Committee: Brian Turner, Colleen Hughes, James Ayers, Jeremy Agar, John Ring, Murray Horton (Secretary/Organiser), Paul Piesse and Terry Moon. We had three resignations in 2017 – Warren Brewer, who had been a “distance” member for several years, resigned earlier in the year. Lynda Boyd, who was also a distance member, did not stand again at the Annual General Meeting.

And, most momentously, 2017 marked the end of Bill Rosenberg’s 40+ years on the Committee (he had been a distance member since he permanently moved to Wellington in 2009, where he is kept very busy as the Economist and Policy Director for the Council of Trade Unions. Not to mention having been recently appointed to the Government’s Tax Working Group).

That really does mark the end of an era. In response, the AGM unanimously resolved to make Bill CAFCA’s first life member (he was disappointed to find that it didn’t come accompanied by any special card). You can read my tribute to Bill (when he left Christchurch) in my 2009 Organiser’s Report (Watchdog 122, December 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/22/08.htm). He hasn’t gone from CAFCA – he still plays an active role, such as regularly updating the Key Facts which are on our Website and are also available in hard copy.

I first met Warren Brewer in the 90s when he was a union activist in Hamilton and I made speaking visits there. His wife, Tracey Paterson, got a job in Christchurch and they came here early this century. He has been an invaluable asset ever since, not only for CAFCA but for a large number of other groups. He started off regularly helping at Watchdog mailouts, then he joined the Committee.

He was a hands-on activist – he slogged his guts out preparing the ground for my 2014 national speaking tour. He was a central figure in groups spun off from CAFCA, such as the former New Zealand Not For Sale group, which campaigned against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) in the early days of the campaign against that.

He was a founder member and key activist in Keep Our Assets Canterbury (KOA) and was Campaign Manager when John Minto was KOA’s Christchurch Mayoralty candidate at the 2016 local body elections. The Aotearoa Independence Movement (AIM) was his brainchild. Warren was into everything – as an Anti-Bases Campaign member he helped with Peace Researcher mailouts and came on Waihopai spy base protests. He was in all sorts of groups campaigning in solidarity for countries ranging from Cuba to West Papua to the Philippines.

I regarded Warren as our key strategist, our political officer. And he was right in the thick of all the seismic trauma of Christchurch’s recent past – for example, the Committee was supposed to be meeting in his Lyttelton home on the night of Tuesday February 22nd, 2011 (funnily enough we didn’t). Lyttelton was hammered by the quakes and full recovery is still a long way off. In early 2018 Tracey got a job in Hawkes Bay and, after 16 years in Christchurch, they have permanently moved north. Warren is sorely missed but still works with us in cyberspace.

I’ve known Lynda Boyd since the late 90s. She had been on the Committee since early last decade. During her time on it she lived in Auckland for several years, where she was CAFCA’s key contact and local organiser when I visited for things like Roger Award events or speaking engagements. She came back to Christchurch and got a very full on job as a union organiser, which meant that she had precious little time for the CAFCA Committee (ditto for the Anti-Bases Campaign Committee, of which she is also a member).

Lynda’s contributions to CAFCA were quite often behind the scenes but extremely important – for example, she scanned CAFCA’s complete Security Intelligence Service (SIS) file which was sent to us in hard copy. In all three cases – Bill, Warren and Lynda – they were not simply colleagues but were, and are, good friends (going back to the early 70s, in Bill’s case).

In the immediate aftermath of the February 2011 quake, Lynda and her sister Jenny drove around town delivering bottles of water to friends, including Becky and me, without running water in their homes (for five days in our case). I’m a non-driver – both Warren and Lynda have uncomplainingly served as my CAFCA (and personal) chauffeur on many occasions. In Lynda’s case, she did this in Auckland as well as Christchurch.

But it’s not all farewells. In my 2016 Report I wrote that, at a TPPA rally, “we were joined by Terry Moon, who was CAFCA’s Treasurer in the 1980s and whom 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!”.

In 2017 Terry attended her first CAFCA AGM in decades and was promptly nominated, from the floor, for the Committee. Her first words, at her first Committee meeting for nearly 30 years, were: “Where are the women?” For the record, the Committee has two women, out of total of eight (which has dropped from ten in 2016).

Terry goes back to when we were called CAFCINZ – the name changed in the 80s. In the early 80s she was both a friend and neighbour of me and my then partner (in the last house we rented before buying what has now been my home for the last 36 years). My then partner was a fellow CAFCINZ founder, Committee member and Chairperson. All three of us were on the Committee together in those days.

Throughout that decade CAFCINZ/CAFCA held Committee meetings in her Avonside home – that house got destroyed in the quakes; and the Avondale house where she was living in 2011 was badly damaged. She moved from there to the Cashmere foothills just in time to be perilously close to the February 2017 Port Hills towering inferno. Terry is indestructible, she survived the lot, and it’s great to have her back, albeit after a gap of nearly 30 years.

Membership: It is at 370+, which is down from where it was when I wrote my previous annual Report, when it was over 400 (and this is being written before the annual purge of non-payers). 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 some, but 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. Falling membership is not matched by falling funds – our finances remain very healthy. At the 2017 AGM, the suggestion was adopted for members to be invited to pay the subs of other members who had advised us they can no longer afford it (I read out one such letter at the AGM).

The issue of an aging membership is certainly not confined to CAFCA or to this country – in September 2017 I spent a weekend in Melbourne (my first visit there since 1988) in my Anti-Bases Campaign capacity, as a speaker at an Australian peace movement national conference. I was very much among my own age group. The organisers of that made speeches noting the absence of the Australian young.

All is not lost however – you might be surprised to learn that our most loyal retail outlet for Watchdog is actually a hipster barber shop a few minutes walk from my home. It is staffed by the sort of young guys who definitely don’t fit the mental image of “CAFCA supporter” (none of them are actual members). The owner, who is decades younger than me, is always happy to have a chat about the national and global political scene.

When I first met him several years ago, he was fascinated to be told that his building featured (as a endnote) in Nicky Hager’s explosive book “The Hollow Men”*, which finished Don Brash’s career as National Party Leader. It detailed how the Exclusive Brethren were behind 2005 election campaign leaflets attacking the then Labour government and its partners (these things really were “fake news”, a decade before that phrase was coined). * Jeremy Agar’s review of “The Hollow Men” is in Watchdog 114, May 2007, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/14/03.htm.

One such leaflet “attacking Labour’s coalition partner, Progressive MP Jim Anderton, was delivered to his Wigram electorate the day before the election, bearing the address of an empty shop a few doors from Anderton’s home”. The hipster barber shop owner reminded me to include this.

Gaining new members is a permanent project. We have some wonderfully evangelical members who set out to recruit others. And we also recruit at places such as 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 $56,000, in round figures, which is more than at the time of my previous annual Report. This is a very good result, considering that we’re not a business seeking to make a profit. Basically, CAFCA is financially independent. 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).

In early 2017 we were able to make a $4,000 short term loan to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account (which exists solely to provide my income) when that dipped too low and was in danger of having to break its own term deposit (which incurs break fees). That CAFCA loan enabled the Organiser Account term deposit to proceed to maturity, later in 2017, and CAFCA has been repaid.

