Committee: Bill Rosenberg, Brian Turner, Colleen Hughes, James Ayers, Jeremy Agar (Chairperson), John Ring, Lynda Boyd, Murray Horton (Secretary/Organiser), Paul Piesse and Warren Brewer. Lynda Boyd has taken six months leave from the Committee, because she’s busy building a house (nothing to do with earthquakes) and her job as a union organiser keeps her very busy, with very frequent travel to meet her far flung members. She joins Warren Brewer and Bill Rosenberg (Wellington), as “distance” members, who don’t attend meetings but remain actively involved in all major decision making. We have a Committee of ten.

All ten attended our March 2016 strategy meeting, which marked the first time since Bill permanently moved to Wellington in 2009 that we had had 100% of the Committee at a meeting, reinforcing the importance of that strategy meeting (it was also attended by Leigh Cookson, who is not a Committee member but as Layout Editor of Watchdog functions very much as an highly valued extra member. And it featured an external facilitator, well known Christchurch unionist Susan Stewart, who has never been a Committee member or, indeed, a CAFCA member). The Committee is the biggest it has ever been, although it is rare to get all the (non-distance) members together at one time at one place for a meeting. After decades of fortnightly meetings we have changed to meeting every four weeks.

Membership: It is at 410+, which is down from where it was when I wrote my previous annual Report. It has definitely dropped over the last few years (460 is the highest it has reached in recent years; it is quite a few years since it threatened 500; 550+ was our absolute zenith, many years ago). Every year we remove non-payers but only after they have ignored two of the dreaded red slips and a final, e-mailed, reminder. And every year we pick up new members, or former members rejoin, so that we make up most, but usually not all, of the number lost. As I’ve said for years now in these Reports, 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. That reflects the aging demographic of our membership. Many members have been with us for decades, some for the full 40+ years. We have a very loyal and generous membership, which more than makes up in quality anything it lacks in quantity. Gaining new members is a permanent project.

We have some wonderfully evangelical members who set out to recruit others. And we also recruit in the real world, at places such as TPPA rallies and various public meetings and events. We insist on a paying membership, because we have no other source of funds. We don’t charge much and haven’t reviewed or increased our sub for a very long time. 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 $54, 000, in round figures, which is $1,000 less than at the time of my last annual Report. A good chunk of this is accounted for by several major operating expenses falling due at the same time in early 2016; bills that, by themselves, only come around every year or two, things such as a fresh supply of pre-printed Watchdog covers. Another example: each time we learn that NZ Post is increasing, yet again, the price of the pre-paid big envelopes we use to post Watchdog, we stockpile a large quantity and lock in the current price, to keep our costs down for as long as possible. In 2016 we bought $4,000 worth of envelopes, which will last us until well into 2017.

We continue to be in a very healthy financial situation and don’t have to devote any energy or time to fundraising beyond our own ranks, being entirely financed by the annual subs and donations of our members (it’s worth noting that our annual sub has stayed unchanged since the 1990s and we haven’t even had to think about raising it). We have enough money on hand for vital and expensive administrative tasks such as the long overdue upgrade of our computer hardware and software and general operating systems.

Our old computer was made for us several years ago (it was installed just after the start of the 2010/11 earthquakes saga – the inner city firm that made it was one of the businesses that ultimately did not survive). Our old operating system actually became obsolete and unsupported a couple of years ago (but continued to work just fine, albeit with various idiosyncrasies). This Watchdog is the last one to be produced on our 2010 vintage computer and several years older operating system and software.

Over and above the costs involved in running the organisation and publishing Watchdog, we can afford to pay for CAFCA projects such as the Roger Award event which, in 2016, was held for the first time in Palmerston North. This actually cost us less than usual because Dion Martin, who combined the Roger event with the annual May Day concert which he has organised for more than 20 years, wouldn’t accept any money from us and ran the whole thing on a self-funding basis.

But CAFCA still paid for costs such as travel and accommodation for Chief Judge Sue Bradford, bringing her from Auckland to announce the winner. And it paid my costs to travel up from Christchurch to speak on behalf of the organisers. I have already mentioned the strategy meeting – we spent several hundred dollars on that, including the cost of flying Bill Rosenberg down for the day from Wellington. Both the Roger Award event and the strategy meeting represented money well spent.

We can also afford to give generous donations to worthy causes such as $1,500 to Keep Our Assets Canterbury for John Minto’s Christchurch Mayoral campaign on behalf of KOA. That one sum accounted for a good chunk of our donations in 2016. We also responded to an appeal from State Housing Action (John Minto again, but wearing a different hat) by paying the fee ($540) needed to file for a judicial review of the Government’s ideologically-driven policy of flogging off State houses (with overseas buyers very much circling the blood in the water) – this at a time of a record shortfall of affordable housing and the related scandals of tens of thousands of homeless people, beggars in the streets and ever growing numbers of the working poor dependent on food banks.

One change we have made as a result of a 2016 review of our administrative systems – after years of paying the going rate (nearly $800 per year) to an external bookkeeper to prepare our annual accounts, we have taken that work back in house (where we get it done for free). Committee member, Colleen Hughes, volunteered to take it on, ably assisted by fellow Committee member, James Ayers, who is an accountant by training. At some stage in the future Colleen may become the full blown Treasurer (which we haven’t had since the mid 1990s, when Ann Currie resigned from the Committee. Since then I’ve been the de facto Treasurer, as well as the Secretary/Organiser). But whether that happens remains to be seen, and is a matter of taking one step at a time.

Organiser Account: The Account has held steady since the time of my previous Report, with approximately* 55 regular pledgers and $25,000 (in round figures) between two bank accounts in two different banks - one account is used to pay me; the other one is a term deposit, with a different bank). Recruiting new pledgers is a permanent project; many of the existing ones are old or getting that way; some have been doing it since the Account started in 1991. I’d like to single out the late John Case who, uniquely, is still posthumously pledging to the Account more than two years after he died. * I say “approximately” because it’s hard to get an exact number of pledgers. Most pledge fortnightly or monthly but a few do it quarterly, half-yearly or annually.

Once again: my thanks to James Ayers for being the Organiser Account Treasurer. In my previous annual Report, I advised that James had to abruptly give that up in 2015 (indeed he had to put his life on hold indefinitely), when he was suddenly confronted with a serious illness that needed lengthy and gruelling treatment. So I found myself in charge of my own pay for several months. I’m very pleased to be able to tell you that, as of 2016, James is better, back at fulltime work, regularly attends CAFCA Committee meetings and has resumed as Organiser Treasurer. He does a very good job of it.

