Speech to CAFCA’s 40th anniversary event, Christchurch, 2/5/15. This is not exactly as I delivered it. I have fleshed out parts of it and added both text and references, to convert it from a speech to an article, and making it a bit longer in the process.

This is quite a daunting topic, to condense 40 years of CAFCA’s history into one, hopefully concise yet comprehensive, speech. I have resisted the temptation to read you 40 years of Committee meeting minutes. I can’t hope to do it justice, so what I propose is to simply pick one or two key events and/or themes from each of the four decades of our existence (so far). Before I start I should acknowledge my sources – the most important one is Watchdog, which is very good at recording the issue of foreign control over those 40 years but not necessarily what CAFCA was actually doing at any given time. My other source concentrates a lot more on that aspect, so I must acknowledge the tireless work of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS) for spying on us for a quarter of a century and keeping a written record about all manner of things about which we had long forgotten.

I decided, why should I bother with trying to remember my own life and CAFCA’s history when I already pay taxes to fund a secret agency of the State which will do all that for us (albeit with its own very biased, not to mention ludicrous, conclusions)? See my article “SIS Spied On CAFCA For Quarter Of A Century”, in Watchdog 120, May 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/20/06.htm, for details. The SIS file on CAFCA is unique in that neither we, nor the historian writing a book on a century of State surveillance in NZ, are aware of any other organisation having received the SIS file on it (as opposed to individuals within it – I, and numerous other CAFCA people, am also in that category). And it is a goldmine in that it is relatively unexpurgated, unlike subsequently released files - such as mine - which are heavily redacted.

The first couple of things to point out are that we didn’t start out under the name of CAFCA, and that we didn’t arrive out of thin air. So some context needs to be briefly set surrounding our creation. CAFCA was born out of the tumult of the 1960s’ protest movement, which spilled over into the 70s and thence became rather more structured and specialised. I started off in a group called the Progressive Youth Movement (PYM) which is long gone but which still fascinates historians today (two of whom have contacted me in recent months for interviews about PYM. Plus a 17 year old Whitianga schoolgirl who, as part of a History project, wanted to know why I protested against the Vietnam War). PYM was an important seedbed from which some, but not all, of CAFCA’s founders came. For example, Bill Rosenberg was not in PYM. Bill and I first met in 1972 in the build up to that year’s famous protest at the then US Air Force observatory atop Mount John in the Mackenzie Country. I actually met CAFCA founder John Christie while we were both in the process of wrecking the Mt John access road (but that’s another story).

The Start

So the massive movement against the Vietnam War diversified into a whole different range of specialties, such as the nuclear free campaign. What became CAFCA started off as an anti-bases campaign (long before there was an organisation actually called the Anti-Bases Campaign). There was a series of ad hoc committees which organised a protest at each of the US military facilities at Woodbourne, Mt John and Harewood (the latter is still there at Christchurch Airport, albeit of much less military and intelligence significance.) As recently as Watchdog 135 (April 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/35/09.html) Maire Leadbeater wrote up this very early history in an excellent article entitled “Our History As An Anti-Bases Campaign: From CAFMANZ To CAFCINZ To CAFCA (& Then To ABC)”. To quote from it:

“CAFCA’s origins go back to a feisty group called Campaign Against Foreign Military Activities in New Zealand (CAFMANZ) formed in 1972….In March 1973 CAFMANZ organised the first national demonstration to promote the need to demilitarise Harewood and to expose the US Navy/Air Force facilities at the airport and the US communications facilities at nearby RNZAF Weedons…CAFMANZ activists were at the forefront of a national campaign to expose US military funding of university research. Owen Wilkes and other CAFMANZ activists also lent support to the Australian Stop Omega campaign and, in 1974, 11 members of CAFMANZ took part in a three week-long Long March against the US North West Cape naval communications station at the westernmost point of mainland Australia (the historic 25 minute film of the Long March, which was only completed in 2014 with some financial assistance from CAFCA, can be viewed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTP145MPoIg It was screened at the conclusion of the speeches at the event to celebrate our 40th anniversary. MH).