As I mentioned in my previous Report, we have enough money on hand for vital and expensive administrative tasks such as the long overdue late 2016 upgrade of our computer hardware and software and general operating systems. That equipment upgrade continued in 2017 with the purchase of a new router (apparently, they should be replaced after two or three years – ours had lasted about seven. No wonder it was playing up).

And I took the leap, at my own expense, into the wonderful world of smart phones, after my trusty old dumb phone died after six years (by contrast, smart phone batteries only last two years). The first time it rang I didn’t know how to answer it – embarrassingly, it turned out to be a young reporter following up on a press release I’d sent out. When I told her my story, she laughed and said: “That sounds like my grandfather”.

On one occasion the most routine trip to buy office equipment turned out to be an emotionally bumpy affair. For many years CAFCA had been buying printer toner (and even printers) from the Christchurch branch of a national office supplies chain. A multimillion-dollar outfit, not a Mum and Dad operation. I needed some toner before they closed for Christmas 2017. I rang them the day before they were closing for the holidays, to be told they didn't have any of that type in stock but that they'd get it couriered overnight from Auckland (at no extra cost to us). It was urgent as they were shutting for a couple of weeks at 12 noon the next day.

I duly rang them again the next morning to confirm the toner had arrived. And was told that in the intervening 24 hours the entire national company (not just the Christchurch branch) had been closed, with effect from 12 noon that very same day, with all staff laid off. They had got the news at 1 p.m. the previous day. Needless to say, none of them belonged to a union. And there was no redundancy package in their contracts.

By the time I arrived to collect our toner cartridge, the office was closed and I had to (for the first time ever) enter the building via the warehouse, where shell-shocked workers were milling around. I had flashbacks to my Railways’ mass layoff days in the 80s and 90s, when thousands lost their jobs (including my own 1991 redundancy. But that wasn't at 24 hours’ notice, or right on Christmas, and I got a redundancy payment that was only taxed at 5% in those days. Ironically, this business was very close to where I used to work on the Railways).

The business was being closed so hastily that all stock was simply flogged off in a fire sale. The now unemployed staff were left to close up the building on their way out. I didn't see much evidence of Winston Peters’ much vaunted "human face" on this particular manifestation of capitalism. It’s a very shitty way to treat people.

But I was pleased to later discover that the woman I’d dealt with for all those years (and who’d given CAFCA a discount as a regular customer) got another job at a nearby similar company (from whom I now buy our toner). She was lucky – she had told me she was 61 and had hoped that her former job “would see me through” (to retirement and the pension).

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 2017 we bought several thousand dollars’ worth of envelopes, which will last us until well into 2018.

Over and above the costs involved in running the organisation and publishing Watchdog, there were costs such as paying for my travel from and to Christchurch to speak on behalf of the Roger Award organisers at the Auckland event to announce the winner (the first time it had been held in Auckland since 2011). CAFCA paid all costs incurred by the AIM campaign since it was announced in 2017.

We could also afford to give generous donations to worthy causes such as the campaign against the National government’s ideologically-driven policy of flogging off 2,500 Christchurch State houses (in 2017 I spoke at one public meeting and one rally as part of that campaign). In December 2017 the new Labour government announced the end to that policy, a move which CAFCA fully endorses. That campaign was a success – but Labour has no plans to do anything about those State houses which have already been sold off by National.

Organiser Account: The Account has declined by a couple of thousand dollars since the time of my previous Report, with approximately* 50-60 regular pledgers and $20,000 (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. *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.

There was a trend in 2017 of a number of pledgers (some of whom had been doing it for many years) advising us that they were having to quit because of changed financial circumstances, such as retirement, and could no longer afford the pledge. It was touching that these people felt the need to be apologetic to me about it. Some pledgers have been doing it since the Account started in 1991. We have grown old together.

Recruiting new pledgers is a permanent project and we do succeed in attracting some new ones (so there is what is called “churn” between existing pledgers quitting and new ones joining). Again, I’d like to single out the late John Case who, uniquely, is still posthumously pledging to the Account several years after he died. I have already mentioned, in the CAFCA finances section, that CAFCA made a short term $4,000 loan to the Organiser Account in 2017 when the latter ran too low. It wouldn’t have run out of money, it just would have had to break a term deposit. That was avoided and CAFCA was fully repaid within a few months.

Once again: my thanks to James Ayers for being the Organiser Account Treasurer. He does a very good job of it. In 2015 he and his wife Melanie had to postpone, at short notice, an overseas trip because James suddenly got seriously ill. He is fully recovered and they made that delayed trip in 2017 – which meant, that for a couple of months, I was in charge of my own pay again (as I have been on regular occasions throughout my 26 years as Organiser).

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 Movement. I’m pleased to report that since 2015 I have been paid the current Living Wage rate (it was increased to $20.20 per hour, from July 2017). To show our practical support for that Movement CAFCA belongs to it, 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. 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 26 years, funded entirely by pledges and donations, which amazes me.

I also get the old age pension (and pay secondary tax). I continue to work fulltime as the CAFCA/ABC Organiser, and 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 have already mentioned my attendance at the Australian peace movement conference in September 2017.

The participants were, overwhelmingly, old buggers and I had some very interesting conversations comparing the merits of our two countries’ respective old age pensions. Suffice to say, Kiwis are better off (Aussie’s pension age is going up to 67, it’s means tested and you can’t get the pension and also work). I met locals who were older than me and still, reluctantly, working, because they couldn’t afford to live on the Australian pension.

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.  The three 2017 issues were two of 100 pages each and one of 80 pages, which makes for a respectable size journal. One of those 100 pagers contained no Overseas Investment Office section (see below for the explanation). If it had done, it would have been the biggest ever issue. Thanks to Layout Editor Leigh Cookson and cover artist Ian Dalziel. Thanks to my Committee colleague, Jeremy Agar, who is the Reviews Editor and whose reviews have attracted regular praise.

Being Editor keeps me very busy but, depending on time, I also do some writing. For example, for the December 2017 issue, I was able to write an analysis of the election (my election analyses always elicit comment, for and against). Thanks to our regular writers such as the prolific Dennis Small and John Minto (sadly, John has resigned as a Watchdog writer, as of 2018. He told me: “I simply don’t have the time – teaching is all consuming”).

The variety and sheer number of writers is very high (for example, we had ten for that December issue – and that was one of the smallest number of writers for a while). The quality is very high: some of them are people with a national profile, such as Bryan Gould and Mike Treen. 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.

When I asked Sue Bradford if she could arrange to get us a review copy of her biography (you can read Jeremy Agar’s review of it in Watchdog 146, December 2017, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/46/07.html), she gladly agreed and told her publisher that Watchdog is the “last remaining community-based Left journal in New Zealand”. That’s sad but true (although we don’t dwell on the sad part). 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 retail outlets 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 CAFCA package deal.

The December 2017 issue turned out to be the last one produced by our printers (who had been doing it since 1997). The major Christchurch institution where the printery was located decided, as of 2018, to contract out its printing to a huge transnational corporation.  The head printer, whom I’d known and worked with for all of those 20 years, had no alternative but to inform all their private customers that we’d all have to find new printers.

