ORGANISER'S REPORT

- Murray Horton

Committee: Unchanged since my previous Report. There are seven members - Colleen Hughes, James Ayers, Jeremy Agar, John Ring, Murray Horton, Paul Piesse and Terry Moon. We continue to work with former Committee members - from both recent and long-ago times - in other campaigns. For example, Brian Turner, Warren Brewer and Denis O'Connor are very actively involved in Keep Our Assets (KOA), including in its most recent iteration, the 2019 Minto For Mayor campaign.

Membership: It is at 330+, which is down from the 350+ of my previous annual Report (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). For any number of years now, the numerical trend has been gradually but steadily downwards.

Every year we remove non-payers but only after they have ignored two of the dreaded red slips and final, e-mailed, reminders. 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. We lose members for a variety of reasons - death, old age, retirement, financial reasons, or simply deciding not to renew. That reflects the aging demographic of our membership. There are other reasons - one member resigned in protest at criticism of Jacinda in one issue of Watchdog; another one resigned rather than having to use online banking to pay the annual sub.

We lost an important member, Trade Aid, at the end of 2019, when its annual sub ran out. For years it had been our single biggest member, buying 32 copies of every Watchdog i.e. one for each of its shops. And it paid the full price too - $20 a copy - meaning that it paid for each shop to be a CAFCA member and it also handled all the distribution involved. So, it was a very good, very lucrative deal for CAFCA.

Why did Trade Aid cancel its membership? This is from its Chief Executive Officer, Geoff White: "We appreciate the work that goes into the publication (Watchdog), and we have supported the work because we feel it is valuable information to be disseminating in Aotearoa. However, in its current format, as the dense, large publication that it is, we have become aware that very few, if any, of our Trade Aid staff and volunteers are actually reading the information. This teamed with the cost of the publication in $, to the environment in terms of resources, and time and cost in us sending it around the country, has led to our decision".

"We would love to see the valuable information contained in the publication produced in bite sized chunks and disseminated online, or via social media as a way of connecting it in a more digestible way with our people. Should this already be an option, we would love to promote to our Movement any social media pages you can link us to that contains this information".

I reassured Geoff that there are plenty of "bite sized chunks" on the CAFCA Website; that Watchdog is available online (and at a separate site, Watchblog, it is available as a PDF); and that CAFCA has a Facebook group with a membership several times bigger than our "real world" (and paying) membership. Geoff raised valid points, which I'll discuss further along in this Report. In the meantime, we continue to electronically send Trade Aid suitably bite sized chunks of material.

Gaining new members is a permanent project. We have some wonderfully evangelical members who set out to recruit others. And several members have responded to our request for donations to pay the subs of members who can no longer afford it. Members are very generous - falling membership does not equal falling finances. Quite the opposite (see below).

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 (at least 20 years, if not longer). 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: - End Of Cheques' Era: Between them, our operating account and three term deposits, hold $73,000, in round figures, which is $4,000 more than in my last 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.

This financial support was put to the test in 2019 and through until now. As you know, our bank - Kiwibank - 100% quit cheques as from the end of February 2020. This means that, in 2019, CAFCA had to bite the bullet and removed all mention of being able to pay us by cheque, from everything in our hard copy and online publications.

We wanted our members to make the transition to paying us by online banking (and it also means that CAFCA stopped paying any of our bills by cheque, and is now doing it all by online banking). As you would expect of an organisation with a "mature" membership (including on the Committee), this has not been a painless experience. Most members have made the change - others continued to send us cheques right up until the end of February deadline.

Some took a risk by posting cash; others personally deposited cash into our account at a Kiwibank branch. We've had one untraceable personal cash deposit and several personal cheque deposits with no names included (I was able to identify them by asking Kiwibank. It was both time-consuming and tedious but I'll never have to do it again, because cheques are now history as far as Kiwibank is concerned).

Just remember - if you do personally deposit cash into our account, include your name, so that we can record your payment. And you can ask your bank to set up an annual automatic payment into CAFCA's account to pay your sub - some members already do that. We have no current plans to accept credit card payments. As I said, we are not a business and the merchant fees charged by the credit card transnational corporations for processing are prohibitive.

I think we have definitely lost members as a result of this end of cheques (in addition to the one who has already resigned in protest). At the very least, more members than usual took longer than usual to pay their sub. But the great majority of our loyal members are sticking with us, even if they have to change their method of paying us.

This change, of course, is not of our doing. But the writing has been on the wall for cheques for a long time (our personal cheque book took from 2010 until 2019 to use up). There is an irony here. Every year, without fail, at least one member will reprimand us for the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account (my pay account) being with an Australian bank, Westpac, and urging us to move to a New Zealand bank.

CAFCA is a founder member of Kiwibank (the Watchdog account, plus CAFCA's three term deposits, are also all with Kiwibank). Westpac continues to accept cheques (but don't use a Kiwibank cheque to make a donation to the Organiser Account). Kiwibank imposed fees for issuing things like hard copy bank statements (we get them online now, for free). Westpac continues to send us hard copy bank statements free of charge. Not only does Kiwibank no longer accept cheques, it also no longer accepts foreign cash. When an Australian member paid in $A cash, I had to change it at an Australian bank (ANZ) in order to have $NZ cash to deposit into CAFCA's Kiwibank account.

Expenses & Donations:

CAFCA has routine office expenses (e.g. in 2020 we have had to buy a new printer. Our printers get plenty of use. The 2014-20 one printed 63,000 pages. The paperless office is a myth). But our single biggest cost every year is the postage for Watchdog. Every year NZ Post increases the price of the pre-paid big envelopes we use, so we stockpile a large quantity and lock in the current price, to keep our costs down for as long as possible.

In 2019 we bought several thousand dollars' worth of envelopes, which will last us until well into 2020 (when the price will doubtless go up again). We have no plans to change Watchdog to an online-only publication (although the option is there for members to get it that way and more than 10% of them do). The great majority of members want a good old-fashioned hard copy Watchdog.

We have enough money to be able to make donations to other campaigns. For example, in 2019 we donated $2,500 to the Minto For Mayor campaign (that was the single biggest donation to John's campaign. All election donations over $1,500 have to be publicly declared, which CAFCA was happy to do. More than once we were listed in the mainstream media as the biggest donor. A marked contrast to the way that Mayor Lianne Dalziel [didn't] declare who were the major donors to her campaign). We donated $1,000 to Aotearoa Water Action. And we make an annual $500 donation to the Anti-Bases Campaign for the Waihopai spy base protests.

CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account: The trend, for several years now, has been of a steady decline. This was temporarily arrested in 2018 by a $10,000 donation and another one of $3,000, but the trend is inexorably down. A further donation of $3,000 from the same couple in late 2019 also temporarily arrested that downward decline.

Over the course of 20 years this couple have donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Organiser Account. To quote from the latest monthly bank statement at the time of writing (March 2020): the balance was $2,903.83 (down $3,200 on previous month). Money in during the February/March month was $2,014.26 and money out was $5,240.39. That monthly loss was noticeably bigger than usual, because I got three pays in the period covered by the statement, rather than the usual two (one pay was the final transaction on the statement). But, even taking that into account, it is a bigger monthly drop than usual.