“At the beginning of 1975 CAFMANZ embarked on an alternative to the Long March - a Resistance Ride around the South Island calling at the US military bases and also stopping at other places of political and environmental significance such as the site of the proposed Clyde Dam. The Ride was shadowed by two policemen – dubbed Tom and Jerry – and a police mobile command post. CAFMANZ became CAFCINZ - Campaign Against Foreign Control In New Zealand - around the time of the Resistance Ride. From now on the activists would also be concerned about threats to New Zealand sovereignty from foreign economic control as well as military intrusion. A major focus for CAFCINZ in its early years was the aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point, and its owner Comalco’s ‘corporate welfare’ power deal with the Government” (and it still is a major focus).

So, very briefly, that’s how we started. Maire mentions the late Owen Wilkes and he deserves special mention. He appears right throughout the SIS file on CAFCA. For example, the first SIS memo to the US Central Intelligence Agency about us, in 1975 (yes, we were the subject of memos to the CIA) says: “Owen R. Wilkes is the main organiser and activist in both CAFMANZ and CAFCINZ”. That wasn’t true but he was certainly a leading figure in those early days. As far as the good old spies were concerned, he was the mastermind. My obituary of Owen is in Watchdog 109, August 2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/09/09.htm.

Economic Imperialism Our New Focus

The difference between CAFCINZ and what came before is that we now devoted a lot of attention to the economic manifestations of foreign control; we targeted what were then called multinational corporations (which we now call transnationals). In short, we broadened our definition of imperialism. Maire mentioned the Comalco smelter (we also campaigned hard in those early years against the proposal to export coal from Mount Davy on the West Coast. The June 1975 Mt Davy issue of Watchdog is online at http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2010/01/mt-davy-issue-june-1975.html). To quote from the SIS file: “CAFCINZ, at least in Christchurch and the South Island, is regarded in some quarters as being a knowledgeable body on the subject of Comalco and competent in expressing its views. It is also somewhat significant that when matters relating to Comalco and Mt Davy coal and other such disputes are in issue attention is focused by the news media on statements from CAFCINZ, and their spokesmen are not infrequently interviewed on radio and television. Many of the principals in the organisation are young men of intelligence and education with high academic degrees in the sciences” (an accompanying report listed those academic qualifications).  

Mention of West Coast issues reminds me that, in those very early years, we had a West Coast branch, revolving around the self-described “cocky rooster”, Peter Neame. We devoted plenty of attention to Coast and Buller issues in those days. I can remember a trip we did to actual or potential mine sites, where we were threatened with road blockades by the mine workers’ union but welcomed with open arms by Federated Farmers. Our relationship with unions and workers has always been a variable one. We have a long history of close working relationships with several unions; we have also been ostracised by workers and their representatives in industries ranging from transnational banks to the Bluff smelter (where workers hung a giant banner saying “Piss Off” on one early CAFCINZ trip there). I worked for years in the Railways and tried to advance CAFCINZ’s agenda vis a vis Buller coal exports, but got nowhere. The common denominator in all cases is the threat, real or imagined, that we and what we stand for, represent to  the jobs of workers who work for transnationals, directly or indirectly (such as bank workers, smelter workers, coal train drivers). And. also in the very early days, there was a Wellington CAFCINZ, which features prominently in the SIS file. It undertook to organise a 1976 North Island Resistance Ride, which was called off not long before it was supposed to happen, and the Wellington branch atrophied and died over the next few years. We are quite happy to remain a Christchurch-based group without actual branches. Indeed there are sound reasons for that.

A few years later, in the early 80s, CAFCINZ was all over the news when we secured a large number of internal documents from Comalco’s Australian head office that proved to be politically explosive.  That was when John Christie played his most prominent role as CAFCINZ spokesperson. And we published “Power Junky”, our wonderful Comalco comic (written by Pete Lusk and illustrated by Ron Currie). It’s online now, immortalised in cyberspace (http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/01/comalco-comic.html).

