of four pages (as opposed to two), and this means that a number of graphics have to be routinely left out of every issue, because they can’t be fitted into that four page format. We had another discussion in 2014 about the look of it, specifically whether we should continue to include endnotes and references in the hard copy edition. The decision reached was “yes, we should”, because Watchdog is a journal of record.

Postage costs keep going up and up. Only a few years ago it cost $1 to send a Watchdog; now it’s closer to $3 (NZ Post most recently increased the price in July 2014, so we stockpiled more postage-paid envelopes, to lock in the old price until 2015. But, as of this issue, we now have to pay the increased price). Thus far we have absorbed all these relentless postage increases – it has been many years since CAFCA last increased our sub. The alternative would be to go to an online-only publication, which would instantly eliminate postage and printing costs, but that is not a path we are prepared to go down. It may happen but not in the foreseeable future.

Watchdog is, above all else, a political publication and one rule we ensure that it rigidly adheres to is to reflect CAFCA’s political independence. We endorse no party, Parliamentary or otherwise, and reserve the right to criticise all of them (and do so; for the most recent example, see my analysis of the 2014 election in Watchdog 137, December 2014, “What’s That Terrible Smell?”, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/37/01.html). So, operating on this principle, we declined to publish an article by one of our regular writers which promoted one particular party contesting the election (we had done the same in the 2011 election year; different regular writer, but promoting the same party). The result this time was that person resigned as a regular writer but we parted on friendly terms. I should stress, by the way, that decisions such as this – to decline to publish an article on political grounds – are made collectively, not individually by me as Editor. In both cases (2011 & 14) the decisions were unanimous.

Watchdog is appreciated as a political publication of an unmistakeable type. Well-known mainstream columnist Chris Trotter attended one of the Auckland meetings on my national speaking tour. He devoted one of his weekly Press columns to it (13/5/14; “Horton’s Latter-Day Pilgrim’s Progress”. It is not one of the Trotter columns online at the Stuff site but you can read it online, titled “New Zealand’s Progressive Nationalism”, at Trotter’s own Bowalley Road blog, at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.co.nz/2014/05/new-zealands-progressive-nationalism.html). Trotter played a very active role in that meeting, asking me plenty of questions, and we had a good discussion. At the conclusion he picked up a copy of the (April) Watchdog and, brandishing it aloft, declaimed words to the effect of: “20 years ago there were half a dozen publications like this. Now it’s the last one left”. He recommended Watchdog to those in the audience. He wasn’t finished. After having left, he stuck his head back in the door and loudly declared: “And I’m going to rejoin!” (He has, too. Welcome back, Chris, even though we do now and again “have a pop” [his words] at him too). I personally think that Watchdog being the sole survivor of the old school Left publications is a big reason why we have no trouble getting people, including big names, to write for us for no pay.

Roger Award: see Watchdog 136, September 2014, “Roger Award Event: Nelson Raises The Bar (In A Bar”) http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/36/02.html for my report on that. For the 2014 Roger Award Paul Maunder returned as both a judge and Chief Judge, replacing Wayne Hope in the latter role. David Small was the only surviving judge from the 2013 bench – our two new judges were Dean Parker and Dennis Maga, and Sue Bradford returned (our principle of independence from all political parties also applies to those whom we invite to be Roger Award judges. We didn’t first invite Sue until after she had resigned as a Green MP several years ago; her subsequent role in Mana made her ineligible again; and we didn’t re-invite her until after she had quit Mana in 2014). Paul Maunder has told us that he is not available to be a 2015 judge; the other four are available, if asked (we don’t organise the next Roger Award until later in the year).

Thanks to the judges, the Report writers, the event organisers (in 2014 it was held in Nelson, the first time it’s been held outside the four main centres), and the groups which help us publicise it and distribute the nomination forms. We run the online Roger Award People’s Choice poll, administered by Warren Brewer. The winner of that is sometimes different to the official winner selected by the judges, just to make it interesting. The event to announce the 2014 winner/s was held in Christchurch for the first time since 2012. It was held on May Day, for obvious reasons, and as an integral part of CAFCA’s 40th anniversary celebration event, which was held the next day at the same venue. It was organised by a committee comprising CAFCA’s Lynda Boyd, along with Leigh Cookson and Gillian Southey.