There are two reasons for this steady decline - firstly, the commitment to pay the Organiser (me) the living wage (which increased in 2019 to $21.15 per hour). And the drop in the number of pledgers and donors - the number of pledgers sits between 45 & 50 (it used to be closer to 60, in the not too distant past) - for the same reason that CAFCA membership is dropping. People are retiring and can no longer afford it. In some cases, they have been doing it since the Organiser Account first started, back in 1991. I never cease to be amazed by their generosity.

One noteworthy point - for many years the Organiser Account had a back-up term deposit, held at Kiwibank. No more. We closed it in 2019 and consolidated that money into the Westpac account which is used to pay me. So, what is in the Westpac account is it. CAFCA made the decision in 2019 to top up the Organiser Account with direct donations, when necessary. At the time of writing, that time is now.

It is remarkable that it has lasted for nearly three decades without ever having been a drain on CAFCA finances (up until now the only input from CAFCA has been the interest earned from its' three term deposits). For nearly 30 years, up until now, the Organiser Account has been entirely dependent on the generosity of pledgers and donors.

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 thank James Ayers who does a very good job of looking after the Organiser Account.

As for me, I'm relaxed about it - I get the old age pension on top of my Organiser pay (and pay the higher secondary tax rate). In 2019 I signed my first ever contract, at the age of 68. I've never had one before. I was made redundant from my last "real" job (at the Railways) in 1991, just before the former Employment Contracts Act came into law. I've never even had a CV in my entire working life, and my last actual job interview was in 1976 (for the Railways. It was a different world then. One question asked if I objected to belonging to a union, as membership was compulsory by law. Guess what - I didn't).

Watchdog: I am the Editor; it is our flagship, our "face", our voice to our members and the world at large. To use the jargon, it is our "brand". It looks the best it ever has. The three 2019 issues were, respectively, 80, 76 and 96 pages (the latter being the biggest issue for several years). As I've already detailed, we've lost Trade Aid and its 32 member shops because they adjudge Watchdog to be "dense and long".

In our defence, I have to say that foreign control is not an easy subject to boil down to a simplified form. It can be done to some degree - Bill Rosenberg does an excellent job rendering his annual online Key Facts update as a series of graphs (his late father, Wolfgang Rosenberg, seriously proposed that every article in Watchdog could be rendered as one table each). Watchdog will always be a niche publication - we only now have one retail outlet, an iconic Christchurch bookshop, which regularly sells out of the copies it stocks. We don't have the resources to compete with mainstream magazines. Nor the intention.

I believe that there remains a place for long form journalism on such a specialised and vitally important subject. I'm as fond of "bite sized" chunks of information as the next person but this is a subject that cannot be oversimplified. Donald Trump is the perfect negative example of the dangers of populist sloganeering. There is a whole Rightwing perspective on this subject, which seamlessly morphs into racism and xenophobia. CAFCA is never going to allow ourselves to be smeared as such.

Being Editor keeps me very busy but I make sure that I do some writing for each issue, ranging from political analysis to obituaries. Indeed, I did more writing in 2019 than for a while - for example, I wrote the lead article in all three issues. Thanks to Layout Editor Leigh Cookson and thanks to Ian Dalziel, whose wonderful quirky cover graphics have been a distinctive feature of every issue for many years now. Thanks to my Committee colleague, Jeremy Agar, who is the Reviews Editor and does an excellent job of it. I can tell you that one particular mainstream publisher sends us unsolicited books because they want Jeremy to review them.

Thanks to our regular writers such as Linda Hill and the indefatigable Dennis Small. The variety and sheer number of writers is very high (we had 12 for the December 2019 issue). The quality is very high: among the people who wrote for us in 2019 were Jane Kelsey, Bryan Gould, Mary Ellen O'Connor, Maire Leadbeater and Prue Hyman. Some of those have been writing for us for years.

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. Sue Bradford wrote to me recently: "Glad to hear that the last hard copy Leftwing publication in NZ is going stronger than ever".

Watchdog is a journal of analysis, not a newspaper. But it does cover ongoing news stories - every issue from December 2018 to December 2019 inclusive had an article by Shane Loader about the since aborted Foulden Maar mining proposal in Otago. And we have also made a point of including an update in every recent issue from Aotearoa Water Action about what they quite correctly call water mining (in the form of exporting bottled NZ water, for which the water miners pay a laughable pittance).

Online Watchdog: Cass Daley was in charge of this from 2010 until the beginning of 2019, when she had to give it up because an injury made it difficult for her to use a computer. She did a very good job during a nearly decade-long stint and is deserving of our thanks. Terry Moon has taken over the online Watchdog, adding that to her being in charge of the separate CAFCA Website.

Our online-only members 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.

Website & Other Electronic Means Of Communication: Terry Moon is in charge of the CAFCA site (and also added the Watchdog site to her portfolio in 2019). She is doing a very good job with both and is meticulous with updates and improvements. The April 2019 Watchdog was the 150th issue and to mark that milestone, we invited (and published) comments from members. Several of them were constructive criticisms about how CAFCA could improve our methods of getting our message across.

The first area we agreed to look at and work on is the Website. We formed a subcommittee and James Ayers got a quote for building a whole new site from scratch (so we could have some idea of what it would cost, what it would involve and what new features and services it could offer). We then decided to give first refusal to our existing Web host, which has provided excellent service since CAFCA first went online, back in 1996. The subcommittee met with the Webhost people (one of the very few face-to-face meetings we've had with them since 1996).

They came back to us with a detailed proposal, including costs (both set up and ongoing), which the subcommittee then went through line by line, before accepting. At the time of writing, things are progressing apace. We're also looking at branching out into new methods of communication, namely podcasts, but have nothing to report about that, as per yet. In addition to the CAFCA site, we have the separate Watchdog one and the Historic Watchdog site, set up by Lynda Boyd, which stores online all issues from the mid 1970s until 1999, when the actual Watchdog site was created.

That ran into a technical problem in 2019, namely that to access whole issues (as opposed to the first few pages), readers are asked to pay by the site host - for something that had hitherto been free. We are looking at finding an alternative host. Warren Brewer runs the Watchblog site, plus CAFCA's Twitter account, and the Keep Our Assets (KOA) site.

We struck another technical problem in 2019. Six years earlier, our former Internet service provider told us we had to stop sending out bulk e-mails through their system and they set us up with new dedicated bulk e-mail system (they even did all the data entry for us, which involved a lot of work). But that system permanently crashed in 2019 and remains inaccessible to us. Fortunately, I had retained all the lists of names and email addresses in our day to day e-mail system (which is what I use for non-bulk mailouts and one-on-one e-mail correspondence). So, I seamlessly switched back to using that old system - which is actually much faster than its replacement - without having to do any massive data entry.

We encountered a very fundamental technical problem in February 2020. I suddenly had no Internet connection and it stayed dead for six days. To put it into perspective, it was a longer Internet outage than that caused by the February 2011 killer quake (of course, in that case, we also lost power, water, toilet and mobile phone - but not landline. Internet loss was just a detail in a much bigger picture). The only explanation our Auckland-based Internet service provider gave me was: "We have a problem with multiple Christchurch customers with copper connections" (we got a discount for the lost days).