We remain very closely interested in Rio Tinto, the owner of what used to be called Comalco, and its Bluff smelter. The only speaking tour we have ever organised by an overseas speaker was that by Englishman Roger Moody in 1990 – Roger was, and is, a world expert on Rio Tinto and mining transnationals in general (the report on his NZ tour is in Watchdog 66, March 1991, http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-march-1991.html ). In more recent years Rio Tinto has featured prominently in the Roger Award – it has both won it and regularly been a finalist.

1970s: Protest Group

The other major theme to note about CAFCINZ in the 70s was that we were very much a protest group. We regularly organised demos, ones at which some of our members got arrested. We were of interest to the Police. We had a Committee member who arrived from nowhere, offered to take responsibility of our membership list (we declined), expressed no political views, and duly disappeared back to nowhere – only to reappear later as a long serving detective. And we were of great interest to the spies.

When the SIS released our file to us, the then Director, Warren Tucker, wrote to me: “The demonstrations against PBEC in May 1977 and the allegations of sabotage (oil tankers being shot at) didn’t do CAFCINZ’s PR image with the Police and NZSIS much good in the early days but it is probably fair to say that there might have been less subsequent NZSIS interest in CAFCINZ if it had not continued with protests against US bases and visiting naval vessels and taken up an active ‘abolish the SIS’ stance” (the Pacific Basin Economic Council [PBEC] was a smaller version of what is now the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation [APEC]). Our protest against the PBEC meeting in Christchurch is reported in the June 1977 Watchdog http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-june-1977.html.

The SIS report on the PBEC protest said: “While the presence of up to 200 demonstrators was thought possible it was considered more likely that about 100-140 would turn up. The event proved the forecast wrong. Also wrong was the assessment that the demonstration would consist only of banners, placards, chanting and the like. The violence of the demonstrators also surprised the Police”. It is worth noting that the report lists: ”Source: Christchurch Police”  and that has been underlined, by hand, four times. A separate SIS report on that protest said: “The Police are of the opinion that CAFCINZ (Christchurch) has the potential to use violence and will probably do so in the future”. In the interests of balance, it needs to be pointed out that the violence of the cops also surprised the demonstrators. And, nearly 40 years later, the world is still waiting for CAFCA to “use violence”.

In our first decade it was common for CAFCINZ to organise protests and pickets, including against the SIS, hardly surprising for a protest group which grew directly out of the turbulence of the late 60s and early 70s, and these were all obsessively reported upon by SIS informers and agents. For instance, in alliance with the then Seamen’s Union, we used to regularly picket the ships taking West Coast coal to Asia. And on one memorable occasion in Lyttelton we picketed a Soviet fishing boat, which was operating in NZ waters on a joint venture. This definitely threw the SIS. What were we up to? Weren’t we Communists and, ipso facto, supporters of the then Soviet Union? Several reports were devoted to analysing what our possible motives might have been. One suggestion was that we were out to win the support of “middle New Zealand” and, bugger me days, the SIS concluded that we were succeeding. Groups such as commercial fishermen’s associations came out in support of our action.

But the SIS concluded that there was a bright side to our unexpected deviation from the Communist Conspiracy, namely that we would piss off the pro-Soviet Socialist Unity Party and “split the Left”. Sure enough, the file gleefully includes aggrieved letters to the Press from SUP loyalists attacking our action and defending the presence of Soviet fishing boats in NZ waters. I do need to explain Tucker’s rather alarming quote about “shooting at oil tankers”, which conjures up images of some sort of al Qaeda suicide bomber attack on a gigantic ship bearing vital fuel supplies to little old NZ. The reality was rather more mundane. There is material in the CAFCA file relating to the mysterious 1970s’ incident of a couple of bullet holes being found in a Christchurch petrol tanker (i.e. a truck) owned by an American oil transnational and the suggestion that this was some sort of protest against NZ port visits by US nuclear warships during the Muldoon era. Neither I nor CAFCA had anything to do with any such incident nor do we know anything about it to this day (nobody was ever charged in connection with it).