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. I’m pleased to report that since 2015 I have been paid the current Living Wage rate (it was increased to $19.80 per hour, from July 2016). To show our practical support for that Campaign, CAFCA has joined it, in 2016, as a supporting organisation. We can’t be an actual Living Wage employer, because CAFCA does not employ me. Since 1991 I have been a self-employed dependent contractor, which is a mutually beneficial set up for both CAFCA and me.

Any further increase in my pay is, as always, dependent on the health of the Organiser Account. We have attracted some new pledgers, plus some 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 – and I’ve been doing it now for 25 years, funded entirely by pledges and donations, which amazes me.

I need to declare at this point that, as I turned 65 in 2016, I also now get the old age pension (and pay rather more in tax by way of secondary tax). I continue to work fulltime as the CAFCA/ABC Organiser, and also getting the pension every fortnight is a very welcome financial buffer, effectively adding several dollars per hour to what has always been a low paid job. I don’t see it a double dipping but as a means of getting back some of the nearly half a century of tax that I’ve paid (for example, as self-employed, I have to pay both ACC’s employer and employee levies, and have had to do so for a quarter of a century). It eases the pressure on the Organiser Account.

Applying for the pension represented my only dealings with the benefits bureaucracy in many years and I must say that whole process went very smoothly and quickly (the only problem was poor Becky had to tear the house to pieces for a couple of days to find the necessary supporting documentation which, of course, has to be hard copy originals. It all turned up out in our garage where it had been dumped to make way for quake repairs five years earlier, was promptly forgotten about and had never made it back into the house). I make regular use of my Gold Card and have no qualms about doing so (although I haven’t had my free bus and ferry trip to Diamond Harbour yet – let alone Waiheke Island. I hardly ever use public transport, invariably biking or walking).

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’s monthly Decisions).

Being Editor keeps me very busy but, depending on time, I also do some writing. For example, for the August issue, I was able to do more than for some time. Thanks to our regular writers such as Greg Rzesniowiecki, John Minto and the prolific Dennis Small. The variety and sheer number of writers is very high (for example, we had 13 for the August 2016 issue). The quality is very high: some of them are people with a national profile, such as Jane Kelsey, John Minto, Nicky Hager, Bryan Gould and Catherine Delahunty. 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.

For three years we had to work within a printer’s size limit of 100 pages. But the printers changed equipment and the size limit was history. The result was that the April and August 2016 issues were two of the biggest we’ve ever published, both being 108 pages. There were a couple of reasons for that – as I have already mentioned, James Ayers had suddenly got seriously ill in 2015, meaning that he could not write up the Overseas Investment Office Decisions (the December 2015 issue was the first Watchdog since 1990 not to include any such writeup).

But James got back into it with a vengeance in 2016, starting with the backlog that accumulated during his illness. Instead of writing up four months worth of Decisions at a time, he wrote up six for the April issue and seven for August. He has now caught up, so normal service resumes with this issue. And Greg Rzesniowiecki missed writing anything for the December 2015 issue (which was a mere 76 pages). As with James, he made up for that in the April 2016 issue – between them they accounted for more than half of that issue.

Speaking of our printers – there was a milestone in 2016, namely the retirement of Keith Miskimmin, the head printer. I had worked with Keith ever since we had started using that printer in 1997. It had been a very productive and eventful 19 years, which had survived the earthquakes catastrophe, along with numerous other more mundane challenges. I came to regard Keith as a mate, not simply as our printer. My tribute to him is in Watchdog 142, August 2016, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/42/18.html (as well as to his offsider, Alan Armstrong, who retired a couple of years previously; and to Ray Leonard, my old mate from the [different] photocopying business that CAFCA has used since the 1980s. Ray had also retired a couple of years earlier).

Keith’s retirement doesn’t mean the end of our relationship with that printer – far from it. We are carrying on getting on Watchdog printed there (and Anti-Bases Campaign has Peace Researcher printed there as well), under the new head printer, Susan Sell, with whom I’ve also worked since 1997 and who has actually been at the printery for longer than both Keith and Alan.

Watchdog is the sole survivor of the old school Left publications (certainly in hard copy) and I believe this is a big reason why we have no trouble getting people, including big names, to write for us for no pay. It is a journal of analysis; it is not, never has been, and never will be, a newspaper. It is also freely available online but we have no plans to abandon the hard copy edition. Members want something they can hold in their hands to read and to keep in their bookcase or on their coffee table. We do sell a few copies of each issue to a couple of Christchurch bookshops and a hipster barber shop a few minutes walk from my home, plus a number of libraries have stocked it for decades but Watchdog is 90%+ only available to sub-paying members. It is a vital part of the package deal.

Overseas Investment Office: In my previous Report I detailed that James Ayers and I had met with Ombudsman Ron Paterson (at his request) in 2015, to try and find a way of dealing with several years worth of CAFCA appeals of OIO deletions from its monthly Decisions (mostly, but not all, involved withholding the consideration  i.e. the price paid). The OIO subsequently released to us a great wodge of previously withheld Decisions, complete with the considerations, spanning the period 2012-14 inclusive.

To be precise, it released 88 Decisions which had previously had material withheld; but it decided to withhold four Decisions indefinitely, and will review another 16 after a specified period of time (it has told us when that will happen, in every case. However, that review will not be until 2018 in three of those cases).

More significantly, the OIO decided to institute a whole new regime relating to the cloak of secrecy thrown over foreign investment applications to it (the new regime actually started as from May 2015 but CAFCA was only informed of it in April 2016 by Professor Paterson). To quote his letter to us: “If the OIO determines that there are good grounds under the Official Information Act for withholding the information, the applicant is advised that the information will be withheld for a period of one year or until such time as the information becomes public (whichever is earlier)”.

“If the applicant considers that the information should remain confidential beyond the specified expiry date, the onus is on the applicant to write to the OIO explaining why that is the case. The OIO will then reconsider the grounds for withholding. With these actions, the OIO has effectively changed its starting position with respect to information that is deemed confidential when a Decision summary is released – that is, confidentiality is maintained for a specified period rather than indefinitely. The onus is on applicants to contact the OIO if they consider that there are good grounds under the Official Information Act to withhold the information after the expiry of the specified period”.

This is a definite improvement on the OIO’s previous position (i.e. throwing an indefinite cloak of secrecy over all or part of its monthly Decisions). CAFCA thanks Professor Paterson for his work on this. And we pat ourselves on the back for continuing to hold to account this very publicity-shy, rubber stamping part of the State’s foreign investment “oversight” regime. CAFCA is fundamentally opposed to the whole “come on in and help yourselves” message to foreign investors from Governments led by both major parties.