Apparently, I was the first one to be informed: “My apologies, Murray, and many thanks for all the years of great custom from you, you have been our longest customer and it was always a pleasure to deal with you”. This had been talked about for at least a year, so it was not a great surprise. But it was sad to end, quite abruptly, such a long and productive working relationship.

Over those years I had become friends with those printers. We’d been through a lot together. For example, they were among the central city premises fenced off and guarded by the Army in the aftermath of the February 2011 killer quake – we still got the next Watchdog printed on schedule.

I had already paid tribute to them when the former head printer, Keith Miskimmin, retired in 2016. That tribute is in Watchdog 142, August 2016, “Watchdog Printer Retires”, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/42/18.html. Keith was succeeded as head printer by Susan Sell, who had actually been there longer than him. In my tribute I wrote: “I look forward to continuing to work with Sue for years to come”. In the event, we only continued working together for less than two more years.

Sue was always prepared to go the extra mile for us – on a couple of occasions she personally delivered the printed Watchdogs to my home (from where I work), when I couldn’t quickly access a vehicle to go and get them. I was delighted that when I paid my last visit to the printer, after being told about its closure to private customers, that Keith happened to pop in while I was saying goodbye to Sue. I hadn’t seen him since he’d retired in 2016. They were great printers and we would have happily stayed with them indefinitely.

So, we now had to find a new printer (and Anti-Bases Campaign was in exactly the same situation, because they were the printers of ABC’s Peace Researcher - which I co-edit, with Warren Thomson). The problem was speedily resolved – we simply gave the job (both jobs, actually) to the local firm where CAFCA has had photocopying and printing done – but never Watchdog - since the 1980s.

They were already keen to print Watchdog and, unsolicited, had given us a competitive quote for it, in 2017. Now they’ve got the job and we’re confident that they’ll maintain the high standard set by our previous printers. I’ve worked with these guys even longer than with our previous printers and, likewise, regard them as friends. This issue is the first one printed by them.

Overseas Investment Office: There is a theme of change throughout my Report this year and this section on the OIO is no different. In 2017, Committee member James Ayers resigned as the person responsible for writing up the OIO’s monthly Decisions, both for Watchdog and CAFCA’s Website. He resigned simply because he is too busy in his job and his life. There had only ever been two OIO writers in the nearly 30 years that CAFCA has been writing up its Decisions, namely Bill Rosenberg and James.

That could have all stopped in 2017. Nobody else on the Committee was in a position to do it and it has never been part of my job. But we tried a new approach and appealed far and wide for a volunteer to take it on. There was no guarantee of any takers but we received several applicants – all of them women and not all of them CAFCA members.

We chose Linda Hill, who is a member, and who has committed to doing it for several years. She is making a very good job of it and is a worthy successor to both Bill and James (who, incidentally, is not lost to CAFCA. He is still a very active Committee member and is in charge of the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account i.e. he is my paymaster).

Website & Other Means Of Electronic Communication: More change here. Chris Oakley had been running the Website (and running it very well) since taking over when Bill Rosenberg resigned as Webmaster, in 2014. But Chris himself resigned, as of the end of 2017 (there have only ever been two Webmaster in the decades that CAFCA has had a site). Thanks to Chris for the years of hard work he put into it.

As with the OIO Decisions writeups, we faced the prospect of finding a new Webmaster from outside the Committee and maybe from outside the membership. But our newest Committee member, Terry Moon, put her hand up to do it, having had some IT experience (Cass Daley runs the separate Watchdog site). Our Website is a vital resource and the first point of contact with CAFCA for many people, including the media. I’ve been recently told, by journalists from both NZ and overseas, that they found us through the site and that they found the site a goldmine of information.

Warren Brewer runs the Watchblog site, which is separate from the CAFCA and Watchdog ones. Watchblog is the only site where you can find Watchdog issues as PDFs, complete with all illustrations. Warren also administers our Twitter account. Colleen Hughes administers our Facebook group, which has several times more members 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 site.

We encountered fundamental change when our Internet Service Provider (the only one we’ve ever had since we went online in 1996) announced it was going out of the connectivity business, as of March 2018, and we accepted its offer to be transferred to another ISP that they recommended. It involved no change to our e-mail address; to our bulk e-mail distribution system; or to the free Web hosting for the CAFCA and Watchdog and ABC Websites.

For 22 years our old ISP went the extra mile for us. Being small, Christchurch-based and supportive of CAFCA, they dealt with all manner of technical queries; made one house call to check out my computer set up; and did all the huge amount of data entry needed to make our bulk e-mail system operational. Plus, they regularly turned up at public meetings, marches and rallies on a variety of issues. They will be missed.

Roger Award:

For the first time since 2011, the event (to announce the 2016 winner) was held in Auckland. FIRST Union, which is the biggest and most active union supporter of CAFCA (and of the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account), organised it (and fellow major union E Tu provided the venue). Specifically, thanks are due to union officials Robert Reid, Dennis Maga (a former Roger Award judge), and Joe Hendren (a former CAFCA Committee member for several years before he moved to his Auckland job).

The fantastically ugly Roger Award trophy was on display; the event consisted of speeches from me, on behalf of the organisers, and the Auckland-based Chief Judge, Sue Bradford, who announced the winners and explained why they won. It was a low key affair with a small crowd and also featured a speech from Robert Reid as MC and a musical bracket from a local political folk singer.

The 2016 Roger Award was won by Youi; IAG/State Insurance came second; and Uber came third. You can read the full Judges’ Report at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/pdf/roger-award-2016-judges-report.pdf. The online-only People’s Choice Award (organised for several years by Warren Brewer) was won by Bathurst Resources (by one vote, from Youi). There is no equivalent of the Judges’ Report for that.

We thank the 2016 judges - Sue Bradford; Teresa O’Connor (Nelson), Deborah Russell (who was then of Palmerston North but has since become an Auckland Labour MP), David Small (Christchurch) and Dean Parker (Auckland). We thank the Judges’ Report writers, who have done a fantastic job for the past several years and who wish to remain anonymous. For the first time in years the announcement of the Roger Award winners attracted no mainstream media coverage but the insurance industry in-house media reported that two insurance transnationals were among the finalists (they filled first and second spots).

Continuing the theme of change throughout this Report, I must now take it one step further and sadly announce the end of the Roger Award. The 2016 Roger was the last one and that April 2017 gathering in Auckland was the last Roger Award event. Why? Rest assured that it wasn’t because transnational corporations (TNCs) have started behaving better. Regrettably, that is not the case. No, the organisers (the Committees of CAFCA and the former GATT Watchdog) made the 2017 decision to end it because, basically, it had had its day and run out of steam.

In recent years we had received a smaller and smaller number of nominations and were having to research and write more and more of them ourselves. That small Auckland event which attracted no mainstream media coverage confirmed for us that we had made the right decision. It was time to get out while the going was still good. The Roger Award had been a fantastic weapon in CAFCA’s armoury to use against the TNCs and had a real impact throughout its 20 years of existence (the first Roger Award was for 1997).