The fact that we campaigned, long and hard, against the SIS put CAFCA on its literal enemies list. This was made extremely explicit in a letter from Tucker to me personally (in connection with the separate SIS file on me): “You ask if you are still ‘a person of interest’ to the NZSIS. The answer is that you are only of interest to us as long as you are interested in us. You have campaigned publicly for the abolition of this Service but you have never encouraged unlawful activity such as sabotage, subversion or terrorism…”. So that’s a relief that campaigning publicly for the abolition of the SIS is not equated with sabotage, subversion or terrorism.

1980s: Name Change

We started the 80s still as an anti-bases group. This started to change when Bob and Barbara Leonard arrived as Reagan refugees from the US in the early 80s and Bob volunteered to take on the Harewood campaign as his speciality. Thus was born Citizens for the Demilitarisation of Harewood, and the start of my 30 year working relationship and friendship with Bob, which ended only with his death in 2013 (my obituary of Bob is in Watchdog 134, January 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/34/13.html. For Ronald Reagan’s obituary, see “Fuck Ronald Reagan”, by Bill Weinberg, in Watchdog 106, August 2004, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/06/17.htm). But CAFCINZ was still the go to group about other bases. For example, we organised two 1980s’ protests at the former US Naval Observatory atop Black Birch in Marlborough. However, the revelation that a top secret spy base was going to be built at Waihopai led to the birth of the Anti-Bases Campaign in 1987, and CAFCA has left the bases issue to ABC ever since (of course, we actively support it with money and publicity).

That wasn’t to say that we abandoned our interest in the military and intelligence aspects of foreign control. Far from it – for example we spent several years in the 80s trying, ultimately unsuccessfully, to organise a speaking tour of New Zealand (and Australia) by the late Philip Agee, the former CIA spy turned whistleblower, political activist and author. He was the Edward Snowden of his era (my obituary of Agee is in Watchdog 117, April 2008, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/17/07.htm).Watchdog ran heaps of military and intelligence stuff throughout that decade – possibly my most poignant inquiry ever from a journalist was a phone call from Auckland on behalf of two Special Air Service (SAS) widows who were asking us how their husbands had died in the crash of an American plane during a military exercise in the Philippines. The NZ military and Government had told them nothing but CAFCINZ had researched it, using the US Freedom of Information Act.

To quote Maire Leadbeater’s 2014 Watchdog article again: “CAFCINZ became CAFCA at its 1986 Annual General Meeting. The change to the use of Aotearoa for the country name was uncontroversial – most peace and justice groups made this decision around this time – as a way to acknowledge Maori rights and tino rangatiratanga. CAFCINZ members were asked three months ahead of time to choose between three alternatives all including ‘Aotearoa’– the other two contenders were: Campaign for an Independent Aotearoa (CIA) and the Aotearoa Independence Movement (AIM)”. Personally, I would have loved us to have been renamed as CIA but I was outvoted. Which brings me to another point – what are our politics? Well, in the 80s, we put it to a vote among our members – should we remain an anti-imperialist group or broaden our scope to also become an anti-capitalist one? Members were evenly, and passionately, split on the issue, so the status quo has prevailed ever since – we remain an anti-imperialist group.

Maire mentions our AGM, which has been a feature of our existence from the outset. Here’s an extract from the report of an SIS informer among our members about our 1978 AGM: “Horton was one of the main speakers during the meeting and appeared to ‘like the sound of his own voice’. His mode of speech was coarse throughout, and he continually used obscene language whilst speaking, despite the presence of (our then female Chairperson*). Horton interjected continually whilst other speakers had the floor, and at one point spoke out strongly against both capitalism and imperialism, stating that ‘if you support one you end up with the other’”. *My obituary of our “then female Chairperson”, Lynn Burke, is in Watchdog 132, May 2013, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/32/11.html. The SIS report on that AGM said: “She (Lynn Burke) appeared to be the only one of the organisation with any sense of purpose and the whole organisation appears to be winding down to become a ‘paper group’ which will surface sporadically on less frequent occasions”. How’s that for totally misplaced wishful thinking on behalf of the SIS! Sorry, boys, we’re still going strong and are in better shape than ever (that same report says “the bank balance was stated to be $150…”. We’re definitely doing better than that now).