That being the case, the Overseas Investment Office has not seen the last of us just yet. We will continue to appeal Decisions that are fully or partly withheld even after its one year review. But, at least, the OIO’s rubber stamping won’t be hidden behind closed doors quite so often. As for the Ombudsman, Professor Paterson couldn’t wait to close all outstanding appeals from CAFCA. And he subsequently upheld the OIO in permanently withholding the four Decisions mentioned above, and in not reviewing those three other Decisions until 2018 (he has since resigned as an Ombudsman. Perhaps he decided to get out while the going was good).

So it’s not a new age of transparency just yet. But it’s a definite improvement on what it was. And none of it would have happened if it wasn’t for CAFCA’s dogged determination. The Ombudsman’s Case Note (Professor Paterson’s full decision) can be read online at the Website of the Office of the Ombudsman at http://www.ombudsman.parliament.nz/newsroom/item/new-case-note-overseas-investment-office-consent-application-decision-summaries-investment-in-sensitive-nz-assets.

We then decided to try another approach and asked the Ombudsman to review a number of specific OIO processes (under the Ombudsman Act, not the Official Information Act) but were very quickly rebuffed on the grounds that CAFCA does not have any standing in the matter i.e. we are not personally affected by anything the OIO does. And we received legal advice that there is no appeal or review of decisions by the Ombudsman.

Website & Other Means Of Electronic Communication: The Website is being very well run by Chris Oakley, who has introduced some welcome improvements (for example, the Roger Award now has an online nomination form). Our Website is a vital resource and the first point of contact with CAFCA for many people, including the media.

Warren Brewer does an excellent job at maintaining the Watchblog site, which is separate from the CAFCA and Watchdog ones and which provides a very colourful contrast to both. Watchblog is the only site where you can find Watchdog issues as PDFs, complete with all illustrations. Warren also administers our Twitter account, which has 200 followers. Colleen Hughes administers our Facebook group, which has around 1,300 members (which is three times more than our “real” membership) but, of course, they don’t pay membership subs. The issue is how to get any kind of cross-over from “virtual” to “real” membership. We’re far from being the only group facing this issue).

Warren also administers the Keep Our Assets Canterbury and Roger Award People’s Choice Websites (the latter is an annual short-lived but very active site, where people can vote for who they’d like to win the Roger Award. More often than not it has a different result to the official winner). We’ve lost the New Zealand Not For Sale Website, which Warren had also administered for years – the person responsible for keeping the domain name registered (not a Committee member) did not so, the domain name lapsed in 2016 and we lost access to the site.

Roger Award: The event to announce the 2015 winner was held in Palmerston North. Thanks to the judges, the Report writers and the event organisers. We run the online Roger Award People’s Choice poll, administered by Warren Brewer. The 2015 winner of that (Bunnings) was not the same as the official winner selected by the judges (IAG/State Insurance). And that disparity is usually the case, which is a good thing. There is no equivalent to the Judges’ Report for the People’s Choice – it is a straight popular vote.

This was the first time that the event has ever been held in Palmerston North. And only the second time it has been held outside the four main centres (in 2014 it was held in Nelson. It has only ever been held once in Dunedin). Holding it in Nelson proved that the Roger Award belongs to all New Zealand, not just the main cities. We said at the time that we would love the event to be held in other provincial cities and towns, but the key ingredient is a local organiser or organisers.

And we found just such an excellent provincial organiser, namely Dion Martin (who has been CAFCA’s key contact there since the 90s, having organised and hosted my Palmerston North visits during my various national speaking tours, most recently in 2014). Dion organised the nationally renowned May Day concert in Palmy for 20 straight years, before taking a break in 2015 and coming to Christchurch for that year’s Roger event and CAFCA’s 40th anniversary celebration, where he injected the vital ingredient of song (good old working class and revolutionary standards) into both events. We decided there and then that Dion was our man.

The Roger Award event was combined with Unions Manawatu’s May Day celebration, Dion having revived the May Day concert (where performers compete for the May Day Cup). That Roger Award/May Day double banger was last done in Christchurch in 2015. The whole thing was a bona fide production, held in a central city theatre, with proper lighting, sound and all the trimmings. It was a Saturday night show and a very well attended one at that. The Roger Award event was the opening act.

The fantastically ugly Roger Award trophy was on display on stage next to the speakers’ lectern; the event consisted of speeches from me, on behalf of the organisers, and the Chief Judge, Sue Bradford, who came down from Auckland to announce the winners and explain why they won. Between our two speeches Dion (who told me that he did not want to know the winner in advance) had organised and scripted an extremely funny and entertaining “ugly parade” representing the six finalists.

For example, he himself adopted possibly the worst Australian accent I’ve ever heard to represent Westpac; Serco wore boxing gloves (because of the Mt Eden Prison fight clubs); MediaWorks swung a microphone; and the lean and hungry fellow who played IAG/State, with his dollar sign giant glasses and suit and tie, looked every inch the mean and grasping insurance transnational (he was my host for the night and I hasten to assure you that he’s nothing like that at all). It had the audience in stitches and was great fun (but with a very serious purpose). Wellington’s Brass Razoo brass band (which has previously played at some Roger events in Wellington) was on stage and played the appropriate Darth Vader music from Star Wars when the winner was announced.

For the 2016 Award we have lost Dennis Maga as a judge. He was replaced by our only new judge, Teresa O’Connor (Nelson), who is continuing a family tradition – her sister Mary Ellen O’Connor served as a judge for several years last decade. Sue Bradford (Auckland) remains as Chief Judge and the other continuing judges are Deborah Russell (Palmerston North), David Small (Christchurch) and Dean Parker (Auckland). For the first time ever we have more women judges than men.

And, for the first time since 2011, the event will be held in Auckland. FIRST Union, which is the biggest and most active union supporter of CAFCA (and of the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account), accepted our invitation to host it. By mutual agreement it will not be combined with May Day this time but will be held as a stand alone event, in April 2017 (it has been held as a stand alone event many times in the past, most recently in Nelson in 2014).

Keep Our Assets Canterbury (KOA): As in 2015 KOA was our major Christchurch project in 2016. I am the Convenor and a number of other Committee members are also very actively involved with the KOA Committee (Warren Brewer, Paul Piesse, Jeremy Agar and Brian Turner, to a greater or lesser degree). KOA’s work focused on, and will continue to focus on, the move to sell off up to $600 million worth of the Christchurch City Council’s extensive portfolio of publicly-owned assets over three years (reduced from the Council’s originally announced target of $750 million), to help pay for a beat up of a “shortfall” in finances, needed to pay for the city’s share of the quake rebuild costs share agreement that the previous Council had been bullied into by a Government that has a clear agenda to sell public assets. The Council voted 8-6 to sell.