It had an impact both in terms of very regular mainstream media coverage, sometimes extensive; we know that it definitely impacted on its targets (because some of them bit like sharks); we never had any trouble attracting very good judges, some of them very high profile indeed. The quality of the research, both in the nominations and the Judges’ Reports, was extremely high. Taken all together, it comprises a fantastic resource, which can be accessed at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/roger.html.

And it is a resource which continues to be used – twice in the past 12 months I have been contacted by people who had either found or were seeking material from our Roger Award treasure trove (coincidentally, both inquirers were after stuff on the same TNC, but from different years). So, the Roger Award is no more. But, my God, it was a lot of fun while it lasted. Serious fun; fun that delivered a well-deserved kick up the arse to the TNCs and their Kiwi collaborators.

The hideous trophy itself, inside its specially built travel case, is back in our garage (which serves as a props museum for both CAFCA and the Anti-Bases Campaign). The company that engraved the winner’s name on the plaque every year is walking distance from home and I pass their premises every day on my walk to our local café – so I simply called in recently to break the news to them that we no longer require their services. They took it in their stride, although they said they’d miss finding out, in advance of anyone else, who each year’s winner was. But I don’t think the loss of our annual one-line job will threaten their profit margin.

Keep Our Assets Canterbury (KOA): I am the Convenor and a number of other Committee members are also very actively involved with the KOA Committee (Paul Piesse, Jeremy Agar and Brian Turner, to a greater or lesser degree. Former Committee member Warren Brewer was a key figure in KOA right from its birth in 2012 until he permanently left Christchurch at the beginning of 2018).

Others on the KOA Committee are John Minto, Bronwen Summers, Denis O’Connor (a former CAFCA Committee member himself), Steve Howard, Dot Lovell-Smith, and Mike Newlove. KOA was CAFCA’s major project in 2016, even more so than it had been in 2015. And KOA’s major project in 2016 was running John Minto as our candidate for Mayor of Christchurch. I reported on all this in detail in my 2016 Report (Warren Brewer, who was then a CAFCA Committee member, was John’s Campaign Manager and did an excellent job).

KOA’s work focused 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). The rationale was to help pay for an alleged “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 the National government, one which had a clear agenda to sell public assets.

The Council announced that its maintenance and infrastructure company, City Care, would be the first to be sold. So, KOA (with CAFCA’s active involvement) campaigned throughout 2015 and 2016 under the slogan: “Save City Care”. The Minto For Mayor campaign was just part of this. And our campaign worked. Despite the Council (well, a slim majority of Councillors) having been hellbent on selling City Care, it backed down not long before the 2016 local body elections and abandoned the sale. Against the odds, KOA had won! We had, in fact, saved City Care. I wrote about this in detail in my 2016 Report, plus regular Watchdog articles.

There was more good news post-election – the Council restored Enable (its broadband infrastructure company) to the strategic assets list (strategic assets can’t be sold without public consultation). And, in 2017, the Council came to its senses and also restored City Care to that strategic assets list (over the objections of the Mayor, Lianne Dalziel). But it has not, so far, restored Red Bus to that list, meaning that is a publicly-owned trading asset that can be sold without notice.

Sea Change

We detect a sea change in the present Christchurch City Council – there is no more talk of asset sales and KOA is immodest enough to claim that we played a role in that, particularly with the Mayoral campaign. There have been losses as well as victories – the Council allowed itself to be parted from its social housing portfolio by the National government (the Christchurch City Council was the second biggest landlord in NZ, after the State).

On the subject of public housing, KOA (and CAFCA) got actively involved in the campaign to stop National selling 2,500 Christchurch State houses. Paul Piesse was CAFCA’s rep on the organising committee; in 2017 I spoke, on behalf of KOA, at one State housing public meeting and one march and rally. This story had a happy ending – Labour campaigned to stop the sale of State houses and, once in Government, honoured its promise. But it has done nothing to renationalise those already sold (because that would breach property rights, the bedrock of capitalism, and Labour is very keen not to upset the capitalist applecart).

KOA and CAFCA also got involved in the Living Wage campaign (as CAFCA/ABC Organiser I have been paid the Living Wage since 2013). Brian Turner is CAFCA’s rep on the Christchurch committee, and Warren Brewer was KOA’s rep (with Warren gone, Brian now represents both) The Living Wage campaign had a victory in 2017 when the Christchurch City Council voted to pay it to its workers.

But not yet to Council contract workers. That may become a battle in its own right, following the recent decision of the Council’s events and venues company to transfer all its workers to a transnational services corporation. The Council company insisted that this was not to dodge having to pay its workers the Living Wage. Yeah, right.

KOA itself kept ticking over in 2017 – there were no pickets or marches, but we (usually Steve Howard and I) made the odd speaking appearance before a Council meeting and I did the odd KOA media interview. CAFCA remains centrally involved in KOA because asset sales are core CAFCA business.

And we can never afford to take our eye off the ball – powerful local voices, from business to the media, keep calling for “maybe partial sales of assets” to enable the Council to pay its share of Christchurch rebuild anchor projects (read: white elephants) like the proposed new covered rugby stadium. These white elephants were forced on the previous Council by the previous Government under the onerous Christchurch rebuild cost share agreement. Or to fix quake-damaged infrastructure that the Government simply patched up. Or, that old hardy perennial, to keep the rates down (they’d be even higher if the city didn’t own those assets).

Aotearoa Independence Movement (AIM): this was CAFCA’s new campaign in 2017, and was a real return to our roots in the 1970s (when we started off as CAFCINZ). As I’ve already mentioned, it was Warren Brewer’s brainchild. The idea was to capitalise on the global and national revulsion at Donald Trump and to build a campaign for a non-aligned, truly independent Aotearoa. It was not intended to be a new party or organisation, nor did it have a list of policies which people had to sign onto. It was hoped that it would build a life of its own, of which CAFCA would simply be one component (as opposed to the be all and end all of it).

I was the spokesperson for AIM. I made a speech in that capacity, while I was in Auckland for the April 2017 Roger Award event (the last one of those). I produced a couple of AIM leaflets and I did a number of press releases, some on subjects that went beyond the range of CAFCA’s usual issues, and they elicited mostly positive responses. The leaflets and media releases were all uploaded to an AIM page which was set up on the CAFCA Website. I did some community radio interviews in my AIM capacity but it never achieved any mainstream media breakthrough.

That lack of any kind of breakthrough became obvious from the outset – AIM just did not get traction. I think one major reason was that people did not make the connection between revulsion at Trump and the need for New Zealand to get out of the US Empire. We tried to build a national committee and invited a whole range of groups to be represented on it – with a couple of exceptions, we got no response.

It became plain that we were putting the cart before the horse i.e. that not enough people were convinced of the need for such a new campaign and therefore felt no reason to get involved. What was needed was a grassroots, bottom up, method of campaign-building, not a top down one. But the fundamental problem was that not enough people saw the need for it at all. And that they thought we were trying to create a new organisation, despite our assurances that the goal was a campaign only. In fact, the goal was to have a national dialogue to build such a campaign.