Long Campaigns

The 1980s also illustrated two other major features of CAFCA – we run long campaigns and we are very persistent and patient. That decade marked the beginning of our dealings with what was then called the Overseas Investment Commission (now the Overseas Investment Office). Bill had the brilliantly simple idea that, as it is subject to the Official Information Act (which only became law in the 80s), it should be obliged to regularly release its Decisions. From 1985 we fought a five year battle to even get that right (the Commission took us to court, then chickened out, had to pay us costs and started releasing the information to us). For a number of years we were the only source in the country for that material and we actually on-sold it, for a nominal sum, to media outlets. Not just to the media – in the 90s we were asked to sell our entire database of Overseas Investment Commission material to New Zealand First for Winston Peters’ use during the build up to an election campaign. We did, once again for a purely nominal amount.

We believed then, and continue to believe, that material should be freely available to all. It is now. Bill wrote it up and analysed it, for Watchdog and our Website, for over 20 years. Now that job is done by James Ayers. And it is still a very current and ongoing campaign – only a fortnight before CAFCA’s 40th anniversary celebration James and I met an Ombudsman, at his request, to discuss our routine appeals of all material withheld from public release by the Overseas Investment Office. And in case you’re wondering, we made it very public in the 90s, and haven’t changed our opinion since, that we wouldn’t trust Winston Peters as far as we could throw him (for example, see my cover article “Winston’s Petered Out” in Watchdog 84, May 1997, http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-may-1997.html).

1985 was also when we first asked the SIS for information it held on us. This is the reply we got from its then Director, the improbably named John Smith: “I regret that I cannot meet the request, I neither confirm nor deny the existence of any information concerning the above organisation (CAFCINZ). This answer is given pursuant to Section 10 of the Official Information Act 1982. I am convinced that meeting any such request is likely to damage security by making the Service vulnerable to a systematic collection plan. Even the supply of apparently innocuous or negative information could place the integrity and efficacy of the Service at risk by revealing the extent and quality of its activities”. That particular campaign took a quarter of a century to come to fruition, when our (heavily redacted) SIS file was released to us and we then gleefully set about encouraging everyone else named in it to apply for their own files and thus engage in a “systematic collection plan”. They did, too.

Both of those long running campaigns also illustrate another key feature of CAFCA – we always have generated media coverage vastly disproportionate to our actual size. Our battle to get the material from the then Overseas Investment Commission led to big coverage, including several Listener features; we still get regular coverage today via our expertise with Overseas Investment Office material, particularly around the perennial hot button issue of rural land sales to foreigners; we had not yet decided to go public about the release of our SIS file when the Press got wind of it, begged for an exclusive, and plastered Bill and I across the front page. That kicked off a whole lot of other media coverage. I just mention those as examples, spanning the decades. CAFCA has a good media profile.

1990s: Roger Award

The 1990s had a number of distinctive features. In 1991 we gained our first, and thus far only, paid worker – namely me. I am the Organiser for both CAFCA and ABC and have been for nearly 24 years now. Without wishing to blow my own trumpet (perish the thought) having a fulltime paid worker has made a big difference to what we have been able to do. And it is important to remind people that the funding for my pay is entirely separate from CAFCA and ABC’s funds. At this point, I want to thank all of the generous people who contribute to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, by either regular pledges or donations – without you I couldn’t do what I do nor could CAFCA do what it does. Having a fulltime Organiser enabled me to make the first couple of my regular national speaking tours, in the 90s. I’ve done five of them so far, always deliberately in an election year, the most recent being in 2014 (my report on that tour is in Watchdog 137, December 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/37/03.html).  