I had to scramble around to get my mobile phone set up to receive and send e-mails and to be able to print from it. But that isn't a full substitute for what I can do on my wifi connected computer. After that major inconvenience, we decided to convert to fibre, which had never been previously deemed necessary at our place (it was actually laid down our street in 2015 but we had never felt any compelling need to connect to it). At the time of writing, that process is underway.

Overseas Investment Office (OIO): This is a continuous CAFCA campaign that dates back to the 1980s. It is so much part of the furniture that I sometimes forget to mention it in my Reports or to emphasise that it is a campaign. One that had real potential consequences in the early days when the Overseas Investment Commission - as it was then - fought tooth and nail for several years to stop us getting any access to their information.

I've never forgotten the bailiff who came to my door one night in the late 80s to serve me papers as a co-defendant - alongside an Ombudsman, no less - in their judicial attempt to stop us. They lost. It's all very pally wally and business-like now. Linda Hill has now been writing up the OIO's monthly Decisions, both for Watchdog and CAFCA's Website, since 2017, and is doing an excellent job.

Courtesy of a deal brokered a few years ago between CAFCA and the Ombudsman (to eliminate the need for us to appeal every deleted detail of every Decision), the OIO now routinely sends us the previously suppressed details of individual Decisions - the purchase price, invariably - after a set period of time (one year).

Linda Hill takes the trouble to get those newly released details to Webmaster Terry Moon to be inserted into the online Decisions. But things slipped backwards in 2019, with some applicants wanting to withhold the purchase price, or only agreeing to release it in a band (in one case the applicant wanted a $40 million band; after we went to the Ombudsman it was reduced to $10m. And that is $10m too much).

In my previous Report, I mentioned that CAFCA was supplying those delayed-release OIO Decisions to major media outlets such as the Press and the New Zealand Herald, and ensuring that they gave CAFCA the credit as the source (we got name checked regularly in the process). That arrangement stopped in 2019, because the OIO is, finally, now supplying them directly to the media. For a brief period, we had a flashback to a period of several years, late last century, when we made some pocket money by selling Bill Rosenberg's writeups of the monthly Decisions to journalists and others.

CAFCA was literally the only source for that stuff - the Overseas Investment Commission refused to supply it to anyone and only did so to us because they lost a court case trying to prevent us getting access to it. The difference this time around is that we didn't charge anyone. The OIO has actually started to do some of the job it is supposed to do. In 2019 it took several overseas owners to court for not fulfilling the conditions of their approvals and in a few cases had them fined and/or forced to sell up. Which is all good news but there is a long way to go.

Roger Award: That is all history now but it was great fun while it lasted, for 20 highly memorable years. In my previous Report I detailed our quest to find a home for the actual, uniquely hideous, trophy (which had lived in our garage when not on the road). That turned out to be Canterbury Museum. In 2019 they sent a truck to our place to pick it up, in its customised travel crate. Not only that, they put a press release on the Museum's Website, saying how pleased they were to have acquired ugly old Roger.

Months later they contacted us again asking if we knew who made the trophy, because they wanted to include it in a book. Alas, we don't. CAFCA was not involved in its creation, that was done by our Roger Award partners in the former Christchurch Corso. They can only remember the artist's first name and nothing else.

The other, hilarious, Roger Award thing to report from 2019 is that it inspired an Australian version, the wonderfully named Scummo Awards (the Murdoch Media Empire won the Grand Scummo. New Zealanders can relate to that). Just as the Roger Award was inspired by a real person in NZ, the Scummos are a play on the ScoMo nickname for Aussie PM Scott Morrison.

Keep Our Assets Canterbury (KOA): I am the Convenor, and a number of other current or former CAFCA Committee members are also very actively involved with the KOA Committee - namely, Paul Piesse, Jeremy Agar and Brian Turner. 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.

Although he now lives in Hastings, Warren remains in charge of KOA's Website. And Denis O'Connor, a Committee member from the 1970s and 80s, is very actively involved with KOA. Other KOA Committee members include Steve Howard, Paul Broady, Rex Knight, Mike Newlove, Jonathan Handley-Packham, and Dot Lovell-Smith. Several - but not all - of them are also CAFCA members.

2019 was local body election year. In 2016 KOA ran John Minto for Mayor and he got a very respectable 14% of the votes. In my previous Report I said that KOA didn't know if John would run again or if KOA would have any involvement with the election. We weren't being cute - we genuinely didn't know. When John ran in 2016, he was a fulltime high school teacher. He retired at the end of 2018 and, literally the next day, took off to spend several months walking the length of the country via Te Araroa Trail. It wasn't until he came home from that, months into 2019, when his decision was made to run again as the Keep Our Assets candidate.

I freely admit I was sceptical about the merits of a repeat Mayoral campaign. For both political reasons - asset sales did not appear to be the Christchurch hot issue that they were in 2016. And for practical reasons - Warren Brewer, who was then a CAFCA Committee member, was John's 2016 campaign manager and made an excellent job of it. Warren has permanently left Christchurch and there was nobody to replace him in 2019 (it's a very intense and time-consuming job). John, now an old age pensioner, took it on himself, aided by a campaign committee, of which I was an active member.

And I freely admit that I was wrong to be sceptical about the merits of a repeat Mayoral campaign. John's campaign was extremely timely - he set out to re-emphasise issues from three years earlier: issues such as free buses, water quality, the living wage, and prioritising Council rental housing for the poor over a white elephant half-billion-dollar stadium. And guess what issue came roaring back out of obscurity? Asset sales!

Unlike 2016, the business sector ran their own candidate, Darryll Park, in 2019 and he made very clear his support for asset sales (to pay for the bloody stadium!). Not surprisingly, climate change was a major issue this time around. My scepticism was proved wrong in that the election provided an excellent platform for John and KOA's progressive policies to get a wide public airing. He was the only candidate with any policies. Once again John's campaign and policies got excellent mainstream media coverage, not only locally, but nationally.

John wrote up the campaign in Watchdog 152 (December 2019, "Putting People Before Profits: Minto For Mayor In 2019"). In 2016 there were only two major candidates - him and the sitting Mayor, Lianne Dalziel. John came second and got 14% of the vote. In 2019 there were three major candidates - Dalziel, Darryll Park and John (who got 9.6% of the vote and came third).

John's 2016 campaign spent $24,000; in 2019 it was $15,000. CAFCA kicked it off financially with a $2,500 donation (the largest single donation) and CAFCA people played a very key role at all levels of the campaign. I chaired some of John's public events and took on tasks including: chairing weekly campaign committee meetings at John's place (I can recommend his scones); paying bills; electronically distributing publicity material and fundraising appeals (which raised and spent thousands); and walking our Addington neighbourhood streets putting campaign leaflets in letterboxes.

Actually, I did less in 2019 than three years earlier - in 2016 I chaired a series of neighbourhood meetings right across the city. They got a disappointing turnout, so we only did one in 2019. I'm pleased that I did less this time around - in 2016 I got a bit run down and got quite crook, with the result that I had to step back from the final stage of that campaign.

Show Us The Money, Lianne! And the campaign did not end with the October election. In December 2019, John went public with the demand that Mayor Dalziel declare where her campaign donations came from (her declaration of donors was less than transparent). She had to reveal that the biggest donors were Chinese businesspeople, with the money funnelled through a wine auction organised by her lawyer husband.