When the Council announced, in late 2015, that its maintenance and infrastructure company, City Care, was the first to be sold, KOA launched many regular and well attended pickets outside City Care depots, outside the City Council Building, and right inside the debating chamber during several Council meetings (they were silent protests where we held up banners and placards naming and shaming the eight “Sellouts” and thanking the six “Stalwarts”). We picketed in heat, cold, gales and rain, right through all four seasons. We also met with all the unions representing City Care workers.

The pickets were very well covered by the media and I did a lot of interviews in my KOA capacity. Another encouraging aspect of the pickets was the overwhelming level of public support expressed by the simple vox pop of rush hour motorists responding to our signs such as “Toot if you oppose asset sales”. From single occupant cars to tradies’ vans, even a cop car, they tooted with gusto, and in big numbers.

The Council had set a June 30th deadline to sell City Care (that’s the end of its financial year). It announced a June 27th Extraordinary Meeting, with the public and press excluded. We geared up for a battle – at least two KOA Committee members (one was a former CAFCA Committee member, the other a current one) announced their willingness to get arrested at that meeting. But the Council called it off, without explanation. KOA resumed its schedule of pickets. Then the Council announced that it had abandoned the sale. Naturally it said that this had nothing to do with public opposition (yeah, right) but we know a victory when we see one. Against the odds, KOA had won! We had, in fact, saved City Care.

But once the October local body election was out of the way, the danger was that the Council could resume selling assets, which could include anything from Red Bus to Enable to Lancaster Park (and everything inbetween – with the exception of the only four remaining listed strategic assets: Orion, Lyttelton Port Company, Christchurch Airport Ltd and Eco Central. It doesn’t mean those four can’t be sold, just that there has to be a public consultation before any of those can be sold). Whilst savouring our victory in having saved City Care, KOA won’t be putting away our banners just yet. Not until the Christchurch City Council renounces its plan to sell any public assets.

There was more good news post-election – the Council restored Enable (its broadband infrastructure company) to the strategic assets list. KOA was front and centre in that one as well – we highlighted the fact that the Mayor, Lianne Dalziel, had promised to do that, in an election debate with John Minto, but that it was going to be decided in the public excluded section of a Council meeting. The media picked up on that and gave it (and KOA) big coverage. KOA said we’d be at that meeting to protest; Dalziel moved the item back into the public section of the meeting and invited KOA to speak to the meeting (I did that, at very short notice).

But that same Council meeting postponed a vote on whether to put City Care onto the strategic assets list – they wanted to have to define “strategic asset” first. That remains undecided at the time of writing. It must stick in the throat of the Mayor and her fellow would-be asset sellers to now have to debate protecting the very City Care that they spent 18 months busting their guts trying (unsuccessfully) to sell. The score so far: KOA 1, asset sellers nil.

Minto For Mayor Campaign: KOA ran two major and interconnected campaigns in 2016. In my 2015 Report I mentioned the welcome addition of John Minto and his wife Bronwen Summers to KOA’s ranks (having moved from Auckland back to Bronwen’s home town). They injected great energy into the campaign (not to mention their own money on occasions – until KOA could pay them back). This moved up several gears in 2016 when KOA put up John as our Christchurch Mayoral candidate against the incumbent Lianne Dalziel. “No Asset Sales” was Number 1 of John’s six progressive and positive policies.

I have never been involved in any mainstream political campaign before, so this was a first for me. John’s campaign got huge media coverage (the Press gave it several front page leads, plus editorials). I also chaired the official launch of John’s campaign, which likewise drew major media coverage. The Minto for Mayor Campaign was greatly heartened by the outpouring of public support – merchandise sales (badges, bumper stickers, T shirts) and donations totalled $23,000+ (including the $1,500 that CAFCA put in). Expenses also totalled $23,000, but we finished with a tiny surplus, with all bills paid. We raised enough to pay for dozens of short ads on commercial radio stations in the final two weeks of the campaign.

People volunteered to distribute 65,000 leaflets and host 300 fence placards and a small number of large billboards on their properties (we even ended up with a fence placard in our unruly giant front hedge. Plus Becky and I did our share of letterboxing the streets and housing complexes of Addington. Our daily walk was combined with political work). John described it as the best resourced and most fun campaign he’d been involved in since the 1981 Springbok Tour one.

John’s Campaign Manager was Warren Brewer (the Press highlighted Warren’s CAFCA role, which KOA hadn’t mentioned at all) and Warren did an excellent job, He threw himself into it heart and soul (just as he did in organising my 2014 CAFCA/ABC national speaking tour), arranging John or another representative of the campaign to speak at suburban meetings, to meet with unions, political parties and community groups (of course, John himself has been a CAFCA member for nearly 30 years and  is a regular Watchdog writer).

I chaired and spoke at a whole series of John’s suburban meetings, plus ended up speaking to a Grey Power meeting on John’s behalf (he is a full time high school teacher and couldn’t undertake campaign commitments during school hours. Dalziel’s team unsuccessfully tried to have me stopped from speaking, on the grounds that I was not a candidate – Grey Power stuck to its guns and congratulated me on my speech, after I’d delivered it). As an account signatory I did a lot of banking and paying bills. CAFCA Committee members Jeremy Agar, Paul Piesse and Brian Turner were also very actively involved in John’s campaign (others on the KOA Committee who deserve special praise are Denis O’Connor [a former CAFCA Committee member himself], Steve Howard, Dot Lovell-Smith, Paul Hopkinson and Mike Newlove).

John Got 15% Of Vote: It goes without saying that Lianne Dalziel won by what the media laughably described as a landslide (she got 75,000 votes to John’s 13,000). But KOA thinks winning 15% of the vote is a very respectable result for such a grassroots, guerrilla campaign. If John had not run, Dalziel would have been re-elected unopposed (as were several City Councillors). All in all, KOA made sure that the issue of asset sales remained front and centre in the election campaign, exactly as we said we would.

And we forced Dalziel to address issues she’d rather have ignored – like asset sales (she tried to declare black as white by saying the Council was not selling any assets during her term); like the white elephant central city anchor projects which the Government had forced the previous Council to sign up to paying for; like the whole oppressive cost share agreement between the Government and the Council. It is telling that the traditional Right didn’t put up a Mayoral candidate (meaning that local Big Business was happy with Dalziel representing its interests).