Media Profile: we have a high reactive media profile (by which I mean that the media contacts us, rather than us proactively contacting them). In the past year I have done numerous media interviews, including with major outlets including Radio NZ, commercial radio networks, major daily papers and community radio. Both Bill and I were interviewed for a planned cover story in a national magazine, which was then spiked on legal grounds (it was nothing to do with what either Bill or I said).

This was in addition to the press releases that we proactively put out about things such as the Roger Award (which generates media coverage in itself); and in addition to the whole raft of media interviews that I did, in both islands, in the course of my national speaking tour. The tour also inspired media coverage that did not involve me being interviewed, ranging from major mainstream papers (Chris Trotter’s Press column, which I’ve already mentioned) to local papers and union papers. Bill is also regularly sought out by the media in his CAFCA capacity (he has a very high media profile in his CTU capacity).

Relations With Political Parties: as I have already said (see above, under Watchdog), CAFCA has always been fiercely independent and unaffiliated to any party, whether Parliamentary or extra-Parliamentary.  We reserve the right to criticise all of them, and do so. That doesn’t stop us productively working with political parties. See the next item on the Keep Our Assets Canterbury network. In previous years the Greens have regularly helped to distribute Roger Award nomination forms but they don’t do that in election years, which is fair enough. Grassroots Green activists (not the Party as such) played an important role in my speaking tour, organising my meetings in several places and hosting me and Jeremy (one such host is an MP). We regularly work with people from Mana, Labour, the Democrats and Alliance.

Keep Our Assets Canterbury (KOA): along with my speaking tour this was our major project for 2014. I am the Convenor and a number of other Committee members are also very actively involved (or former Committee members, in the case of Warren Brewer). Our work focused on, and will continue to focus on, the move to partly sell off some of the Christchurch City Council’s extensive portfolio of publicly-owned assets, to help pay for a beat up of a “shortfall” in finances, needed to pay for the city’s share of the quake rebuild cost share agreement that the previous Council had been bullied into by a Government that has a clear ideological agenda to sell public assets.

Prior to the 2013 local body election KOA asked all candidates to sign a Public Ownership Pledge, and The People’s Choice (TPC; basically the local body version of the Labour Party) signed up to it en masse, all six of their Councillors and all of their Community Board members. They were happy to accept Public Asset Defender certificates from us at a public event in February 2014. KOA met with TPC Councillors on several occasions later in the year to discuss the subject and we reminded them of their commitment to the Pledge.

But, when the heat came on, at the very end of the year, TPC buckled and agreed to the disaster capitalism agenda (“shock doctrine”, as Naomi Klein dubbed it when the same thing happened to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005), driven by the Government, Big Business, the Mayor, Councillor Raf Manji (the power behind the throne) and the transnational corporate media beating the tired old “There Is No Alternative” drum. Fortunately TPC came to its senses in April 2015 and launched its Common Sense Plan, which provides an alternative to asset sales. The Council’s plan to sell assets has gone to public “consultation” in 2015 and is KOA’s major campaign (and a major project for CAFCA).

KOA did other things, as well, in the past year – we organised a seminar on public private partnerships (PPPs), at which Bill Rosenberg spoke; we produced leaflets which were distributed to people attending general election candidates’ meetings and a big protest march against the TPPA; Ron Currie made us an eyecatching white elephant (bearing a sign reading “No to Govt white elephants”, it was the star of our picket of the Key/Cunliffe Leaders’ Debate during the 2014 election campaign); Warren Brewer and Steve Howard (with help from me and others) created an excellent Powerpoint which KOA uses, with a script, when we speak to groups in the city urging them to see the danger to not only public ownership but to local democracy and Christchurch’s control over its own destiny. For example, we have spoken to seven of Christchurch’s eight Community Boards. Warren also administers KOA’s Website and Facebook page.

KOA is where CAFCA and Warren work very closely together, now that he has gone from the CAFCA Committee. And this is the campaign in which we work most closely with the Greens (until their building was closed for quake repairs post-election they had hosted all KOA meetings for two years), and it is a most productive partnership. Particular thanks to the Greens’ Grace Taylor and Claire Waghorn (sadly, Claire resigned from KOA in the course of the year). It is the only campaign on which CAFCA works directly with the Labour Party. I’ve already mentioned that several CAFCA Committee members are regularly and very actively involved with KOA (for example, Jeremy Agar wrote a KOA article for the Press). Thanks are also due to Steve Howard, Denis O’Connor (a CAFCA Committee member himself decades ago) and Mike Newlove, for their tireless KOA work.

Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA): this is an extract from my speaking tour report. “And I also had an accompanying speaker, which was not part of the original plan, but it worked out very well. Greg Rzesniowiecki (due to his unpronounceable Polish surname he is universally known as Greg Fullmoon – which is his e-mail address) had wanted to do a joint speaking tour. We said no. But we invited him to speak from the floor at the end of each meeting. Which he did, from Takaka onwards, entirely at his own expense, and travelling independently of us, living in his van, the trusty Tinkerbell (which provided my transport to and from a couple of my Christchurch meetings. It is an “interesting” experience to be told that the brakes have failed as we headed toward a red light on the motorway). It actually worked really well and his set speech about what people could practically do about the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (i.e. make the TPPA an issue for their local Council) was a great complement to my speech which, quite deliberately, did not propose any specific campaigns or solutions (I focused on the broad sweep approach, the “big picture” when it came to policies). Greg got a really positive response from audiences who basically got two speakers for the price of one. Greg tirelessly promoted the tour, helped us in numerous ways, and organised and publicised the final five Christchurch meetings (North New Brighton, Lyttelton, Heathcote, Fendalton and Papanui. He personally paid for some of those venues’ hire costs). He added a whole extra dimension to the tour. As a direct result of his involvement in the tour he has now become a regular Watchdog writer about the TPPA local government campaign”.

We gave due prominence to the TPPA in the handouts we took on the tour, specifically a set of ten differently coloured A5 flyers about ten different aspects of it. This was a brilliant idea (big thanks to Jeremy for editing them) and hugely popular. They went by the thousands. They provided people with an organising tool e.g. at the Kaitaia meeting, when people asked what they could do, I came up with the idea of putting the Pharmac leaflet into doctors’ waiting rooms and distributing them at chemists’ shops. We donated the leftovers to Greg Fullmoon for his endless road trip on the TPPA local government campaign.

Apart from that, CAFCA has played its part in the local and national campaign against the TPPA. We took part in the Christchurch marches during the March and November 2014 National Days of Action (I was one of the speakers at the March rally) and the March 2015 one, which was the biggest so far. We donated money to the national campaign and were among the publicly listed sponsors of the November 2014 and March 2015 Days of Action. We still have the New Zealand Not For Sale Website, administered by the ubiquitous Warren Brewer. The national campaign against the TPPA is in very good hands, under the leadership of It’s Our Future, and has made great progress. So much so that the November 2014 and March 2015 Days of Action marches and rallies around the country got major mainstream media coverage and constituted the biggest marches against the TPPA anywhere in the world, to date.

Annual Strategy Meeting: this is a very useful exercise for the Committee and enables us to set goals and projects for the year ahead.

40th Anniversary Celebration: this took place on May 2, combined with the Roger Award event, which was held the night before (May Day) at the same venue. Both were among our major projects for 2015. Full reports on both will follow the events. We last had an anniversary do (back in 2000) for our 25th, and really we should wait until our 50th, but we’re all getting old and mightn’t be around by then. So we decided to make hay while the Sun shines and grow old disgracefully (and any other appropriate clichés that come to mind).

By pure coincidence, in 2014, I was contacted out of the blue by an Australian expatriate filmmaker in the US regarding a never finished film of the 1974 Long March (by bus, I might add) across Australia to a former US military base. A number of New Zealanders, including me, took part in this and it provided the inspiration for the 1975 South Island Resistance Ride, the event which led to the creation of what was first called CAFCINZ (now CAFCA). We put a small sum into the film and screened it at our 40th (having already done so at our 2014 AGM). Dealing with the Aussie expat also led me to getting back in touch with an old Australian friend (a veteran of both the Long March and the Resistance Ride), with whom I’d lost all contact since the 80s.