This definitely got the attention of the mainstream media and the Press ran it on the front page for days. In early 2020 the City Council's Electoral Officer passed John's complaint onto the Police. The cops, in turn, passed it onto the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), which has launched an investigation. This got the attention of the national mainstream media, because it coincided with the SFO launching an inquiry into the 2019 campaign fundraising by Auckland Mayor Phil Goff, and inquiries into, or criminal prosecutions arising from, fundraising by both the National and New Zealand First Parties.

At the time of writing, we all await the next move by the SFO. By contrast, the Minto campaign was happy to make public that CAFCA was its single biggest donor (Park, the business candidate, got his biggest donation from a coal company). Elsewhere in this issue you can read John Minto's detailed article on the subject.

The Mayoral campaign was not KOA's only activity in 2019. Steve Howard and I carried the Keep Our Assets banner at a big march protesting the Belfast water bottling export scheme (it was attended by thousands of people). We lobbied the City Council to put its public housing ahead of the proposed white elephant rugby stadium - but, no, they voted to spend hundreds of millions on the stadium, plus tens of millions more on running costs.

We joined those protesting the use of still-extant earthquake emergency laws to ram through changes to Hagley Oval cricket ground. Steve Howard wrote an excellent submission and Steve and I appeared before a City Council Hearings Panel to speak to it. One Labour-aligned Councillor asked us to explain "disaster capitalism/shock doctrine". It was all new to her, rather alarmingly.

And, once again, the City Council and the Labour Minister decided to back big business and to use those emergency laws to let the people of Christchurch be rolled like a cricket pitch. To sum up: KOA was very active in 2019. Meaning that CAFCA was very active (as we had been three years earlier in John's first Mayoral campaign).

Relations With Other Groups: Since 2018 we have developed a productive working relationship with Aotearoa Water Action (AWA), which is fighting the Chinese-owned water bottling plant in Christchurch. AWA has been taking highly successful legal action against the regional council Environment Canterbury (ECan) for consenting the plant. CAFCA donated $1,000 to that cause.

I have taken part in two AWA marches since late 2018 (one of which involved thousands of people) and AWA updates appeared in every 2019 issue of Watchdog, carrying onto into this first 2020 issue. This campaign involves not only Christchurch, but also the Chinese-owned Otakiri water bottling export plant in the Bay of Plenty. CAFCA sees water as the oil of the 21st Century.

Of course, the big issue of the day is climate change. Becky and I attended all three of the schoolkids' rallies for climate action in 2019 (after the March 15th one ended abruptly and with no public explanation, we went to the Library for a coffee with friends - and we were there when the place went into lockdown because of the mosques' massacre that afternoon. We escaped the lockdown and had a highly adventurous drive home). On the second one, we joined in the fastest march I've been on for a very long time - it was more like a very fast cross-country run.

CAFCA has formalised its relationship with the climate change action campaign and Committee member Terry Moon is our rep to the local Extinction Rebellion campaign - she has been on actions in both Christchurch and Dunedin. I attended my first Extinction Rebellion rally in January 2020. CAFCA has been highlighting climate change as a major issue in every Watchdog for many years, most particularly via articles by Dennis Small and reviews by Jeremy Agar.

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. 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, in the mid-1970s. Elsewhere in this issue you will find my obituary of Dave Morgan, who was national leader of the Seamen's Union for 30 years. I first met Dave in 1969, when I started out as a political activist and he was the Secretary of the Lyttelton branch of the Seamen's Union.

And we must not forget our very own Bill Rosenberg, CAFCA founder, veteran Chairperson and our first (and thus far, only) life member. Bill moved to Wellington in 2009 to work as the Economist and Policy Director for the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) and did an excellent job in that role. He retired at the end of 2019, after ten years in what he describes as "the highlight of my working life". He is now doing some part-time work for the CTU. CAFCA joins the labour movement in congratulating Bill on a job very well done (hopefully, he will now have some time to write for Watchdog. It's been too long since he did).

Relations With Government & Political Parties: This part of my Report has only come into existence since the present Government came into office in 2017. In my previous Report I detailed how I'd met with Eugenie Sage, the Minister in charge of the Overseas Investment Office in 2017 and then, in 2018, I spent half an hour on the phone with Treasury officials being consulted about the Government's review of the Overseas Investment Act.

In 2019, there was a further development - the Government announced that Stage 2 of its Overseas Investment Act review was underway. Treasury held a series of stage-managed "public consultation" meetings around the country and James Ayers and I attended the Christchurch one. I followed that up by writing a brief submission, which you can read in my article "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Overseas Investment Act Reform Aimed At Making Life Easier For TNCs" (Watchdog 151, August 2019). That is one of the few submissions I've ever written about anything - Bill Rosenberg used to be our submissions specialist.

In November 2019, Minister David Parker announced changes to the Act, including the addition of a national interest test to foreign applications to buy in certain defined sectors of economy (e.g. it includes media but not dairying). A Bill to implement this will be introduced into Parliament in 2020. Minister Eugenie Sage sent me a 2019 Christmas card saying: "Look forward to your comments on phase 2 of OIO reforms". My lead article in this issue contains CAFCA's answers to Eugenie's question, being my analysis of the foreign control situation under this Government.

Wearing my Anti-Bases Campaign hat, ABC has had a close working relationship with the Greens since they first entered Parliament, in 1996. Green Co-Leaders to have spoken at ABC's Waihopai spy base protests are: the late Rod Donald, the late Jeanette Fitzsimons, Russel Norman, Metiria Turei and, in 2019, Marama Davidson.

Green MPs to have done likewise include Keith Locke, Steffan Browning and Golriz Gharahman (who spoke at the 2018 protest and was scheduled to do so again in 2020 but had to pull out at very short notice because of health issues - she later announced that she has multiple sclerosis. Golriz sent her speech to be read out at the protest. This was the first Waihopai protest since 1996 not to feature a current Green MP in person i.e. since the Party first entered Parliament). Former MP Steffan Browning was present again in 2020 and spoke at the spy base gate.

It is significant that, in 2018, 19 and 20, we've had an MP and/or a Co-Leader of the Greens speaking (in person or via proxy) at an ABC protest that is against a policy of the Government of which the Greens are part (Labour is committed to keeping Waihopai; NZ's membership of the Five Eyes spy alliance; and staying an active and loyal junior satellite of the US Empire).

Media Profile: It's fair to say that 2019 was quieter than usual (but then again, 2018 was much busier than usual). At the most recent funeral Becky and I attended a long-lost friend said: "I don't hear you on the radio so often". That's correct - my last Radio NZ interview was in late 2018 (twice in 2019 I was rung by Radio NZ for a possible interview. And twice I never heard back from them). I haven't appeared in the Press by name since late 2018 (not coincidentally, the Press business journalist who contacted me most often - we had a love/hate relationship going back decades - no longer works there).

But CAFCA got plenty of mentions in the Press in 2019, specifically our role in supplying them with previously suppressed Overseas Investment Office Decision details (invariably it was the price paid that was suppressed). The OIO now supplies the media directly with those details. But, although CAFCA is Christchurch-based, we deal with a national issue - so, among my most recent mainstream media appearances, in 2019 and 20, have been in the country's biggest paper, the New Zealand Herald in Auckland. The Herald has consistently sought out CAFCA for years, for comment and even the odd opinion piece.