And CAFCA went electronic in the 90s – we signed up for this newfangled e-mail (previously we had organised by fax, phone trees and good old fashioned snail mail). We went online, with the creation of both the CAFCA and Watchdog sites that are still alive and kicking today (now supplemented by other related sites, Facebook and Twitter). Bill ran the CAFCA site for 20 or more years; now it is run by Chris Oakley. Greg Waite ran the Watchdog one for more than a decade; now that is run by Cass Daley. Thanks to Lynda Boyd all our old Watchdogs (i.e. from 1974-99 inclusive) are also now online, at their own site. Warren Brewer does an excellent job running the separate but related Watchblog.

The 90s saw the creation of the annual Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand. That has generated great media coverage over the years, stirred up controversy and hit the transnationals where it hurts. We have had prominent New Zealanders - few of them actually members of ours - queuing up to be the unpaid judges. The events to announce the winners have been held around the country and are always great fun. The latest one was last night in this very hall (my report on it is elsewhere in this issue). So those 1990s’ innovations - a fulltime Organiser and the Roger Award - are still going strong.

Building Networks To Fight “Free Trade” Agreements

The 90s also saw us focus on other issues and undertake a particular style of campaigning that is still in place today. I’m talking about our strong focus on so-called “free trade agreements” and network or coalition work with other groups. In the 90s that started with campaigns against specific free trade agreements, a more global focus on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the biggie of that decade, the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), which was defeated by a campaign which was both global and national. That led to us working closely with Jane Kelsey, who is speaking to us here today, and with groups such as GATT Watchdog - I single out Aziz Choudry, Dennis Small, Leigh Cookson and Gillian Southey.

That campaign, in turn, led us back to our old mates the SIS, who were caught redhanded breaking into Aziz’s Christchurch home in 1996. CAFCA was proud to support the successful court cases taken against the State by both Aziz and David Small arising from that*. So-called “free trade agreements” (which are actually charters for transnationals to come on in and help themselves) remain a very major concern of CAFCA to this day, with the TPPA being the current focus. *See my article “David Defeats Goliath: David Small Wins $20,000 From Police In Second Court Case To Result From 1996 SIS Break-In” in Watchdog 94, August 2000, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/94/7david.htm).

That focus on free trade agreements also led to a new focus on how they affect local government and we - both CAFCA and GATT Watchdog – did a lot of very successful lobbying of the Christchurch City Council and other local bodies about specific agreements and particularly about the MAI. The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) is right now the subject of a very vigorous and successful local government campaign; spearheaded by the indefatigable Greg Rzesniowiecki, who accompanied Jeremy Agar and me around the country on my 2014 speaking tour (Greg’s latest report is in this issue).

And the 90s saw us work with other groups to fight the inroads of corporatisation, privatisation and “transnationalisation” into the assets and services of local government. CAFCA was instrumental in setting up the Campaign for People’s Sovereignty network in that decade; right now we are heavily involved with Keep Our Assets Canterbury. A fortnight before CAFCA’s 40th celebration KOA met with the People’s Choice (i.e. Labour) Councillors in the Christchurch City Council to hear them declare that they have decided, after much ducking and diving, to fight the proposed asset sales here, alongside KOA.

The 90s saw us fight specific transnationals – for example, we, with others, formed the Society for Publicly Owned Telecommunications (SPOT) to campaign against Telecom. We, with others, campaigned against Westpac buying up TrustBank. In both of those campaigns we worked closely with the late Rod Donald, when the Greens were part of the Alliance (my obituary of Rod is in Watchdog 110, December 2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/10/09.htm). We continued to work closely with the Greens until recently, in the KOA campaign. He wasn’t the only mainstream politician with whom we worked in that decade – at one memorable public meeting in the Town Hall, about a Bill to make foreign investment easier, we hosted both Jim Anderton and Winston Peters (I sat between them on the speaker’s panel, which was an interesting experience).

By this stage it was obvious that CAFCA was no longer a protest group and hadn’t been for many years – we are routinely described in the media as a lobby group. The last entry in our SIS file was from 1998 and SIS Director Warren Tucker said that they had actually stopped spying on us in 1985 (so they say). In 2008, when releasing our file to us, he wrote: “The April 1985 SIS report concludes: ‘The organisation does not espouse violence and is not subversive under the terms of the (SIS) Act. CAFCINZ is currently assessed as being of minimal security interest’”. Which somewhat begs the question of why they kept a file on us until 1998. Never mind, it gave them something to do.