The national launch of AIM was set to take place in Blenheim on the same January 2018 day as the Anti-Bases Campaign’s latest Waihopai spy base protest (CAFCA organised and paid for the AIM launch event). It was obvious long before that date that AIM was buggered but we decided to proceed with the launch, primarily because we had gone past the point of no return with it.

So, it proceeded as scheduled, with 40-50 people in attendance (which was more than we’d expected to show up). I was the MC and one of the three key note speakers, the other two being former Green MP, Keith Locke, and CAFCA’s own Bill Rosenberg (but in his capacity as Economist of the Council of Trade Unions). As soon as those three speeches were over, I assumed the role of facilitator of a whole-of-group discussion.

Before going any further, I said there had been various criticisms of AIM and that it was the time to decide whether to proceed with or abort the proposed AIM campaign. I told the group that from its 2017 outset AIM had, for whatever reasons, failed to gain traction. I listed the specific criticisms - that our organising style was wrong; that a campaign about "independence and sovereignty" could not proceed without tino rangatiratanga being central to it.

Most recently, a new criticism had arisen, namely a January 2018 Chris Trotter column (in which I was referred to as "The Last Mohican") saying that, to succeed, AIM needed to be a "well-funded political party", not simply a campaign. One of the "lack of tino rangatiratanga" critics was present, so I invited him to speak on that topic, which he did. There then ensued a very productive, amicable and open discussion for more than an hour, arguing the pros and cons. Indeed, when the discussion appeared to have finished, there was a call from the floor for people who had not spoken to take the opportunity to do so and some did.

I then asked for suggestions on how to resolve the matter one way or the other. The group felt that a vote by an open show of hands was the best and most democratic way. I then put the same three options that I had recently foreshadowed to the CAFCA Committee - that AIM proceed as scheduled; that AIM be "parked up" until some unspecified time in the future; that AIM be killed off there and then.

Voted Out Of Existence

There was no support at all for "parking it up". So, it came down to two votes: all those in favour of AIM proceeding as scheduled (for the record, I voted for that. There were a number of other people who voted in favour. Some had come a long way, specifically to get involved in an AIM campaign). Then, the second vote was for all those in favour of AIM not proceeding any further. The majority of those who voted in favour of that was at least 2 to 1. It was a very clear vote.

I’m pleased that I forced the issue to be decided there and then, by an open democratic vote, rather than a decision (one way or the other) by a small number of people behind closed doors. These points are worth noting:

• the discussion and vote were all held in a very friendly spirit, there was no disagreement, arguments, rancour or bitterness;
• the vote against AIM was not because of its not including tino rangatiratanga. That point was discussed and it was fell that it could be dealt with at a later time, if AIM had proceeded;
• the vote against AIM was because it was felt that there is no need for another, separate, campaign when people are already campaigning on different aspects of what AIM would have been about;
• it was felt that what is needed is more networking among existing groups and campaigns;
• there is no special role seen for CAFCA in any such networking, other than as a member of the network;
• the group felt that Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) should have a special role in any such network, specifically via its regular Waihopai protest serving as an occasion for a national activists' gathering.

To conclude: the meeting voted for AIM to not proceed. Where that leaves CAFCA is where we were before we adopted the idea of the AIM campaign.AIM was launched but it was born dead and CAFCA was left AIMless. All that remained was to decently bury it. The main task was to archive the former AIM page to elsewhere on the CAFCA Website (so that all of that work did not simply disappear). CAFCA’s AIM subcommittee (myself, Paul Piesse and Warren Brewer) was wound up after a year’s work, and so was AIM’s national committee.

Was I disappointed? More relieved, to be honest. It was obvious from very early on that this baby wasn’t going to fly, so better to cut our losses, hopefully learn the lessons, and move on. I think AIM was both behind the times and ahead of the times. It took CAFCA way back to our original fire-breathing anti-imperialist roots in the 1970s, emphasising themes and using language that we hadn’t used for many decades. That was how AIM was behind the times (although, personally, I think such topics are timeless. All that changes are the language – and the hairstyles and hair colour. Or, in some cases, the actual existence of hair).

But AIM was certainly ahead of the times, in that Trump and everything he stands for are not going away anytime soon. Indeed, if he is re-elected in 2020, he will very likely be coming to a town near you – specifically Auckland, in November 2021, when NZ next hosts the APEC Leaders’ Summit (our last US Presidential visit, by Bill Clinton, was in 1999, when NZ last hosted an APEC Leaders’ Summit).

Then, if there is a call for a broad united front to protest Trump, the bright orange figurehead of the battleship US Imperialism, and people are scratching around for a name, we have one to hand. We even have a banner – it has been “archived” in our garage – the Museum, of the Revolution! - along with many other past and present props.

Relations With Political Parties:  I need to add a new category here, namely Relations With Government (which has a novel ring to it). It sounds grandiose and, indeed, it only consists of one meeting with one Minister thus far. But that’s one more meeting than CAFCA has had with a Minister from any previous Government, Labour or National.

Once the new Government was announced I wasted no time in meeting, in late 2017, with the new Minister of Land Information, Green MP Eugenie Sage, to discuss, in detail, the Government’s new regime for foreigners wanting to buy NZ farmland, plus various other aspects of the 2005 Overseas Investment Act (which is the one still in force today). She is the Minister in charge of the Overseas Investment Office.

We take heart from the fact that Eugenie is the first Minister of Land Information ever prepared to meet with CAFCA and seek our views on a subject on which we have acquired decades of knowledge and expertise. You can read a fuller account of my meeting with Eugenie in my lead article in Watchdog 146, December 2017, “Putting A Human Face On Capitalism: What’s That Old Saying About Pigs And Lipstick?”, specifically in subsection “Tightening Up Farmland Sales Rules Welcomed”, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/46/01.html.

Of course, Eugenie (like the other two Green Ministers) is outside Cabinet. We certainly haven’t been invited to meet with any actual Cabinet Ministers, from either Labour or New Zealand First. But, wearing my KOA hat, I spoke – as part of the successful campaign to stop National selling Christchurch State houses – at one public meeting and one rally, alongside a number of MPs from various Parliamentary parties, one of whom is now a Minister (at the conclusion of one of my speeches, she said to me: “I was surprised to hear you say anything nice about Labour, Murray”).

KOA 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 its Christchurch local government form of The People’s Choice). KOA also has a working relationship with specific City Councillors.

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 a variety of them.

Wearing my Anti-Bases Campaign hat, I have had a decades-long close working relationship with both the Green Party and individual Green MPs on our shared campaign to close the Waihopai spy base. At the January 2017 Waihopai protest retiring Green MP, Steffan Browning, spoke for the last time in his Parliamentary capacity (Steffan has been involved in the Waihopai campaign for many years, long pre-dating his years as an MP).

In January 2018, we welcomed the Greens’ newest MP, Golriz Gharahman, to speak at the base gate. Her speech attracted media interest because, for the first time, a Government MP spoke against the Labour government policy of maintaining the Waihopai spy base status quo. ABC, and CAFCA, are delighted that the Greens are sticking to their guns in calling for Waihopai to be closed. Former Green MP, Keith Locke, has spoken at Waihopai protests for decades, including right throughout his Parliamentary career. In 2018 he attended again, and was one of the keynote speakers at the Blenheim (non) launch of AIM.