In early 2020 a press release I put out about the scandal of Rio Tinto's toxic waste from its Bluff aluminium smelter led to an invitation from Stuff Business to write them an opinion piece on the subject. Which I duly did (it was the first such invitation from Stuff for years. The previous one was about the smelter also. You can read my February 2020 opinion piece here).

Keep Our Assets' 2019 Minto For Mayor campaign attracted excellent and very regular mainstream media coverage. Indeed, I was startled to be confronted with a full two-page colour photo of John and I at his campaign launch media conference featured in the Your Weekend magazine of one Saturday's Press (that magazine accompanied all Saturday papers throughout the country owned by that particular media transnational). That regular weekly photo slot was entitled "Still Life", which usually evokes images of a bowl of fruit, not a couple of grizzled old sexagenarian Lefty warhorses.

The most unique media gig I did in 2019 was to travel to Wellington to be filmed for an update of the seminal Vanguard Films' documentary "Islands of The Empire" - a mere 36 years after I was first filmed for it, on location at two high altitude US military facilities (Mount John and Black Birch, both long gone, decades ago). It has been converted into a DVD, with a whole slew of accompanying update interviews (Nicky Hager, Keith Locke, Maire Leadbeater and me) but its 2020 Christchurch premiere has been delayed by the coronavirus lockdown. My article on the subject is in Watchdog 151 (August 2019).

I must not forget to give credit to Craig Wills of Hamilton's Waikato Community Radio, who has regularly interviewed me for many years. And, in Christchurch, Martin and Lois Griffiths of Plains FM, have done studio interviews with me for their Earthwise programme for decades now. I did interviews with both of those community media outlets in 2019.

CAFCA Priorities: As I've already mentioned, we are in the process of upgrading our Website (which will cost serious money, but we're in a healthy financial situation, so we can afford what will be money well spent). And we're looking at other methods of getting our message out, such as podcasts. This is all part of a never-ending project to spread the word wider and build our membership and support base.

CAFCA has always worked best in partnership with likeminded groups. In 2019, our priority was Keep Our Assets, specifically its Minto For Mayor campaign, and that kept us very busy. Beyond the local body election, KOA has plenty of work to do, as I've already detailed in the KOA subsection (above) and the hardy perennial issue of asset sales keeps on raising its ugly head.

Over the past couple of years, we have forged a working relationship with Aotearoa Water Action, and we are also now involved with Extinction Rebellion. Both Watchdog and our OIO work are major and ongoing long-term projects in their own right. We need to get our message out to more people, using both traditional media and social media (we've picked up new members from both). We have an aging, indeed aged, membership, so recruiting new - hopefully, younger - members is a constant project.

There have been some changes in the political environment since the 2017 change of Government. This one recognises that foreign control is not just an issue, it is a problem for New Zealand and they have to do something about that. In contrast, the previous Government did not see it as an issue, let alone a problem, and did nothing about it during its nine years in power. What that "something" is that the Government plans to do, doesn't amount to very much but it's better than nothing and it presents CAFCA with a window of opportunity. We've got plenty to keep us busy.

Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC): I am, of course, also the Organiser for ABC. And I am the Editor of ABC's Peace Researcher. From 2011 Warren Thomson was Co-Editor, but he retired from that role in 2019. It is not an exaggeration to say that PR may well have died if Warren had not come on board as Co-Editor in 2011, that most challenging of years for everyone living in Christchurch. As sole Editor, I had only got out one issue in the year from July 2010 until July 2011.

All of us in the Anti-Bases Campaign Committee (along with everyone else in Christchurch) were dealing with thousands of earthquakes that disrupted every aspect of daily life - both Warren and I had our houses damaged (in my case, that meant my workplace was also damaged); the February 2011 killer quake destroyed Warren's central city workplace and, with it, his then job until other premises could be found.

For that July 2011 PR Warren stepped up, along with fellow ABC Committee member, Doug Craig and we got it out. I remember doing the mailout in our dining room, the one room in the house that was habitable, the room that I worked in and that Becky and I lived and slept in for several months during winter 2011, while the rest of our house was being repaired. After that Doug moved back to Nelson, where he remains - the quakes had wiped out, firstly, his job, and then his flat.

Once Warren was in the saddle with me as Co-Editor, we got back to business as usual, publishing two issues per year. Warren is an ABC founder and veteran Committee member (known to all as Waihopai Warren due to his numerous arrests at spy base protests in the 1980s and 90s). He has been a longstanding PR writer, and had a previous stint as Co-Editor, with the late Bob Leonard, in the 90s (my obituary of Bob is in Watchdog 134, January 2014).

In 1997 he went to Bangkok for work, and ended up staying there until 2010, getting married in the process. He and Noi arrived back in Christchurch just in time for the quakes. After a further eight years as Co-Editor, he decided to retire from that role for good (he had already retired from the workforce). But Warren's certainly not lost to PR, the ABC Committee or Waihopai protests. His regular Spooky Bits is a valued feature of every issue. And he also writes plenty of other major articles for it. He remains on the Committee and every year at Waihopai, he makes a point of going onto the spy base land to bang in a placard and face down any cops that might try to stop him.

Warren is a great example of growing old disgracefully. Nor has Doug Craig been lost - he has contributed articles in the years since he left Christchurch. And PR keeps rolling along, with me as sole Editor (which I last did, when I took over from Bob Leonard, from 2003 until 2011). And Becky is the Layout Editor, so it's a family business.

PR shares some features with Watchdog - e.g. Ian Dalziel covers, articles by me and Dennis Small, Jeremy Agar is its Reviews Editor. But there is also material that only appears in PR, such as Warren Thomson's regular Spooky Bits series. PR has much more international material than Watchdog. It is the nature of ABC's issue. And PR covers events and issues that don't appear in Watchdog. You can read the most recent (November 2019) PR online. But we only publish two PRs a year.

To fill in the gaps, in 2019 I started putting together and distributing a new feature - short, regular, electronic ABC Updates, which are simply a collection of links to online material. They were suggested by Lynda Boyd, an ABC Committee member (and former CAFCA Committee member) at ABC's 2019 annual strategy meeting. They have been very well received. You can read them at.

ABC's major project in any year is the Waihopai spy base protest. See my report on the 2019 one in PR 57, June 2019. If you read the mainstream media coverage (Stuff, 27/1/19, "Annual Waihopai Spy Base Protest Takes Aim At Donald Trump"), you can watch a video of it, including our first heckler for years. We've had hecklers, even counter-protesters before, but never before a heckler claiming to be on the same side as us. ABC has since held the January 2020 Waihopai protest, but I haven't written that up yet for PR.

Philippines Solidarity Network Of Aotearoa (PSNA): I work for this on a voluntary basis. In this Report I usually say: "It is basically just ticking over". But that was not the case in 2019. When I was in Auckland in 2017 for the last ever Roger Award event, I took the opportunity to meet with Auckland Philippines Solidarity (APS), a mixture of Filipinos and Kiwis, to discuss ideas and suggestions for projects.

I 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 year was halfway through his single six-year term, which is all that Philippine Presidents are allowed). I last organised a Filipino speaking tour in 2015 - the difference in 2019 was that I didn't organise it nationally (which is a lot of work). I was merely the Christchurch organiser. APS was the national tour organiser and PSNA played the supporting role in that 2019 speaking tour.