2000s: Asset Sales

The Noughties brought us the second Iraq War (the third one is underway now; you can read my latest writings on that in my article “Good Dog, Johnny! Iraq War Is The Price Of Belonging To ‘The Club’”, in Peace Researcher 49, June 2015, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/49/pr49-003.html). This led to CAFCA resuming our interest in the military aspects of imperialism, specifically the major role played in that war by various huge transnational corporations. Bill did a lot of excellent research on this subject – it’s useful to be reminded that we are both progressive nationalists and internationalists. The whole ongoing “War on Terror” is also of interest to us, although we leave it to ABC to take an active role (having said that, CAFCA took part in the 2013 protests against the GCSB Bill).  I remind you that two days before CAFCA’s 40th celebration, namely April 30th, was not only the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the former Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), it was also the seventh anniversary of the Waihopai Domebusters’ classic Kiwi Number 8 wire direct action. It coincided with a Watchdog mailout and what a day that proved to be, with hyperventilating journalists wanting to talk to me as if I could shed light on the Domebusters’ religious views (it remains the only Watchdog mailout to have been visited by a TV news crew).

The Noughties saw us continue our work with other groups in fighting to save public ownership of public assets – CAFCA was involved in setting up Keep Our Port Public, which opposed the Christchurch City Council’s unsuccessful attempt to sell the Lyttelton Port Company to a transnational. That particular battle was won but the war goes on – right now the Lyttelton Port Company is only one of Christchurch‘s portfolio of publicly-owned assets under imminent threat of at least partial privatisation by the Council. That is the battle being waged by Keep Our Assets Canterbury (KOA), of which CAFCA is proud to be a part.

And the Noughties saw us campaigning hard on our core issue of foreign control, namely yet another law to make the transnational corporate takeover even easier (this ideological drive is bipartisan; and these amendments to, or complete rewrites of, the Overseas Investment Act, have occurred under both National and Labour governments). The latest version, dating back a decade now, led to the birth of the renamed Overseas Investment Office, with whom we continue to have regular dealings, as we do with the Office of the Ombudsman. In 2008 we campaigned hard against the incoming National government’s policy of privatisation and asset sales – one of the tools we used was real old school and surprisingly effective. Namely: the humble postcard. To quote from my 2008 Organiser’s Report (Watchdog 119, February 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/19/06.htm):

“But we hadn’t counted on CAFCA’s secret weapon – namely the stupidity of the National Party. On one day in July I started getting e-mails from members in widely scattered parts of the country saying that they had been approached by National MPs who had received the cards from those members and who were demanding to know ‘who is behind these cards?’. Then I got a whole flurry of media calls and ended up doing a dizzying array of interviews because, suddenly, CAFCA was that day’s story in Parliament. The Tories, led once again by Bill English, the Dipstick from Dipton, had alleged that these ‘anonymous’ cards constituted an ‘orchestrated, covert third party campaign’ a la that run by the Exclusive Brethren in support of National in the 2005 election (how’s that for irony), run by Labour and the Greens ‘in breach of the Electoral Finance Act’. I was happy to put the record straight in the media that CAFCA ‘was behind’ the cards (I was referred to in one report as ‘the culprit’, as if we’d committed some crime); there was nothing covert about them; and they are in no way in breach of that Act….Covert campaign my arse! It was great to watch Michael Cullen on the TV news solemnly examine the card and say that he’d never seen it before – likewise Jeanette Fitzsimons of the Greens”. We continue to campaign against privatisation and asset sales and we have also used postcards again (as well as electronic communications and social media)

Here & Now

Which brings us to this decade, the teens, which is already half over. It has been business as usual for CAFCA, fighting all the various sorts of issues that I have already described and on which we have campaigned for decades – transnational corporate takeovers, foreign land purchases, so-called “free trade” agreements, privatisation, asset sales, military and intelligence entanglements. In short: all of the various manifestations of imperialism. There is no shortage of things to get our teeth into. Already this decade I have done two national speaking tours (I only did one in the Noughties) and CAFCA is busier than ever in a number of campaigns.