Relations With Unions: CAFCA has had a long and ongoing productive national relationship with a number of unions and individual unionists. We have an ongoing very friendly relationship 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 organised the 2016 Roger Award event (which was held in Auckland in April 2017. See my report on the event, the last one ever, in the Roger Award sub-section, above).

Wearing my Philippines Solidarity hat, I have had a working relationship with FIRST’s new General Secretary, Dennis Maga and his activist wife Amie, since he arrived in this country as a political refugee more than a decade ago. It is great to see a former organiser from the Kilusang Mayo Uno (May First Movement), with which I’ve had dealings since the 80s, rise to the top of one of New Zealand’s biggest unions and the one which is friendliest to CAFCA.

Other unions we work, or have worked, with are the Maritime Union of NZ (MUNZ), Rail and Maritime Transport 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. My most enjoyable trade union experience in 2017 happened in my Anti-Bases Campaign capacity and didn’t take place in NZ. In September I was invited to speak at the national conference of the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN), in Melbourne.

The conference was held in a Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) building and the union and its members generously supported it both financially and in attending it. The MUA also announced that it will incorporate IPAN’s work into its training programme for its delegates and organisers. One of the conference’s major speakers was the MUA’s Assistant National Secretary, Warren Smith. His speech so galvanised those present that one Aussie peace movement participant exclaimed to him: “Brother, I thought that I was listening to something from 1977, not 2017!”.

Warren’s speech “Peace Is Union Business” is in Peace Researcher 54, November 2017, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/pr-backissues/pr54.pdf. I recommend you read it – I haven’t heard anything remotely like it from any NZ union leader in decades. After Warren’s speech I had a chance to have a chat to him and we ended up talking about somebody we both knew – Dave Morgan (an Aussie, incidentally), who was the national leader of the NZ Seamen’s/Seafarers’ Union (now MUNZ) for decades.

I started my career as a political activist nearly 50 years ago with the Christchurch Progressive Movement and the first PYM meeting I ever attended was in Dave Morgan’s flat (he was then the Lyttelton Secretary of the Seamen’s Union). It had been decades since I'd been immersed in a large gathering of Aussies and I'd forgotten what fun that can be (it was my first visit to Melbourne since 1988). The MUA venue came complete with a bar, an indoor barbecue and a big screen TV so that participants didn't have to miss the footy (Aussie Rules, which is incomprehensible to me).

The MUA is an old school, blue collar, fighting union, which is justifiably famous for having defeated the vicious attempt by the Howard government to destroy it in 1998. It provides a stark contrast to the NZ union leadership of 1991 which meekly surrendered to National’s Employment Contracts Act, a wound from which the union movement has never recovered (I was a grassroots railway workers’ union official then. Don’t get me started on how NZ workers were sold out by their union “leaders” of that time. Ken Douglas is right up there in my pantheon of villains).

Media Profile & Public Speaking:

For a small Christchurch-based group CAFCA has had a high national mainstream media profile for decades and the past year was no different (although, just to be perverse, the one CAFCA event usually guaranteed to get mainstream media coverage every year – the Roger Award – got none in 2017. That reinforced our decision to end it). I regularly get interviewed by community radio stations, either in a Christchurch studio, or by phone from elsewhere in the country. But 2017 and on into 2018 saw a lot more interest from the mainstream media.

Some of that was in response to press releases that I put out (both in my CAFCA and [former] AIM capacities). But other media interviews were entirely unsolicited. The change of Government and its adopting of slightly more restrictive policies in relation to foreign speculators buying houses and foreigners buying farmland led to a greater media interest in what CAFCA has been saying for decades.

The whole subject of foreigners buying houses is one that we have not plunged into in the past but the media now wanted to hear from us about it. So, in January 2018, the country’s biggest paper, the New Zealand Herald, invited me to write a few sentences about it for their Business section. That became part of a major feature and the paper liked it so much that they repeated it a few days later as part of a debate on foreigners buying houses (they illustrated it with a 2006 photo of me against a backdrop of Lyttelton port, taken during the victorious Keep Our Port Public campaign, which I had fronted on behalf of CAFCA).

The Auckland-based media picked up on CAFCA’s appearance in the Auckland paper, leading to me doing a Radio Live interview (from a Kaikoura café, en route to the Waihopai spy base protest), attempting to answer insightful questions like: “Do you want to build a wall around the country and keep all the foreigners out?” (my middle name is Donald but that’s the only thing I have in common with President Trump).

Actually, the Herald gives CAFCA a good run. When I publicised Bill Rosenberg’s latest update of our Key Facts, in February 2018, the Herald wrote it up into a Business article that same day (you can read and view the Key Facts online at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/key-facts.html).

What was different about media interest in the past year was that some of it came from overseas. We started 2017 with CAFCA being mentioned in a long feature in the New Yorker. CAFCA’s fame has obviously spread. We’ve never actually been contacted by the New Yorker. But at the other end of the year, I was rung by a researcher for a major Australian TV current affairs show and by an Australia correspondent for Swiss and German papers. More recently I was contacted by the Australia correspondent for the UK Financial Times. Nothing came from any of these contacts but the fact that they were made at all was significant in itself.

The common denominator was interest in the subject of rural land sales to foreigners and/or super-rich foreigners buying NZ land as bolt holes. Sometimes it’s the details that fascinate foreign journalists – the Swiss/German one told me her Editor was fascinated to learn that the major shareholder of a company buying South Island dairy farms is CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, which was succinctly described by Linda Hill, Watchdog’s Overseas Investment Office Decisions’ writer, as the “people who dug the big hole under Switzerland looking for the Higgs boson particle”).

I was also invited to do some writing for some very niche media, and took the opportunity to raise the profile of CAFCA whilst doing so. I was invited to write an article about a work of art with which I “felt a connection” for the Christchurch Art Gallery’s very glossy magazine. I wrote about a painting by a good friend, the late Tony Fomison, and emphasised Tony the political man and his membership of CAFCA. You can read that in Watchdog 146, December 2017,http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/46/09.html.

And I was invited to write a short piece for the online magazine of my Christchurch high school’s old boys’ newsletter – I wrote about how the oldest entry in my NZ Security Intelligence Service Personal File related to something I did was I was at that school in the 1960s. You can also read that in Watchdog 146, December 2017,http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/46/10.html.

As for public speaking, I didn’t do much of that in the last year. My one actual CAFCA speech in 2017 was at the Roger Award event in Auckland, on behalf of the organisers (and that’s the last time I’ll be doing that). I did a couple of speeches in my former AIM spokesperson capacity – one was in Auckland in April 2017 while I was up there for the (last) Roger Award event; the other was at AIM’s (non) launch in Blenheim, in January 2018. I won’t be doing any more AIM speaking.

And, in my ABC capacity, I spoke at the September 2017 Melbourne peace movement conference that I have already mentioned. You can read my speech: “New Zealand: A Reality Check. But Isn’t It Nuclear-Free And Out Of ANZUS?” online in Peace Researcher 54, November 2017, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/pr-backissues/pr54.pdf. Plus, of course, I speak at the Waihopai spy base protest, plus any related Blenheim events.