Quake Effects On Committee Members: they are ongoing and, it goes without saying, very disruptive. The homes of both Jeremy Agar and James Ayers were repaired in 2014. In Jeremy’s case he cleverly got it done while he and I were on the road for four weeks on the North Island leg of my speaking tour. But he wasn’t quite clever enough – the work wasn’t finished when he got home and he had to drive on straight down south to his newly built crib in the Catlins and spend several wintry weeks there before his Lyttelton home was habitable again. In 2015 Colleen Hughes is out of her home for many weeks while it is getting repaired; and James and his family had to get out again for a short period for his repairs to be actually finished.

My Anti-Bases Campaign Committee colleagues are also affected – Robyn Dann has been told that her historic Woolston riverside worker’s cottage has to be demolished and a new home built on the same land. Warren Thomson’s hillside home was repaired in 2012 but heavy winter rain in 2013 wrecked his already quake-damaged drive, meaning that it has been declared potentially fatal for anyone attempting to drive up or down it. He is still waiting to see what will be done to fix it, while the quotes to do so have skyrocketed astronomically. The quake-buggered home of the late Bob Leonard sold at auction in April 2015, another example of Christchurch’s thriving “as is where is” real estate market, our very own contribution to capitalism. The house had been unoccupied since Bob and Barbara had to flee the city on the day of the February 2011 killer quake. Bob died in Wellington in 2013, having never seen his home, or Christchurch, again. Barbara can now get on with her life in Wellington, having cut her last tie to Christchurch.

In 2014 the family of Paul Watson, from the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa Committee, finally vacated their badly damaged home in a red zoned Avonside street and, after months in a rental, moved into their newly built home in a different suburb on the outskirts of the city. All of the houses in their old street are being, or already have been, demolished (including the last house I ever rented, before I bought my home 33 years ago in what is now the very much gentrified and booming suburb of Addington). Even I have an earthquake story, for the first time in several years. In 2015, completely out of the blue, Becky and I received an Earthquake Commission cheque for a few hundred dollars. Our last contact with EQC was in 2012 and I had to consult our voluminous EQC claim file to see what this was about. When they fixed our place in winter 2011 they forgot a few exterior and interior cracks and told us we would have to file a fresh claim, which we did. Rather than fix them, EQC obviously decided to give us cash. But what EQC giveth, EQC also taketh away – that money might go some way to cancel out the excess that we (and all other Canterbury home repair claimants) now have to pay EQC.

Anti-Bases Campaign: my national speaking tour was on behalf of both CAFCA and ABC, so that was as much a major project for ABC as it was for CAFCA. I gave equal prominence in my speech to each group’s issues. I co-edit Peace Researcher, with Warren Thomson. ABC’s major project in any year is the Waihopai spy base protest. See my report on the 2014 one in PR 47, August 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/47/pr47-002.html. It got extremely good media coverage, which can all be seen at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/waihopai2014/waihopai14.html. Waihopai protests now seem to be the only times at which I get interviewed for TV (because ABC’s issue is more visual than CAFCA’s). There was another Waihopai spy base protest in January 2015. ABC had been actively involved in the massive national protests against the GCSB Act in 2013 – there was a follow up to that with a 2014 Christchurch public meeting, at which I was one of the speakers. 

In 2013 we had held a Christchurch memorial meeting for Bob Leonard, our veteran friend and colleague, who died in Wellington that year. In 2014, ABC organised (and Bob’s widow Barbara paid for) a memorial plaque to be installed on a bench in the park near their (since sold) Christchurch home of 29 years.  ABC, and particularly Bob, had been heavily involved with the case of the Domebusters, the three Christian peace activists who had deflated one of the domes at the Waihopai spy base in 2008. Sadly Bob didn’t live long enough to see their total vindication in 2014 when the Government dropped its pointlessly vindictive civil damages claim against the three of them personally. The Government had already lost in the criminal courts when a Wellington jury acquitted the Domebusters in 2010. ABC had campaigned tirelessly on that issue for six years and we made sure that we marked the final vindication with a celebration.

It was entirely appropriate that my North Island speaking tour ended in the Otaki barn of Domebuster Adi Leason, who was both my organiser and host there. It was a fantastic way to finish – it was the biggest crowd of the whole tour by far (double the numbers I got in big cities like Auckland and Wellington), and it had a completely unique feel to it. We ended with a bang (and his involvement in the speaking tour arose from an invitation he issued to me at the Waihopai protest camp site. That’s how these things sometime happen and I’m very pleased they do).