Professor Judy Taguiwalo was a lifelong political activist (she was one of the tens of thousands imprisoned without charge or trial under President Ferdinand Marcos' martial law dictatorship in the 1970s and 80s). When the present President, Rodrigo Duterte, was elected in 2016 he appointed some Leftists to his Cabinet. For a short time, Judy was the Secretary for Social Welfare and Development but her appointment was not confirmed and she was dumped out, along with the handful of other Leftist Cabinet nominees. It was fascinating to hear Judy's account of life inside Government with Duterte.

Her two-week speaking tour took in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch (with a side trip to Ashburton, where there are a lot of Filipinos working on dairy farms). APS was very pleased with her Auckland and Wellington visits - her public meetings there got good size crowds and she did an excellent live and nationwide Radio New Zealand interview. Ironically, her Christchurch visit was a bit of a fizzer, for reasons including a delayed flight causing an event cancellation, and a small crowd at her public meeting.

But taken as a whole, her national tour was a success and well worthwhile. And she was great company when she was with us in Christchurch. She happened to be here on Women's Suffrage Day (September 19th), so we took her to the Suffrage Memorial in central Christchurch which commemorates the birthplace of the women's suffrage movement which led to NZ women being the first in the world to win the vote, in 1893. That made such an impression on Judy that she was still talking about it when interviewed on RNZ just before leaving the country.

The Philippines remains in the international spotlight for all the wrong reasons. Duterte has continued his rule by death squad under the pretext of a "war on drugs". Tens of 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 didn't last long as a self-styled "Leftist" President and soon reverted to being just another Philippine President. He ended the peace talks that he had reactivated with the Communist underground (which has been fighting a war of national liberation for more than 50 years) and 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.

PSNA has pointed out to our APS friends that Auckland is hosting the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders' Summit for a week in November 2021 (NZ is APEC host nation for all of 2021). Duterte's term runs until 2022, so he'll be there. If Trump is re-elected in 2020, he'll be there too (along with a host of other Asia/Pacific villains). PSNA suggested to APS that we (PSNA & APS) should be part of any activity against APEC in November 2021, specifically Duterte’s presence in NZ.

APS thinks that is a good idea, and suggests that another Filipino activist be brought to tour NZ. The last time NZ hosted APEC, in 1999, PSNA toured the internationally renowned militant trade union leader, the late Crispin Beltran (universally known as Ka Bel) to coincide with it. You can read my report on Ka Bel's 1999 NZ speaking tour online. Regardless of whether Duterte and Trump are still in power (or alive), whoever are the Presidents of the Philippines and the US will be at APEC in Auckland in November 2021.

My Ancient Past: There is always something that brings back the memories. The death of Alister Taylor in September 2019 certainly did. Alister had no connection with CAFCA, his glory days as the country's paramount radical publisher were over before we started (as CAFCINZ) in the mid-1970s. But he was a central figure in my first few years as a political activist. The books that he published were central to the radical politics of the early to mid-70s - books such as Tim Shadbolt's "Bullshit And Jellybeans", Tony Simpson's "The Sugarbag Years" and Sue Kedgley's "Sexist Society".

Alister's key contribution to what went on to become CAFCA (and also, later, the Anti-Bases Campaign) was to publish Owen Wilkes' little booklet "Protest", about the very first wave of anti-bases campaigns in the late 1960s and early 70s (my obituary of Owen is in Watchdog 109, August 2005).

In that same period Alister published the NZ edition of the "Whole Earth Catalogue" (universally known as the "hippie bible") with Owen as Editor. My then partner wrote the section on fur sewing - because she was then a skilled worker in what is now the decidedly non-PC fur industry. And I wrote for Alister, specifically a number of articles for his short-lived NZ edition of Rolling Stone (I've still got a folder of carbon copies of the typewritten articles, done on foolscap paper. You have to be of a certain age to know what those words mean).

I knew Alister when he was in Wellington and, after the end of the 1975 South Island Resistance Ride (CAFCINZ's foundation activity), cartoonist Tom Scott drove Owen Wilkes and I from Wellington over the Remutakas to Wairarapa to visit Alister when he was living in baronial splendour in Martinborough. He was the father of the Wairarapa wine industry. I was reminded of that when Becky and I did a 2007 Wairarapa wine tasting day trip from Wellington (by train through the tunnel this time).

As with so many other writers for Alister (not to mention a huge number of other creditors) my relationship with him ended badly. You can get the picture from the headline on his Press obituary ("Publisher With A Disregard For Debts", 21/9/19, Karl du Fresne). In that era, you weren't anybody until you'd been ripped off by Alister Taylor. I was one of his legions of creditors (very small by comparison to others, but it was serious money to me).

I chased him for the money and it pissed him off. I've kept very little correspondence from those long-gone years but I have kept a 1973 typed letter from Alister, as a memento. Here's an extract: "Your letters give me ulcers, they're so bloody aggressive and underlying nasty that I prefer not to read them, or I get someone else to read them and tell me what you want without the raving bitterness and nastiness. There isn't really any need for that and I'm a little bit beyond that these days. Things are accomplished much better in other ways; you give people blocks and don't really accomplish much...". So, there, I've been insulted by an expert, the master of the time-honoured art of dodging the creditors.

Reading Jeremy Agar's review of Elspeth Sandys' "A Communist In The Family: Searching For Rewi Alley" (Watchdog 152, December 2019) brought back memories of a very different type of person. Nearly 50 years ago I met and interviewed Rewi when he was back in NZ in the summer of 1971/72.

That interview became the basis of two articles by me on Rewi that were published in Canta (the University of Canterbury student paper, which I went on to edit in 1974) and for that short-lived NZ edition of Rolling Stone, which I mentioned just above. So, I wrote about Rewi Alley for Alister Taylor (small world. I can't remember if Alister paid me for that one). My articles on Rewi are among those in the folder I still have, of carbon copies, on foolscap, of my typewritten originals. He was a very striking individual, with an absolutely fascinating life story.

At the conclusion of our interview, Rewi said: "Give me a ring if you're ever in Peking" (as Beijing was then called) and gave me his number. I never expected to be but the very next year, 1973, I was on an NZ students' delegation to China (the first foreign country I ever visited). I did give him a ring but he was away on his annual summer holiday at the seaside. Reading the book led me to make contact with its writer, Elspeth Sandys, in 2020, and offer her my two articles if she was interested in them. She certainly was and she wrote to me: "Really interesting. I learned a couple of things I didn't know. Guess that's the way with a subject as big as Rewi and China!".

I knew his brother, PJ (Pip) Alley, for many years (the interview took place at his Christchurch home). PJ idolised Rewi and talked to me a lot about him. I started off in radical Left politics in the Progressive Youth Movement (PYM) and PJ was a stalwart of the local branch of the former Communist Party. In my impecunious student days, I was a heavy duty bludger and PJ was a soft touch.

When I had to find $900 in a fortnight - a huge sum considering that my then partner and I were paying $9 a week rent for half a house - to go on that 1973 China trip, he loaned me a lot of it. I have a constant reminder of old PJ in my home office - I inherited his collection of years' worth of photos of numerous Christchurch protests of the 1960s and 70s.