CAFCA Priorities:  with the Roger Award having been finished after 20 years, and 2017’s project – AIM - having proved to be a non-starter (and with KOA just quietly ticking over), CAFCA has no special projects or events of our own on the go, for the first time in a long time.  But we will continue to network with likeminded groups on campaigns, events and issues, as we have done for decades, on a whole raft of things.

Examples over the years have included: New Zealand Not For Sale, Keep Our Port Public, and the Campaign For People’s Sovereignty. We have worked with other groups on specific projects, ranging from individual unions to groups fighting mining TNCs on the Coromandel and the whole range of groups that tried to stop Westpac taking over TrustBank Canterbury. You win some, you lose some.

Ongoing projects include getting our message out to more people (including building our social media presence) and recruiting new and, hopefully younger, members. Building CAFCA and establishing a succession plan for when I go are priorities. Watchdog is a major ongoing project by itself, as is our OIO work. Other issues include misleadingly called “free trade” deals (including the resurrected Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement [TPPA]); privatisation; corporate welfare & tax dodging; and the hardy perennial of rural land sales. We’ve got plenty to keep us busy.

Quake Aftermath: For the first time in years, thank God, I don’t have anything to report about CAFCA (or ABC) Committee members in relation to quake damage, quake repairs or quake rebuilds. That’s not to say that Christchurch is not still getting a few quakes – there were a few of them during one January 2018 weekend, after a couple of years of seismic peace (the experts tell us that it will take decades for Christchurch to “settle down”). But quakes seem positively passé now – Christchurch has moved on to whole new disasters, such as regular floods and the 2017 Port Hills fire, which was of Biblical proportions (we watched it from home).

But I do have one piece of quake aftermath news to report. As of December 2017, I started doing CAFCA’s (and my own personal) banking in Kiwbank’s new bank, right in the heart of Christchurch’s CBD (which is still one big construction site. At the time of writing the Kiwibank building itself is not finished). So, what? Well, the last time I had set foot in a Kiwibank on that site was on the morning of February 22nd, 2011 (as I’ve already mentioned, CAFCA was scheduled to have a Committee meeting that night, at the then Lyttelton home of Warren Brewer. It never happened). I usually do the CAFCA banking on the morning of a meeting.

I had gone straight to Kiwibank from the CTV building, where I had done a CAFCA interview, upstairs, about the TPPA and the campaign against it. This was my first time in that building for three years and it came very close to being my last time anywhere. CTV rang me that morning and I agreed to come in at 10.15 a.m. At the end of the interview I sat and chatted for a while with the reporter, so I got to know a bit about him – what he’d done at university, that he was 25 and he’d been in the job for a week. He saw me out onto the street, we shook hands and parted.

I went to the bank (I later looked at the receipt and saw that I was there at 11 a.m.). At 12.51 p.m. the killer quake struck, the CTV building pancaked and the reporter – whom I’d met for the first and last time that morning – was among the 115 killed in that criminally negligent building. His name is now one of the 185 on the quake memorial wall.

Becky and I went there on the day it opened in February 2017 and I put a rose from home under his name on the wall. We went to the CTV memorial garden the day it opened, in February 2018, and we saw, first hand, what an emotionally raw experience visiting it is for people who lost loved ones there.

When a complete stranger came up to us in the street and told us her CTV story (she watched it collapse, from a neighbouring building), we were transported straight back to 2011 when it was routine for strangers to talk to each other like that. I had done the same then. It was a symptom of collective shock and grief during a very frightening and stressful time.

Just banking in a building again is a novelty. For nearly six years I’d done most of CAFCA’s banking and postal business in Kiwibank’s container in the famous and now-closed container mall. I enjoyed it and became good mates with the women who worked there. I miss the container mall, where Becky and I were regular customers throughout its existence. I loved its sheer joie de vivre and wonderful post-apocalyptic strangeness. A nice contrast to tilt slab concrete, steel and glass.

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. She laid out one 2017 issue from the Philippines, where she was visiting family. That was a first). 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 2017 one in PR 53, June 2017, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/pr-backissues/pr53.pdf.

I haven’t yet written my report on the 2018 Waihopai protest but media coverage of it can be seen at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/waihopai-protest-2018.html. And you can read the most recent (November 2017) PR online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/pr-backissues/pr54.pdf.

I was also contacted by foreign mainstream media in my ABC capacity, namely the Wall Street Journal (the Bible of American capitalism). Its Australia correspondent came to Marlborough on a wine junket and discovered the existence of Waihopai and that he had just missed the January 2017 protest there. So, he rang me and we had a long chat. “I’m going to talk to my Editor. Americans have never heard about this”. But I never heard from him again.

I have already mentioned that Chris Oakley resigned as CAFCA Webmaster at the end of 2017 – he was also ABC’s Webmaster for the past several years, and resigned from that at the same time. ABC is deeply grateful for the immense amount of work that Chris put into the site. And, just to prove that it’s a small world, his successor as ABC Webmaster is Greg Waite, who was Watchdog Webmaster for more than a decade (until he was succeeded by Cass Daley). Greg has come home to NZ after 18 years in Australia, came to the 2018 Waihopai protest (his first time there in 30 years) and is now a key part of the ABC team. Welcome back, Greg!

For years ABC has looked at rebuilding the close working relationship we used to have with the Australian anti-bases movement (which faces a much bigger fight than we do). I used to regularly go there in the 1970s and 80s to take an active part in a whole range of activities right across that vast country. But things had been in abeyance for a long time. However, as I’ve already mentioned, I did get invited to speak at the September 2017 Melbourne national conference of the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network.

One thing that was impressed upon me there is how little is known about the reality of NZ by the Australian movement, let alone that of the wider world. One of the star speakers, from the US, gave a fascinating talk about the empire of 800 US bases around the world. But NZ didn't feature. I asked him if he knew that the US military has had a transport base at Christchurch Airport since 1955. Nope. Not to mention the "New Zealand" spy base at Waihopai. In 2018 he got his US publisher to send PR a review copy of his 2017 book on the subject – no mention of NZ in the book either.

A veteran Australian expert said that: "Of course, Australians wouldn't stand for it if it was white people we were locking up on offshore islands". I approached him and said: "Actually, you are. They're called New Zealanders". We had a long chat and his conclusion was (I quote him exactly): "Australians know fuck all about New Zealand".

Another speaker said that Australia has three important defence relationships. I listened carefully but not one of them featured New Zealand. I thought: "What about the NZ in Anzac? Or ANZUS, for that matter?" It was fascinating to see ANZUS as a real live thing in Aussie – here it is taught as history in schools, as an 80s’ relic.

So, I recommended to them that the Aussie and NZ movements need to get to know each other better and to work closely together again as we did in the past. Australia has very recently committed military forces to "fight ISIS" in the southern Philippines. Our two movements used to work together against US bases in that country - I was part of the NZ contingent in the 1988/89 Australasian Peace Brigade to the Philippines. That's how I met Becky - she was on the staff of the Manila conference which was part of it. Which brings me naturally to my next topic.