That meant that unlike any other major city in 2016, Christchurch’s Mayoral campaign was a two horse race (when John had run for Mayor of Auckland several years ago he’d been just one face in a very big crowd). This meant that the mainstream media had to treat him not only as a credible candidate but as The Challenger. So there was a whole series of Mayoral debates (including one in a full house Cardboard Cathedral) of just him and Dalziel. The publicity dividend to KOA was priceless.

Nor was it a single issue campaign – no asset sales was only one of the six policies on which John stood. We didn’t run any candidates for the City Council, Environment Canterbury or any community boards, so we didn’t tread on anybody’s toes. That meant that KOA could, and did, work with the likes of The People’s Choice, whose six Councillors had voted against asset sales (they’ve now got seven Councillors but that is still not a majority on the Council, which has been expanded from 14 to 16, plus the Mayor). The issue of asset sales hasn’t finished yet and is unlikely to be for some time.

CAFCA, as a matter of very longstanding policy, is independent of all political parties and endorses none (see next section). But we see no contradiction in our very active involvement in the Minto For Mayor Campaign, which confronted head on a key CAFCA issue, namely public asset sales (apart from anything else, the most likely buyers would be transnational corporations). KOA is not a political party, so nothing has changed in terms of our key policy.

Relations With Political Parties & Unions: This flows naturally on from KOA. It no longer works directly with the Greens as a Party but individual Greens remain key active participants (I single out Dot Lovell-Smith, who is also an Anti-Bases Campaign Committee member). And KOA is the only campaign on which CAFCA has worked directly with the Labour Party (in the form of The People’s Choice. In 2016 we held productive working meetings with People’s Choice City Councillors and community board members).

CAFCA itself 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. We regularly work with people from the Greens, Mana, Labour, the Democrats and Alliance.

Wearing my Anti-Bases Campaign hat I work closely with both the Green Party and individual Green MPs such as Steffan Browning on our shared campaign to close the Waihopai spy base. At the January 2016 Waihopai protest I shared a speaking platform (well, the back of a ute) with Greens Co-Leader Metiria Turei, who told us how happy she was to be marching through Blenheim in the company once more of grassroots activists. In my KOA Convenor capacity I was invited to a November 2016 social function with the Greens Co-Leaders at the Party’s Christchurch office. I am not, and never have been, a Greens’ member (nor of any other political party) – I was told the invitation was sent to “stakeholders”.

As far as unions go, I have already mentioned KOA building a good working relationship with unions in Christchurch. Both FIRST Union and the Rail and Maritime Transport Union (RMTU) have put money into KOA; both our Mayoral candidate, John Minto, and Campaign Manager, Warren Brewer, spoke to meetings of RMTU workers (Steve Howard did also) and I was invited to speak to a FIRST Union meeting in late 2015.

We have also met with E Tū, the Public Service Association (PSA) and the Amalgamated Workers’ Union (AWUNZ), the three unions who represent workers in City Care. Officials from several unions attended KOA’s City Care pickets, both outside work depots and inside the City Council Chamber during Council meetings. Unions Canterbury invited John Minto to take part in a mass meeting where union delegates could hear local government candidates speak, including the two Mayoral contenders.

CAFCA has had a long and ongoing productive national relationship with a number of unions and individual unionists. We have ongoing very friendly relationships with FIRST Union, which is the only union to regularly pledge to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account. Not only that, it is the single biggest pledger. And FIRST Union accepted CAFCA’s invitation to host the 2016 Roger Award event (which will be held in Auckland in April 2017). This means that the event will be held in Auckland for the first time since 2011.

Other unions we work, or have worked, with are the Maritime Union, RMTU, E Tū and Unite. In some cases, such as with the former Seamen’s Union, now the Maritime Union, those relationships go back to our very beginning, 40+ years ago. In 2016 Unions Canterbury invited CAFCA to the May Day opening of the brand new Trade Union Centre (the old one having been demolished as a result of the quakes). Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend (I was in Palmerston North, attending the 2015 Roger Award event, which was organised by Unions Manawatu). But Committee member Paul Piesse, himself a retired union official, represented us at it. Paul and I were both back in that building later in the year, for the Christchurch memorial gathering for Helen Kelly, the former leader of the Council of Trade Unions.

Media Profile & Public Speaking: this also flows naturally on from KOA, because most of my 2016 media interviews and other interactions were in my KOA, not CAFCA, capacity. I didn’t do any TV interviews for KOA in 2016 but lots and lots of mainstream newspaper and radio ones. The local media have got into the habit of ringing me for comment or information in my role as KOA spokesperson. Sometimes this attention was misdirected – despite having published on its front page that Warren Brewer was John Minto’s Campaign Manager, the Press got the idea into its head that I was. Accordingly I was rung by several different Press reporters labouring under that misunderstanding.

CAFCA has a high reactive media profile for years (by which I mean that the media contacts us, rather than us proactively contacting them. Most recently this happened when Radio NZ rang me for an interview about that hardy old chestnut, rural land sales to foreigners). Plus I routinely put out press releases about things such as the Roger Award (which generates media coverage in itself).

In 2016 I decided to also proactively put out several press releases, either announcing things like the outcome of our dealings with the Overseas Investment Office (see the OIO section above, for details) or commenting on a number of relevant stories. This was the first time that I’d done that since 2014, and I decided to set time aside to do them and make such press releases a priority. I did a number of media interviews as a result.

As for public speaking, nearly all of it was in my KOA capacity, ranging from via a megaphone on a picket to speaking to a Grey Power meeting on behalf of KOA’s Mayoral candidate, John  Minto (I also do megaphone speeches in Blenheim and at the Waihopai spy base, in my Anti-Bases Campaign capacity). All of that KOA stuff is very much CAFCA work by proxy. My one actual CAFCA speech in 2016 was at the Roger Award event in Palmerston North (my speech is in Watchdog 142, August 2016, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/42/04.html). I didn’t speak at the previous year’s event, so 2016 saw the resumption of me speaking at the Roger event, on behalf of the organisers.

Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA): this was the big issue and the big campaign of 2015, and reached its crescendo in 2016, with the protests at the signing of the Agreement in Auckland in February. CAFCA and I have put a lot of work into this for years (it was a central theme of both my 2011 and 2014 national speaking tours) but, I’m pleased to say, it had been well out of our hands for a long time now and it became one of the biggest movements in recent NZ political history.