My Workplace Is Also Our Home: So, inevitably, what happens in the house impacts on my work environment. For example, in 2019 I decided to get all of the exterior and interior wooden window and door frames painted (it was a long overdue job). This took two painters three weeks and was every bit as disruptive and messy as I'd imagined. Furniture had to be moved around, curtains and blinds had to be taken down and put back up. It affected every single room in the house, including the toilet.

Becky's solution was simply to get out of the house every day until the painters had gone. But I worked through - it was an "interesting" experience working on this computer while a painter was up a ladder about a metre behind and above me, scraping down the interior window frame. Having experienced considerably more disruption when our quake repairs were done in 2011, and when we had major renovations done in 1998 (both involved months of upheaval and loss of utilities), this was minor in comparison.

There are some aspects of living in Christchurch that are unique. The City Council was forced to put chlorine into the city's pristine water in 2018. We got around the horrible taste issue by using filters but were caught by another of the unforeseen consequences - in 2019 our place joined the burgeoning number of Christchurch houses where chlorine has wrecked the hot water cylinder causing it to leak and flood its surrounds.

That happened to us and we had to spend around $2,500 before our insurance policy kicked in (insurance companies regard leaking cylinders, regardless of the cause, as 'wear and tear' and therefore not covered). Our plumber told us the cylinder should have lasted 20 years - it only managed 16. After weeks with a bare board bathroom floor, insurance replaced the covering. And the City Council has quietly stopped setting deadlines for when chlorine will be removed from the water. My bet is that it's here for keeps.

Nearly two decades into the 21st Century, we finally had to replace two long-serving and faithful relics from the very end of the 20th - namely, our big old analogue TVs. They were state of the art when we got them and they both withstood 18,000 earthquakes unscathed (things on top of them fell off and broke). In addition, one of them survived the indignity of being stored in the garage with nearly all of our furniture while those 2011 quake repairs took place.

I remember having to stand on it to climb over that pile of furniture to reach some file that I discovered that I needed back inside my temporary home office (i.e. at the dining table). They were heavy old buggers - when we dumped them, the weighbridge docket told us that they weighed 80 kgs between them. To temporarily replace them, we dug out of storage a little wee portable TV that had last been turned on in 2005. To our amazement it worked and that's what we used for two months. That's what we watched the Rugby World Cup on (I was starting to get headaches and eyestrain).

We eventually joined the 21st Century and bought a flatscreen digital TV - but just for free to air TV. We've never had any interest in pay TV, be it via Sky or streaming. When I was profiled for the Press in 2009 ("The Last Radical",14/2/09), the journalist - Martin van Beynen - rang me before publication to double check that it was correct that I was a rugby fan and wouldn't have Sky. Both of those are still true today. We've kept the little old TV because it proved its worth after 14 years in spare room storage.

In my previous Report (Watchdog 150, April 2019), I detailed my adventures with the arborists who encountered a Waihopai spy base protest prop in our semi-derelict back shed (a mould for a giant wearable John Key head. They thought it was a water feature). They came back in the first quarter 2020 to sort out some more trees. I had sent the relevant extract from that Report to the tree company. With the result that, when their quote man came here in late 2019 for the next job, he turned up at the back door - wearing a Donald Trump mask. We both burst out laughing. Never a dull moment at the CAFCA home office.

My Health: I did have a health issue in 2019 but it was due to an injury, not illness. I injured my back lifting our chunky old solid steel lawnmower out of the car at the mower repair shop. We were en route to a movie ("JoJo Rabbit", to be precise). When we walked into the cinema, my left leg suddenly gave way on me and continued to do so, without warning, several more times. To cut a long story short, it was diagnosed as nerve damage caused by a disc pressing on it.

I had a visit to an after-hours clinic, a very short spell in a wheelchair, a day or so on crutches, several hours in Christchurch Hospital's emergency department, my first ever MRI scan and, finally, an appointment with a neurosurgeon, who told me that there is no real damage, that the injury had aggravated normal age-related spinal wear and tear, which came right by itself. No surgery or treatment was required; I only took painkillers for the first day or so. In his medical notes the young neurosurgeon referred to me as a "lovely 68-year-old gentleman". I thought: "So, this is what it's like to be patronised", after a lifetime of doing the patronising (of women, invariably).

That whole process played out over a couple of months. The outcome is that I'm fine, although it took a while to get back to anything like 100% strength in my affected left leg (it still feels a bit funny to the touch). After a lifetime of lawnmowing - homo suburbius personified - I haven't touched the lawnmower since the injury. I now pay a contractor to regularly cut our old school quarter acre section.

I confine myself to things like a bit of hedge and tree trimming. I have to be careful with heavy lifting, twisting and bending. Being suddenly reduced to one leg, and with limited mobility, was a reminder of the inexorable aging process. Oh, and we did get to see "JoJo Rabbit" - just a week later than our first, highly memorable, attempt.

My newly-bought electric bike proved to be my salvation when I had a seriously weakened leg. It's a step-through, whereas I couldn't manage my pedal powered bike. If you'll pardon the expression, I couldn't get my leg over (I can now, although I no longer have to pedal into howling head winds. After a lifetime of doing so into the teeth of southerlies, easterlies and norwesters, I don't miss that aspect of biking one bit). And I was soon back to walking long distances again.

E-biking is great - I zip round town at a top speed of nearly 40kmh, without having to pedal. I have to keep an eye on speed limits, to which I've never previously had to pay any attention. If I had any hair left, I'd feel the wind through it. While on the subject of bikes, I must pay tribute to Keith Guthrie, who was my bike shop man for around 30 years, and was well known around town as a penny farthing rider.

Keith died in February 2020, aged 69 (cancer came back five years after he first got it). My last dealings with him was buying that e-bike in winter 2019. Keith was both a gentleman and a gentle man. In 2018, to my great surprise, he secured me a brand-new pedal powered bike, free. He did so by activating a lifetime factory warranty on a bike we'd bought off him in 2005. Now that's service. Whenever I went into his shop, he sought me out for a chat on politics and the issues of the day. RIP, Keith.

Work/Life Balance: this is the buzz phrase; I practise it on a daily basis. It is certainly not all work with no play. In 2019, for the first time ever, I attended every Crusaders' home game, up to, and including, the victorious Super Rugby final. I usually go with one or two old friends who date back to the very birth of what started as CAFCINZ, and even before. Once again, I went to the victory parade after the final. It was a strange season, blighted (as were so many other things in Christchurch and throughout the country) by the March 15th mosques' massacre. It was a peculiar sensation being checked over by metal detectors under the eye of rifle-toting cops whilst queuing to get into the ground.

As a regular fan, I was invited to take part in the survey of whether the Crusaders should change their name or not. For the record, I voted for them to keep the name but drop all the other corny manifestations of the "crusade". That massacre definitely impacted on us personally (I detailed this in my previous Report. The mass murderer was rammed off the road and arrested at the set of highway traffic lights closest to our home).

And the city was on edge for some time afterwards. A couple of weeks later an Armed Offenders Squad action unfolded directly across the street from our place - we had six cop cars and armed cops blocking off our one-block long street; our drive was blocked by the AOS battle wagon, and I watched from the opposite footpath while shouting cops kitted out like soldiers going into battle sprinted towards a stopped car, rifles trained on the driver and attack dogs in tow.