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 largely the case in 2017.  But not entirely. When I was in Auckland for the April 2017 Roger Award event, I took the opportunity to meet with Auckland Philippines Solidarity, a mixture of Filipinos and Kiwis, to discuss ideas and suggestions for projects (as I’ve already mentioned, Dennis Maga of APS, is FIRST Union’s new General Secretary. This is the union most supportive of CAFCA, and it has been for years).

At that meeting we kicked around ideas for speaking tours and APS has since brought out two indigenous educators in early 2018 (PSNA put money into the tour). They are targeted, persecuted and murdered by the Philippine military and death squads (as “Communists”). I have proposed that PSNA & APS work together to tour a progressive movement speaker through NZ in 2019 to report on the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte (that will be halfway through his single six-year term, which is all that Philippine Presidents are allowed).

The Philippines remains in the international spotlight for all the wrong reasons. Duterte 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).

Initially, Duterte called himself a “revolutionary” and a “socialist” and he did some positive things. That didn’t last long. He ended the peace talks that he had reactivated with the Communist underground (which has been fighting a war of national liberation for nearly 50 years). He has recommenced that war and joined all previous Presidents in a policy of murdering, disappearing, imprisoning and torturing activists of the legal, unarmed, progressive movement.

Duterte makes Trump look like a sensitive new age guy. To aptly apply a Trumpism, he is a shithole. He very recently instructed the military not to kill female Communist guerrillas but to shoot them in their vaginas, to render them “useless”. I have plentiful female relatives in the Philippines, ranging in age from 13 to 84, and I find it deeply offensive that they should have to put up with a murderous sexist pig like that as their country’s leader.

My Ancient Past: There’s always something that comes back to haunt me, and my long-ago role as the face of the Christchurch Progressive Youth Movement (PYM) is a hardy perennial. Very recently a tradesman came to the house to take measurements for a quote. He asked me: “Are you the same Murray Horton who was the leader of the PYM?” (you have to be of a certain age to have even heard of PYM). Having established that I was, he added: “You were ahead of the times. Free bikes are all over the place now”.

He was referring to PYM’s 1969 White Bikes proposal which I had presented to the Christchurch City Council and the local and national media. It created a sensation because we were long haired teenage protestors (the ISIS of the day) and yet here we were proposing something positive. For a long time afterwards, it was common for strangers in the street to shout at me (and not always in a friendly tone): “White Bikes!”.

We certainly were ahead of the times – PYM pinched the idea from the anarchist Provos in Amsterdam (which suited me, as I was an anarchist 50 years ago). Today’s free bike schemes, whether in Christchurch or in other cities around the country and the world, are the domain of Big Business and transnational corporations.

Nothing ever came of the White Bikes proposal and, within a few months, the Mayor who had politely heard us out was throwing away in outrage the Vietnam War protest wreath that I put on the Christchurch War Memorial on Anzac Day, on behalf of PYM. Even my nickname changed – by the time I finished at the Railways in 1991 my workmates were calling me “Pol Pot”. Oh well. But, obviously, PYM and White Bikes have never been forgotten.

At that September 2017 Australian peace movement conference in Melbourne a woman, whom I didn't recognise, approached me and said: "Hello, Murray. Remember me? We went through China together on an NZ University Students Association delegation in 1973" (that was my first ever overseas trip).

1973 featured again in my 2017 life. I was approached by someone I don't know for copies of articles I wrote for Canta (the University of Canterbury student paper) and the short-lived New Zealand edition of Rolling Stone, about a notorious case of that year. I've kept a folder of foolscap carbon copies of the typewritten originals of some of my articles from that era, so I was able to help the inquirer.

You also have to be of a certain age to remember typewriters and carbon copies, let alone foolscap paper. Those carbon copies have survived the ravages of time, silverfish, house moves, storage in the garage, and 18,000 earthquakes. Indeed, they’ve lasted much better than the umpteen electronic files and photos that I’ve lost in recent years through human error or failure of both software and hardware. God bless something you can hold in your hand, I say.

Personal Reflections: I’ve always said that I will keep on as the Organiser as long as the members want me to continue, and subject to my health continuing to be good. I’m inspired by the fact that the current New Zealander of the Year, Kristine Bartlett, is still working, as a rest home caregiver, at the age of 68 (and I must say that it’s about bloody time that working class women got some long overdue recognition).

The only health thing worth reporting is that I had to go to Burwood Hospital in 2017 (for the first time since just before the quakes started in 2010, and that was as a visitor). I needed facial plastic surgery (yes, I really had a nose job) to remove two little skin cancer lumps – of the lowest and least dangerous grade – from the bridge of my nose, within millimetres of my eyes.

It was done under local anaesthetic, so while the cheery young plastic surgeon hacked away at my face, we chatted about whether the TPPA would be good or bad for the health system, and how much the operation would have cost me if I’d gone private. There followed ten days with two black eyes, stitches and facial tape. My appearance led to me being laughed at in the street by a stranger, and gasps of horror from people who know me. But absolutely no reaction when I went to the rugby looking like that. I went with Jeremy Agar and, as he said: “They’d see that as a badge of honour here”. Rather disappointingly, I don’t even have a scar to show for it.

I continue to lead a full life of cultural and sporting events. The winter of 2017 was Christchurch’s wettest one for more than 40 years – on the absolute wettest, windiest and stormiest night (the City Council declared a state of emergency because of flooding), Becky, Jeremy and I, along with another friend, went to see the Crusaders play. You can’t let a bit of inclement weather stop you enjoying life.

I went to a number of Crusaders and Canterbury games. And Becky and I were among the hastily assembled small crowd that attended the victorious Crusaders when they returned from the Super Rugby final in South Africa. As with the All Blacks’ victory parade after the 2015 World Cup, Becky got right into the thick of the Crusaders’ parade, emerging with numerous autographs. As for the players, let’s just say that some of them looked like they might have been “tired and emotional”.

I find going to live rugby matches a splendid opportunity to observe and eavesdrop on the unreconstructed Kiwi bloke in his natural habitat. Here are my two favourite overheard rugby stadium quotes from 2017. “If Sonny Bill Williams is so proud of being a bloody Muslim, why did he choose to play for a team called the Crusaders?” And, at the pre-election time of the change of Labour’s Leader I heard one bloke ask another “What do you reckon about this Jacinda?” His mate replied: “She’s all right. Dunno about those teeth, though”.

I usually get to a movie every week. The Court Theatre (like the rugby stadium) is in our suburb of Addington and within easy walking distance, which is wonderful. I got to a couple of its shows last year and I make a point of checking out several of the central city’s art galleries when I’m down town.  For my most recent birthday I decided to go to “The Piano” at the Theatre Royal, my first ever ballet and greatly enjoyed it (and was reminded what a superb film “The Piano” was, decades after we saw it).

I am enjoying regularly exploring on foot the rebuilt central city that is painstakingly emerging from the rubble. In 2017 I had the pleasure of showing around, on foot, a couple of Christchurch expat old friends visiting from overseas. It is fascinating to see it through their eyes. 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?