Philippines Solidarity Network Of Aotearoa: I work for this on a voluntary basis. It has basically just been ticking over for several years. But later in 2015 PSNA will be involved in another national speaking tour, by a representative of the victims of 2013’s Typhoon Haiyan, the biggest storm to reach land in recorded history (which led to unprecedented media coverage in New Zealand). Disaster capitalism (or “shock doctrine” as Naomi Klein memorably christened it) has been readily evident in this country since the 2010/11 Canterbury and Christchurch earthquakes. PSNA has organised several national speaking tours before, starting in 1995, and most recently in 2010. This time PSNA will not take the lead but will help other groups to organise the tour.

Priorities: major campaign – CAFCA’s involvement in KOA’s opposition to asset sales in the context of post-quake disaster capitalism in Christchurch; major events thus far in 2015 - Roger Award winner/s announcement & CAFCA’s 40th anniversary celebration. Other issues include the TPPA; public private partnerships (PPPs); privatisation; corporate welfare & tax dodging; rural land sales; the merger of CAFCA and ABC issues. Ongoing projects include getting our message out to more people (including building our social media presence) and recruiting new and, hopefully younger, members. There is plenty to keep us busy for the next 40 years.

Death In The Family: Beastly Horton. Bugger it, I’m going to exercise editorial privilege here and pay tribute to a little mate whose death was quite the worst thing that happened to Becky and me in 2014. This is a subject that is usually never mentioned in these august pages – namely the bond between humans and the animals with whom we share our lives and homes, and who are so much more than “pets”. Here is what I wrote in my 2011 Organiser’s Report: “…a starving pregnant stray cat turned up, desperately yowling. I resisted her blandishments (having sworn off cats after having outlived a whole family of them over a quarter of a century) until she gave birth in our grapevine. The Cats Protection League asked us to feed them until they could come and pick them all up; so we started but the two kittens died within 24 hours (having to bury them was heartbreaking); the killer quake struck a couple of days later; and the Cats Protection League had more immediate priorities in their eastern suburbs’ HQ. So, in the midst of all that chaos and desperate scrabble for survival, we discovered that we were cat owners again (if one can ever be said to “own” a cat; quite the reverse, I think). She was a great comfort to us in the worst of times. Thousands of aftershocks and snowstorms haven’t got rid of her, so she’s here for the duration now. She’s distinctly beastly, so that’s what we named her. Naturally, we are now inseparable”.

Alas, “the duration” didn’t turn out to be very long – 3½ years to be precise -  courtesy of two invading dogs that chased, caught and killed her on our back lawn one sunny September morning (it was our wedding anniversary, which meant that our plans for that day were ruined). We’ve never seen those dogs before or since, it remains an unsolved murder. I was out at the time but, unfortunately, Becky was home, witnessed it and was, understandably, extremely upset. It is ironic that a cat that had survived starvation and been with us through so much - quakes, quake repairs, snowstorms, floods, hail, heat,  etc, etc – should have met such a brutal and sudden death in her own home.

You might think this is all very sad but what’s it got to do with CAFCA? Well, she played a vital role as a companion (more a friend than a companion, actually) during a very stressful few years for not only us but everyone in Christchurch. As far as we were concerned she was the best thing to come out of the quakes. She was a real morale booster and stress reliever. We both think of her and miss her every day. And she was well known to the CAFCA crew (former Committee member Warren Brewer was particularly fond of her), who all last saw her at a Watchdog mailout just days before her death.

Of all the cats I’ve “owned” Beastly was the friendliest, the sweetest, the most affectionate and the most playful. She was also the one with the shortest life, and the only one to have met such a gruesome death. All the others died of natural causes and/or old age. She would sleep for hours on top of a filing cabinet next to where I was working on this computer. She used to follow me everywhere, inside and out, including right into a neighbour’s home (she was such a frequent visitor there that they have a photo of her on their wall); she sat on my knee at every opportunity, including the night before her untimely death; and always, always, wanted to play – in the house, on the lawn, up trees, everywhere. I was happy to oblige. She reminded us what great fun it is to have a cat around. Farewell little mate, you didn’t deserve to go so soon and certainly not like that (and, yes, I am aware of the irony of this appearing in a publication called Watchdog).Will we get another cat? Let’s see what (or, more correctly, who) turns up.