Reminders of campaigns from CAFCA's past crop up in the most unlikely of places. To give the most recent example: Simon Denny's "The Founder's Paradox" exhibition, which has been touring NZ galleries since 2017. Denny is an interesting and very political artist. He represented New Zealand at the 2015 Venice Biennale with "Secret Power".

This "simultaneously looked at the graphic design culture of America's National Security Agency and New Zealand's place within the Five Eyes intelligence alliance" ( Bulletin 194, December 2018 , Christchurch Art Gallery, Anthony Byrt). Nicky Hager went to Venice with that exhibition, named after his 1996 book which first exposed the world of the Waihopai spy base, the agency that runs it - the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau - and the Five Eyes spy alliance, of which Waihopai and the GCSB are integral parts.

Denny's current exhibition, "The Founder's Paradox" (which also includes an image of the Waihopai spy base), centres on the highly controversial figure of Peter Thiel, the American tech billionaire who made his money creating software for spy agencies and who was secretly granted New Zealand citizenship by the previous National government. This wasn't made public until years after the event, along with the fact that he got it after having spent only 12 days in NZ. Since then, Thiel has emerged as one of the billionaires in Donald Trump's inner circle.

The best article on Thiel's NZ connection (he is the prime example of a "boltholer", having purchased here what is referred to by the 1% as "apocalypse insurance") is Matt Nippert's "Citizen Thiel" in the New Zealand Herald, February 2018.

Denny's exhibition is about Thiel's decidedly strange world view, which is one typical of extreme libertarian Silicon Valley billionaires. In his case, it also incorporates his obsession with JRR Tolkien's "Lord Of The Rings" books (his spy software is named Palantir after a magical artefact in the books, an upmarket crystal ball). The exhibition is designed as an elaborately detailed game, illustrating the world view of Thiel and his mates.

For instance, he appears in it in a giant portrait as an "Immortal" prepared to do battle with the dragon of Democracy and all the other scary monsters that keep the One Percenters tossing and turning in their boltholes. Thiel is an irony-free zone - he made one of his rare visits to his land of citizenship-of-convenience to see the exhibition for himself when it was on in Auckland in 2017.

The Roger Douglas Connection

But what caught my attention, from a CAFCA perspective was this quote from the Christchurch Art Gallery's Bulletin (cited above): "...What we didn't anticipate were the New Zealand-connected rabbit-holes we'd quickly end up down: Thiel's deep fixation with 'The Lord Of The Rings', for example, or his links to the life-extension scientist and biotech venture capitalist Laura Deming - an expat New Zealander".

"Then there was the strange story of Wharekauhau Lodge (my emphasis). In the mid-1990s, a group of investors - many of them prominent libertarians - participated in a property deal for a large farm station and luxury lodge in the Wairarapa. Among them were former New Zealand Finance Minister Roger Douglas and the extreme-libertarian authors of one of Thiel's favourite books, 'The Sovereign Individual: How To Survive And Thrive During The Collapse Of The Welfare State', the American James Dale Davidson, and the late British peer Lord William Rees-Mogg (whose son Jacob is a key player in pro-Brexit British politics) ...".

The individuals behind Wharekauhau Lodge (Roger Douglas et al) were the subject of CAFCA's first ever "not of good character" complaint, under the provisions of the Overseas Investment Act, to what was then called the Overseas Investment Commission (OIC; now the Overseas Investment Office [OIO]). It was a long story, written up in meticulous and fascinating detail in Bill Rosenberg's "The Intriguing Story Of Roger Douglas And His Unpleasant Friends At Wharekauhau Lodge", in Watchdog 84, May 1997, (and it needs to be pointed out that none of those people are still involved with Wharekauhau Lodge).

To cut a long story short, our complaint was not upheld. Nor were any subsequent ones to the OIC or OIO for the next 20+ years. Not until our 2016 "not of good character" complaint about Agria, which was at least partly upheld (but not until the very end of 2018). That was our very first success in this particular long-running campaign and is the subject of an article elsewhere in this issue. It's funny where things turn up to trigger CAFCA's collective memory. I would not have picked the Christchurch Art Gallery or its glossy magazine to have been among them.