Nobody got shot or bitten, just arrested - it was a routine criminal matter involving a stolen car, meth, and illegal guns in the car. The only thing that got damaged was one of poor old Becky's plant holders which she trod on and broke whilst trying to film the action through our hedge (though she did get a nice soundtrack of a barking Police dog).

We usually go to a movie a week (except for the week in which I buggered my back and leg en route to the cinema) and I keep that up when Becky's away on her months-long annual family visit to the Philippines. I get plenty of good use out of my Gold Card. I also check out exhibitions at the city's galleries. I bike or walk on a routine daily basis, except that now some of that biking is by e-bike.

We live so close to town that I walk to movies, etc, in the central city. I take the scenic route through Hagley Park and the Botanic Gardens, which are close to home (several years ago, when Russel Norman was Greens Co-Leader, I took him on that route to an event he was attending. He was suitably impressed). A lot of those things have been brought to a grinding halt - hopefully temporarily - by the coronavirus pandemic (see below)

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. People ask me when I plan to retire. Look at it the other way around. I actually got "retired" (via redundancy) in 1991 and have been getting paid to do my retirement hobby ever since. I'm both a worker and an old age pensioner. I have an active social life with friends, both local and from out of town. 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?

Going Viral: there are a couple of reasons why the central reality of life in 2020 - the global coronavirus pandemic - is not mentioned until last in this Report. Firstly - the Report covers what I did in 2019, when nobody had ever heard of this disease. Most of this was written before it became an issue. Secondly - the Report covers a bit of what I've done at the start of 2020 but, at the time of writing, this particular bomb is still very much in the process of exploding, and major changes are happening by the hour, let alone the day.

There is always some bloody thing that comes along just as I'm about to put this annual Report to bed. In 2011 it was Christchurch's killer quake; in 2019 it was the Christchurch mosques' massacre. But this is the granddaddy of them all, catastrophically affecting not just one city or one country but the whole world.

So, it would be disingenuous not to mention it (although I will be in a better position to have got my head around it by the time of my next annual Report. Hopefully it will be over by then). How is it affecting me and CAFCA? At the time of writing, the country is in lockdown, so there can't be any CAFCA (or ABC or KOA or PSNA) Committee meetings until that is lifted. As for me, well, I was way ahead of the trend. I've been working from home since 1991. Any shock from losing the social aspect of the workplace is way in the past with me.

And as an only child with no kids (by choice) I'm very comfortable with my own company - being alone is not the same as being lonely - and I've been practising social distancing all my life. I enjoy people and am a very social person but, equally, I'm very happy working by myself in monastic solitude (and in total silence, by preference, without radio or music). I'm fully aware that it's not a style of life or work that suits everyone but it is serving me very well at present. For me, it is very much business as usual.

I am alone - Becky is stuck in the Philippines, where she went for her annual family visit in December 2019 and, after extending her stay, found herself stuck there until further notice as the Philippine government imposed a typically militaristic and shambolic lockdown, and airlines stopped operating (her flight home was cancelled). She was there with her family, so was not in a desperate situation. (She got back to NZ in April 2020 on a plane chartered by the Government to get Kiwis out of the Philippines [that all happened very fast]. Upon arrival, she and all the other passengers were put into quarantine in Auckland for a fortnight before they could go home).

I still get out for my daily walk - solitary of course - but courtesy of Jacinda's compulsory savings scheme, I don't get to a café for my daily coffee, or to my weekly movie or to watch the Crusaders play (I did all of those things and plenty more, with gusto, right up until they were shut down. I look forward to resuming all of them. As a wise man once said: "Live every day like it's your last. Because one day it will be").

People have asked me: "Aren't you worried?" Yes, but no more than about other regional, national and global disasters I've lived through - such as 18,000 Christchurch earthquakes, sometimes dozens of them per day (you were never sure when you went to bed if the house wasn't going to crash down on top of you in your sleep). Such as previous global pandemics, the most recent of which was the 2009 swine flu one.

Such as the flu epidemics of my childhood that killed millions worldwide. Such as the polio epidemic of the 50s - my mother used to terrify me by talking of people who ended up in iron lungs. My one experience of contact tracing was in the 90s when I was told that I might have been exposed to TB - I wasn't, but it definitely got my attention. Not to mention the threat of nuclear holocaust that dominated most of my life (I've never forgotten our primary school headmaster in tears as he told us assembled kids, in 1962, that a nuclear war was about to break out because of the Cuban Missile Crisis. These memories tend to stay with you).

I have to be mindful that I fit the target demographic for coronavirus fatalities - I'm 69, with two pre-existing conditions: type 2 diabetes and intermittent asthma that can be triggered if a bad cold gets into my lungs (which last happened in 2016, leading to a weeklong hacking cough and being referred by my doctor for an immediate chest X ray to see if it was pneumonia or lung cancer. It was asthma, which was duly fixed). Keeping that in mind, life goes on while I concentrate on doing what the Government wants us all to do - working from home.

I really don't understand panic buying and hoarding. I can understand scooping up stuff like bottled water and toilet paper after a quake, when infrastructure and services are all gone (as we experienced in Christchurch). But not when plentifully supplied supermarkets remain open and infrastructure and services are fine. Actually, half a century ago, I had a nutty uncle who shopped like that as a matter of course - he used to take a sack with him to the shops. It was irrational behaviour then and it is considerably more so today.

Some people will find an upside to this major interruption to life as we know it - those who think there's far too much sport on TV will be absolutely delighted. I imagine my former partner will be amongst them. I well remember, in the 1980s, overhearing her phoning through a complaint to the TV network that was delaying the News to accommodate the cricket. She uttered the unforgettable line: "I'm sick of watching men play with their balls".

Mother Nature Has Last Word, Again

Once again, the human species is witnessing the tendency for Mother Nature to have the last word. We saw it in Christchurch with the quakes. As someone who was very active in the 1980s' international campaign to close US bases in the Philippines, I witnessed Mother Nature partially do the job for us with the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption that wiped out the massive US Air Force Clark Base. And what we're experiencing right now, in the most brutal and terrifying way possible, is a massive correction by Mother Nature of human behaviour worldwide, at the level of individuals, transnational corporations and whole industries. The cult of globalisation itself needs a radical rethink.

As an unintended consequence, it is doing to us what we have signally failed to do for ourselves if we really are to "do something" about climate change. It has eliminated global (and domestic) air travel, wiped out global tourism, taken cars off the roads and shut down carbon-emitting and polluting industries world-wide. For a time, however brief that may be, it has stopped the untold millions of people who say: "Yes, yes, we must do something about climate change. Now, excuse me, I've got a plane to catch to Bali".

The powers that be are anxious to get things back to what they were before - unbridled global growth and unlimited global and domestic mass travel, profitably dominated by transnational corporations. But this whole business is teaching us a lesson about the scale of things that will have to be done to deal with climate change. If we learn anything from all this, hopefully that necessary correction in human behaviour can be done in a much more planned, structured and gentle way. As for me, the lesson I've taken from all this is - I'm never going anywhere near any cruise ships. That was never on my bucket list and it definitely isn't now. Stay safe and stay well.


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