And, what’s even better, we won - an international, grassroots, people’s movement, waged tirelessly for years, defeated the forces of neo-liberal globalisation. The TPPA death blow was delivered by Donald Trump making US non-membership a central part of his policy platform. He is no friend of ours, or of the global progressive movement, but sometime strange bedfellows can, together, deliver the desired result. The score: the people 1, TPPA nil.

CAFCA played its part in the local and national campaign against the TPPA. We took part, with our banner and leaflets, in any Christchurch TPPA marches and rallies. Our participation at such events can have unexpected positive spinoffs. At the most recent one, we were joined by Terry Moon, who was CAFCA’s Treasurer in the 1980s and who I hadn’t seen for several years. She ended the day helping to carry our banner. Suitably enthused, she turned up at a Minto For Mayor suburban meeting a few days later - which she otherwise wouldn’t have known about – and promptly got actively involved in that campaign. Good on you, Terry!

CAFCA’s SIS File: It got one outing in 2016. A veteran Auckland activist is writing a thesis on the Auckland Progressive Youth Movement of the 1960s & 70s, of which he was a leader (I was a leader of the Christchurch PYM, which was a very different beast to our Auckland colleagues). He wanted to check Auckland PYM references in CAFCA’s SIS file (there are a number, dating right back to our beginning as CAFCINZ in the mid 1970s). So, it’s good that this file is still proving to be the gold standard for researchers wanting insight into a relatively uncensored (but that‘s not saying much) SIS file. And I have used it as a reference for several obituaries.

Priorities: Our 2016 strategy session came up with the idea of approaching selected members and supporters throughout the country, to invite them to a national forum to discuss how they can help to spread CAFCA’s message in their area. We may also try regional fora. At this very early stage, we’ve only got as far as brainstorming likely names. This has also become part of our strategy for the 2017 election year. Quite deliberately, CAFCA has never attempted to establish branches around the country (there are sound reasons for that). So this is an experiment in widening our circle of active members round the country.

Ongoing projects include getting our message out to more people (including building our social media presence) and recruiting new and, hopefully younger, members. Watchdog and the Roger Award are ongoing projects. A major campaign will continue to be CAFCA’s involvement in KOA’s opposition to asset sales in the context of post-quake disaster capitalism in Christchurch (the Minto for Mayor Campaign component of that took up an extraordinary amount of the time of both CAFCA and me throughout 2016). Other issues include misleadingly called “free trade” deals (they didn’t die with the unlamented TPPA); privatisation; corporate welfare & tax dodging; and the hardy perennial of rural land sales.

Anti-Bases Campaign: I am, of course, also the Organiser for ABC. I co-edit Peace Researcher, with Warren Thomson (and Becky is the Layout Editor, so it’s a family business). We publish two issues a year (Watchdog comes out three times a year). ABC’s major project in any year is the Waihopai spy base protest. See my report on the 2016 one in PR 51, June 2016, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/51/pr51-003.html. Media coverage can be seen at http://www.stuff.co.nz/marlborough-express/news/76188890/waihopai-spy-base-protesters-talk-gcsb-five-eyes-and-democracy-in-marlborough.

Errol Wright and Abi King-Jones’ excellent Waihopai Domebusters/Five Eyes documentary “The 5th Eye” (reviewed in this issue by Jeremy Agar) came out in 2016, in time for the annual Film Festival. ABC had donated $1,000 to it (and CAFCA put in $500). Plus we helped to publicise it. I had been interviewed for it several years ago (so long ago that I’d forgotten what I said, let alone the questions).

Becky and I got free tickets to its Christchurch premiere - it’s always an interesting experience to watch yourself on a giant multiplex screen (it wasn’t my first time to appear in a film by Errol and Abi. The previous one was “The Last Resort”, reviewed by Jeremy Agar in Watchdog 113, December 2006, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/13/11.htm. So I’ve appeared in their films in both my CAFCA and ABC capacities). Details about “The 5th Eye” can be found at www.cutcutcut.com .

ABC’s other big project in 2016, which was very much Warren Thomson’s baby, was the new Intelligence and Security Bill, which arose from 2015’s so-called “independent” Intelligence and Security Review. Warren’s analysis of the Bill can be read in PR 52, November 2016, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/52/pr52-001.html. We urged people to make submissions opposing it and Warren wrote and presented (by phone) ABC’s one.

We tried to mount another big project in 2016, namely getting a New Zealand delegate to represent us at major activities in Australia to mark the 50th anniversary of the top secret US warfighting and spy base at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs (it’s been a long campaign. I had been there, done that, in 1987. See my article “The Siege Of Pine Gap” in Peace Researcher 16 [first series], December 1987, https://www.scribd.com/document/33725264/Peace-Researcher-Vol1-Issue16-Dec-1987).

We offered to pay the not inconsiderable travel costs and we had a person in mind – but he was unavailable, unfortunately. We tried several other people but none could go. After the event we found out that it had been attended by Liz Remmerswaal, a former ABC (and CAFCA) member, one who had hosted and/or organised my Hawkes Bay visits during my 2011 and 2014 national speaking tours. She had gone at very short notice and on her own initiative. Upon her return she wrote an article about it for Peace Researcher.

Quake Effects On Committee Members: Christchurch’s February 2016 big quake and further aftershocks were a violent reminder that geological time and human time are two very different concepts. That caused further minor damage to homes already repaired after the 2010/11 quakes, such as that of Committee member, Colleen Hughes, who lives in the eastern suburbs, which were the most badly affected by the 2010/11 seismic reign of terror. But life very much goes on. The favourite Sunday outing for Becky and I is to go to Sumner (where that February 2016 quake was centred) and walk the hillside roads and tracks, one of which is fenced off only metres from where great chunks of cliff collapsed into the sea.

I’m delighted to report that my Anti-Bases Campaign Committee colleague, Robyn Dann, is finally living in her newly built home. She had to live in the lounge of her 19th Century Woolston riverside brick cottage for nearly five years because her bedroom was deemed to be too dangerous. Her house lost all ability to keep out wind, rain or cold – poor Robyn nearly got hypothermia at one point during Christchurch’s extremely cold winter of 2015. It wasn’t until early 2016 that the house was demolished and she lived in a caravan for more than six months while the new home was built on the same section.

One result of this was that, as of 2016, ABC is able to have Committee meetings at Robyn’s place for the first time since 2010 (we had met there throughout the previous decade. I had been hosting the meetings since the February 2011 quake had rendered her old place unsuitable. Plus, I was ABC’s acting Treasurer during the several months she was living in a rental caravan in 2016).