I couldn’t mention this decade without acknowledging external realities. We are a Christchurch-based group, so obviously we were all as affected by the 2010/11 seismic reign of terror as the rest of our fellow Cantabrians. It is useful to remember what CAFCA was doing on February 22, 2011. We were, as usual, very busy. We had been involved in organising a major seminar on the TPPA just two days earlier. We were scheduled to hold our regular fortnightly Committee meeting, over in Lyttelton, on the night of the 22nd, so I was busy preparing for it. That morning, I was rung by CTV, who wanted to interview me about the TPPA. So I went to the CTV Building that morning, where I spent time upstairs doing the interview. Upon arrival I had remarked to the receptionist that it was the first time I’d set foot in that building for three years. I left there at about 10.45 (two hours later the 25 year old reporter who had interviewed me was among the 115 people killed in the collapse of that criminally constructed building. He had worked there for one week). I headed into the central city to do the CAFCA banking, then went home, which is where I work. At the precise moment the killer quake struck I was working on the computer compiling the list of overdue members to be removed from the mailing list (maybe the god of procrastinators and bad debtors was trying to tell me something. Rest assured that I completed that purge after the power came back on at our place five days later). Funnily enough we didn’t have a Committee meeting that night in Lyttelton, or anywhere else. But it was only a week before we did meet again and swung back into action. It was less than two months later when I hit the road for my scheduled national speaking tour. It will take more than a prolonged subterranean bombardment by 14,000 earthquakes to put CAFCA off its stride.

Leftwing

Which brings us to the present. It is not my role today to critique CAFCA or to talk about our future. My job is to simply give you some (and it is only some) of the history of what the wonderfully grumpy Owen Wilkes memorably referred to as “the most unsuccessful campaign in New Zealand’s history”. Suffice to say that I beg to differ with Owen. We are a small organisation, tiny even, but we punch well above our weight. Without us around to keep the bastards honest, the issue of foreign control would never have had the national prominence that it continues to enjoy up until today, and it certainly would not have had any kind of progressive, let alone Leftwing, emphasis. It would have been left to New Zealand First and, beyond them, the racists and reactionaries who really are the xenophobes which we have been regularly, and falsely, accused of being. 

Don’t just take our word for it. After all its hard work spying on us for decades, it’s only fair to give the SIS nearly the last word. When it released our file to us, the then Director, Warren Tucker, wrote to me (30/10/08): “The passage of time has shown however that CAFCINZ’s wider appeal (over CAFMANZ), to popular suspicions about the intentions of overseas business interests in New Zealand rather than just to the Leftwing causes of the day, has ensured your organisation’s longevity. In any case, it is a new experience for me to be writing, as the Director of one still flourishing organisation, to the Secretary of another – which is also noteworthy from our perspective as the only one that called for the liquidation of the NZSIS that has not joined the others dedicated to that cause on (to use the late VI Lenin’s term), ‘the rubbish-heap of history’!” (following our receipt of this letter, Bill Rosenberg was rather surprised to be rung at work by somebody else from the SIS saying that Tucker had quoted the wrong dead Communist icon and that he had meant Leon Trotsky rather than Lenin, and was most anxious to get these things right. These guys must have too much time on their hands and too much taxpayers’ money at their disposal).

Life Begins At 40

CAFCA has a long and honourable history; we remain as relevant and effective today as we have ever been; we are engaged in any number of campaigns, both under own steam and in partnership with others. It’s been a lot of work, but equally, it’s been a lot of fun. I can honestly say the organisation as a whole has never been bedevilled by the sectarian infighting and splits that have destroyed so many other groups on the Left; we have always been clear about what we are and what we aren’t; and the Committee, right through all its different members over the years, has always functioned as friends as much as colleagues. Speaking personally, I have always found it a pleasure to work for, and with, CAFCA. The fact that I actually get paid for it puts the icing on the cake. As they say, life begins at 40, so let’s get on with it.