And ABC’s Warren Thomson finally saw work commence on replacing his quake-buggered drive years after his house was fixed (it had been a real saga just to get to this point, costing a huge amount and taking a long time, because it is an extremely steep hillside drive, with shared access and retaining walls. But further complications arose and, at the time of writing, the very far from completed project was at a standstill. By contrast our flat land drive was replaced way back in 2012).

New Quakes: Of course, we are still experiencing earthquakes, just not in our immediate backyard. My heart goes out to the people of North Canterbury, Marlborough and Wellington. It is a strange sensation for Christchurch people to be spectators this time to quakes taking place in Canterbury. That’s not to say that we’re not directly affected – Colleen Hughes and James Ayers, the two CAFCA Committee members who live closest to the sea, were among the many thousands of Christchurch people evacuated in the early hours of November 14th because of the tsunami warning. To Becky’s disgust, I went back to bed (she woke me up later to check if we live far enough away from the coast to not be concerned. We do).

James Ayers spent time in cut-off Kaikoura as part of his job – he’s a commercial insurance loss adjuster – and to help out small businesses there, based on his own experience of losing his own small business in the February 2011 Christchurch quake (his former shop is in the only central business district block still fenced off). And ABC has definitely been affected by these latest quakes – to get to Waihopai, in Marlborough, we will now have to drive a much longer route. And we decided it to be prudent to relocate our camp site of the past several years away from an isolated north east Marlborough beach, back to to an inland site where we had last camped a decade ago

I did have one meeting with the Earthquake Commission (EQC) in 2016. Nothing to do with our house repairs – they were all done back in 2011. No, this was a spinoff from the Minto For Mayor Campaign. John wrote a story on The Daily Blog about the outrageous amounts paid on Cabinet’s directive to a handful of Fendalton homeowners after the September 2010 quake, Unsolicited, Gerry Brownlee, the relevant Minister (and National MP for those homeowners) wrote to John offering a briefing with top EQC managers so that John could “better understand the process”. John declined but offered for Steve Howard and me to go to EQC’s Christchurch HQ to represent Keep Our Assets, which we duly did.

As I left, I reflected that the only previous time I had been at that building (but outside only) was with Warren Brewer when he and I were representing CAFCA on a very angry, very wet and very cold quake victims’ protest back in 2012 (CAFCA was involved because the march had also gone to the nearby head office of State Insurance, a transnational corporation which is still of great interest to CAFCA. IAG/State Insurance won the 2015 Roger Award; the Judges’ Report is at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/pdf/roger-award-2015-judges-report.pdf). It is a finalist again in the 2016 Roger Award.

Philippines Solidarity Network Of Aotearoa: I work for this on a voluntary basis. In this Report I usually say: “It is basically just ticking over”. And such was the case in 2016. But the Philippines itself has been thrust into the international spotlight for all the wrong reasons. Its newly elected President, Rodrigo Duterte, won as an outsider (another part of the global trend that includes both Brexit and Donald Trump. But Duterte makes Trump look like a sensitive new age guy). He has unleashed rule by death squad under the pretext of a “war on drugs”. Thousands have been killed in an overt State policy of mass murder, one in which the murderers operate with total impunity (the Philippines has always had death squads that operate with impunity but Duterte has ratcheted it up by a considerable order of magnitude).

Duterte is a real mixed bag. On one hand he has authorised the burial of the decidedly unheroic Ferdinand Marcos in Manila’s National Heroes Cemetery (Becky, who was in the country visiting her family, took part in protest rallies against this. Under the Marcos martial law dictatorship, three of Becky’s aunts and one uncle were among those imprisoned. And one other aunt was the most high profile female murder victim of that dictatorship).

On the other hand, Duterte has reactivated the long stalled peace talks with the revolutionary Communist underground (that war has been running for nearly 50 years). Two of the top peace negotiators on behalf of the National Democratic Front are Luis Jalandoni and his wife Coni Ledesma, whom PSNA organised on a New Zealand speaking tour in 2010. When they were in this country they were excited at the prospect of peace talks recommencing under the newly elected previous President, Benigno Aquino. But nothing came of that. Let’s see if there is any more success this time.

Duterte has released Communist political prisoners so they can take part in the peace talks in Oslo. The Left considers Duterte their best hope in living memory for making some real progress in the huge structural problems in Philippine society that are the root cause of both mass poverty and revolution. He is definitely the only Philippine President to have told the US to butt out of the affairs of its former colony. A lot of time at PSNA’s monthly Committee meetings in 2016 has been taken up with discussing the Philippines under Duterte (what Filipinos call a situationer).

My Ancient Past: There’s always something that comes back to haunt me and in 2016 it was the Progressive Youth Movement (PYM), specifically our anti-Vietnam War protests at Christchurch’s Anzac Day ceremonies for three consecutive years (1970/71/72). An Auckland University PhD student contacted me with a view to interview me about that (it has yet to happen). Christchurch and Wellington PYM was the subject of the 1991 documentary “Rebels In Retrospect” by Russell Campbell (filmed during the course of 1989 events to mark a 20th anniversary reunion of Christchurch PYM). A lot of it was filmed in this house.

That film has a whole section on the Anzac Day protests, which stand in stark contrast to the PR bullshit in which Anzac Day is cocooned now, not to mention the whole glorification of New Zealand’s long and sorry military history as the most willing junior servant of whoever was the dominant imperialist power at the time. My blood boiled when Becky and I were among the crowd at the 2016 All Blacks/Springboks test in Christchurch and we were all asked to stand when two uniformed military personnel paraded NZ flags, “to honour all those who have died fighting for their country” as part of the four year long propaganda exercise that is the centenary of WW1. What was that about keeping politics out of sport?

The human cost has been enormous in this tiny country. When I was in Wellington in 2016 I paid my first ever visit to the National War Memorial and when I stood at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, I remembered my late father telling me that there was a mathematical chance that it could contain his Uncle Charlie (my great uncle) who was among those who disappeared without trace in the vast slaughter house that was the Battle of the Somme during WW1. The memory of that most criminal of imperialist wars was kept alive in my family – my father, who was born after his uncle’s death but before the war’s end, was given the middle name of Charles. Charlie Gaskell – just one of the tens of millions of victims of WW1, thousands of whom were young New Zealand men like him.

I also encountered a forgotten PYM reminder in quite another context in winter 2016, when Becky and I were among the thousands who poured into the Arts Centre when it held  a couple of open days at the Great Hall, the first time the hoi polloi had been allowed back into it for 5½ years. In a previous life the Arts Centre been my campus from 1969-74 inclusive (the University of Canterbury Town Site). But as we headed for the Great Hall, which was jampacked with wall to wall people, Becky suddenly veered left, saying something that I didn’t understand.

What she was actually saying was: “I want to see the Viva Che”, which was painted on the nearby quadrangle wall (I’m embarrassed to say that I’d completely forgotten about it. So, you can see that absence does not make the heart grow fonder). But Becky hadn’t forgotten and that was her absolute top priority upon re-entering the Arts Centre for the first time in 5½ years.

And, yes, it is still there, very faded (it has been there since 1969, after all, and is still behind a fence, but definitely still there and, just, readable. Not only that, it has survived 18,000 earthquakes, whereas whole other buildings in the Arts Centre came crashing down). I can say, without fear of contradiction, that it is the only surviving PYM paintup in Christchurch. I hasten to add that I didn’t paint it – I have never been a member of the Che Guevara fan club. But that’s another story.

One other encounter with my ancient past was both personal and political. I made an impulsive decision to revisit my childhood neighbourhood, for the first time in decades. I discovered to my surprise that not only was the old family home still standing, basically unchanged, but that it was for sale and the open home was right then. Not without some trepidation – I’d last set foot in that house in 1975 - I went in. That triggered a very strong emotional response and unleashed a flood of memories, good and bad, and I had to leave after just a few minutes.

One memory that came flooding back was the circumstances under which I left home in January 1970. I had gone to Auckland (on the back of my best friend’s motorbike). My purpose in going was to participate in the epochal protest against the visit by US Vice President Spiro Agnew. I was arrested at that (the first arrest in my criminal career) and the Auckland cops rang the old man late at night to tell them I was in custody (I don’t know why they did that, maybe because of my age. It never happened with any of my subsequent arrests).

To quote from my 2005 Watchdog obituary of my father: “When I arrived home soon afterwards, he presented me with an ultimatum: ‘Get a haircut, get a job, get married, get out of this stupid outfit (PYM) with whom you’re involved – or get out by Wednesday’. I got out by Wednesday. My crying mother gave me the taxi fare and held the door open. I was 18. I told my girlfriend that I needed a place to stay for a fortnight, and proceeded to stay for 18 years (as she never failed to remind me)”. I vividly remembered that as I walked back out of that same door in 2016.

Onwards And Upwards: As I’ve already mentioned, in 2016 I turned 65 and am now an old age pensioner (being joined in the club a few months later by Bill Rosenberg and Warren Brewer). I’m mindful of the fact that this was the age at which my old friend and colleague, Owen Wilkes, decided to not apply for the pension (because he refused to take money from the State). Plus, he decided to kill himself. He said in his suicide note that he thought his natural life span was 60 and that he had outlived his use-by date – his words - by five years.

My obituary of Owen is in Watchdog 109, August 2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/09/09.htm. I admire his unflinching honesty even in death. He is not the only subject of a Watchdog obituary to have committed suicide but his remains the only one where suicide is openly given as the cause of death. Owen killed himself because he faced major health issues and decided he’d rather get out while the going was good. I understand and respect that decision.

I’ve always said that I will keep going as long as the members want me to continue, and subject to my health continuing to be good. On the latter, I have to say that my doctor has seen rather more of me in 2016 than in previous years. Things like shingles (that was interesting) and a couple of bouts of the asthma that I’ve had sporadically for many decades. The second one concerned him enough to send me straight off for a chest X ray and blood test to eliminate nasties like pneumonia and lung cancer. They did. It’s my body giving me a message and telling me to pace myself. And my use-by date is obviously a bit longer than Owen’s. I don’t yet feel the need to keep looking over my shoulder to see if an undertaker is following me with a tape measure and a bottle of embalming fluid.

The long term health issue that I finally had to confront in 2016 is hearing loss (the women in my life would snort that I’d had selective male deafness forever). I had my first hearing test in living memory and was told I need two hearing aids. The audiologist recommended applying to ACC for financial assistance for work-related hearing loss (when I had “real” jobs, such as 14 years as a Railways labourer, I worked in noisy workplaces).

But ACC’s ear, nose and throat specialist did not agree and my application was declined. I took advice and was told an appeal wouldn’t succeed. So I bought the hearing aids – they’re bloody expensive, even with a Government subsidy. In fact they cost considerably more than CAFCA is spending on a new computer with all the hardware and software bells and whistles. So now I’m getting used to a much louder world.

Life Is Not All Work With No Play: Becky and I continue to lead a full life of cultural and sporting events. To give one highlight, we went to the All Blacks/Springboks’ Christchurch test (I managed to buy two of the last six tickets left, to the envy of friends and colleagues). This was the first time I’d seen the Springboks live since 1965 and the first time ever in a test (a bit of apartheid politics had cropped up in the intervening years) and the first time I’d seen the All Blacks live since 2010, just before the quakes started. For Becky, a very keen and knowledgeable All Blacks fan, it was her first live test (and her first up close witnessing of the good old Kiwi booze culture that goes with it).

We usually get to a movie every week and pig out during the Film Festival. The Court Theatre (like the rugby stadium) is in our suburb of Addington and within easy walking distance, which is wonderful. I also walked to see “Sweeney Todd” at the Theatre Royal in the central city (when she stood up at half time the blue haired lady next to me was horrified when I cheerily asked her: “Going out for a pie?”). The last time I’d seen that show live was back in the 1980s when the title role was played by my good friend, the late Mervyn Thompson (my obituary of him is in Watchdog 70, pages 73 & 74, August 1992, https://www.scribd.com/doc/24209961/campaign-Against-Foreign-Control-of-Aotearoa).

But the cultural highlight of the year was seeing the Kate Sheppard punk rock musical “That Bloody Woman” at The Court. It was no mean feat for the very talented cast to get a full house of Christchurch’s liberal bourgeoisie to sing along with a song entitled “Fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck, fuck, fuck” (well, it is a punk rock musical). The women’s suffrage campaign was Christchurch-based and Kate Sheppard was a local. Very local actually, she is buried in Addington Cemetery, a few minutes walk from home (we go through there every day on our walk which includes a coffee stop at our local café, where we are part of the furniture).

Her headstone is low to the ground and modest, so it survived the quakes unscathed. Not so the grandiose monuments of the rich and powerful from early Christchurch who fill that now closed cemetery – they came crashing down and remain so (in one spectacular case, a towering obelisk came off its base, flipped in mid air and embedded itself upside down in the concrete slab of the neighbouring grave. Who needs special effects movies when Mother Earth lays it all on for free?).

In short, life and work remain both stimulating and interesting. Not to mention that the work is very important. So I have no plans to chuck it in the foreseeable future. Why give up something that is both immensely worthwhile and enjoyable?