Lockdown And All That

Been there, done that and the novelty's worn off. I just carried on working from home in 2021 as I did during the 2020 lockdown and, indeed, as I've done continuously since 1991. As for the 2022 red traffic light setting, we treated it as a de facto lockdown (as did an awful lot of other people). Some things have changed. I hardly ever wore a mask during 2020 but I did so regularly in 2021 and continue to do so in 2022.

In my 2020 Report I said: "I'm not set up for Zoom or any other kind of online meetings". That changed in 2021 - a Web camera has been bought and attached to the monitor and Zoom software has been installed on the computer. CAFCA and the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) shared the cost, with CAFCA paying most of it.

Ironically, neither the Webcam nor the Zoom has yet been used in my CAFCA capacity. But ABC now routinely holds Zoom meetings, which I host and I've taken part in several national Zoom meetings of the new campaign against Rocket Lab. Plus a very successful Webinar (a first for ABC) about Rocket Lab, which replaced a planned Christchurch public meeting which had to be cancelled due to covid restrictions.

Another change is that, unlike 2020, I did not spend the 2021 lockdown by myself. First time around Becky was stuck in the Philippines for an extra couple of months by their lockdown. She got back home in May 2020 and has been here ever since, the longest time she's spent in NZ since the 90s. She was unable to make her annual Christmas visit in 2020 or 2021 to see her family, because the border was closed and the Philippines was enduring the world's longest and most unsuccessful lockdown, a singularly bungled militaristic one. She keeps in touch with her family online and via video calls. And 2020 and 21 were her first Kiwi Christmases in many years. In my 2020 Report I said that she'd got no refunds for cancelled flights - that finally changed, 18 months later, in 2021.

I'm fully vaccinated and boosted, although getting the second shot proved to be a bit of a saga - my bookings were cancelled twice before it happened. Actually, lockdown at home (which is also my workplace) is a very nice place to be under house arrest. We have a section which is just under the old quarter acre measurement, with no garden but lots and lots of greenery in the form of lawns, big trees, high hedges and fruit ranging from a grapevine to very big orange and pear trees. And the house is plenty roomy for two people. The whole place has what the real estate ads call "character".

Indeed, we are constantly besieged and beseeched by real estate agents and developers (by flyers in the letterbox, snail mail letters, phone calls, and knocking on our door - and on my office window in one case) to sell the place to them. Not because they're interested in the old house but because they want to knock it down, plus all those trees, etc, and cram as many townhouses as they can profitably squeeze onto the land.

It's happening all over our Christchurch suburb, Addington, and has added a new ugly word to the language - densification. They'll have to wait, because I regard a house as a home, not an "asset". And I definitely would not want to be spending lockdown in one of their shoe box townhouses or apartments, surrounded by concrete or asphalt. Thankfully, lockdown gave us a rest, albeit briefly, from their blandishments.

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 and Denis O'Connor are very actively involved in Keep Our Assets (KOA). Warren Brewer turned up unexpectedly at KOA's first 2022 Committee meeting, which was the first time I'd seen him since he moved to Hastings in 2018.

Membership

It is around 300, which is down from the 315 of my previous 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 re-join, so that we make up some, but by no means 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.

2021 was the first full year when members did not have the option of paying their CAFCA sub by cheque (our bank, Kiwibank, was simply the first bank to stop accepting cheques. It has now spread beyond banks to a whole raft of other institutions that will no longer accept them). We lost a couple of members for this reason. I had to return two or three cheques to members and ask them to try again.

They can still deposit cash into our account at a Kiwibank branch (if there is one in their area). Or, they can post us cash - at their own risk. Some members have done that for years, including from overseas. One member hand delivers cash to our home letterbox. Banking that cash during the 2021 lockdown was a big adventure, involving queuing for a lengthy period on the footpath outside Kiwibank's Christchurch CBD branch, closely surrounded by a line of the city's underclass who regarded masks as an impediment to their freedom to cough their guts out, have a smoke, talk on the phone or shout at their kids. It's all part of the job. Perhaps I should get paid danger money.

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.

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 (not since the 20th Century). However, in 2021, we substantially increased the sub for those very few overseas members who get Watchdog by snail mail.

The overseas postage rates are now astronomical, and the annual $30 we'd charged them for decades no longer remotely covered it. We now charge $60 for members in Australia and $100 for those in the rest of the world. We told them they can get it for the standard $20 if they swap to online readership. 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 account and two term deposits, hold $57,000, in round figures, which is $5,000 less than in my 2020 annual Report (which was $11,000 less than in my 2019 one), So, CAFCA's bank balance has dropped by $16,000 in two years. We used to have three term deposits, now we have two (with interest rates for term deposits currently no higher than 2%).

There is a simple explanation for that drop. The CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account (which exists solely to provide my income) dipped too low in 2020 and continued to dip to do so in 2021. So, CAFCA donated thousands to it in both 2020 and 2021. Prior to this, CAFCA's only financial contribution had been the occasional loan and the gifting of the regular interest from our term deposits. Regularly propping up the Organiser Account to the tune of thousands of dollars at a time is not sustainable and we decided that something has to be done about the latter (see below).

There are plenty of small organisations like ours who would give their eye teeth to have $57,000 in the bank (let alone the $73,000 we had in 2019). By contrast, the other group for which I am the Organiser - Anti-Bases Campaign - has $8,000 in round figures. So, 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. And, as I've already pointed out, we haven't increased our sub (except for a handful of overseas members) since the 20th Century.

Expenses & Donations

CAFCA has routine office expenses. Plus, the odd one-off, such as buying the Webcam that I've mentioned. 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 2021 we bought several thousand dollars' worth of envelopes, which will last us until well into 2022 (when the price will doubtless go up again. In 2021 I had to ring NZ Post to check if the price was going up, because it hadn't been publicised).

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. By contrast, Anti-Bases Campaign has decided that it can no longer afford these relentless postage rate increases and, from 2021, it moved Peace Researcher (the other publication which I edit) to being mainly online. A small number of ABC members - including all the Committee - took the offered option of continuing to get PR in hard copy.

CAFCA has enough money to be able to make donations to other campaigns. For example, we make an annual $500 donation to the Anti-Bases Campaign for the Waihopai spy base protests (as the 2022 one had to be cancelled because of covid restrictions, CAFCA asked for our $500 back - for the first time ever). We have one very generous member who recently gave us two donations of $500 each and told us to decide who most deserves them - they both ended up in the Organiser Account, keeping only $20 for the member's sub for CAFCA.

CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account

The trend, for several years now, has been of a steady decline. This forced CAFCA, for the first time, to dip into its reserves to prop up the Organiser Account (ABC doesn't have any reserves to dip into). So, in 2020/21 CAFCA donated $20,000, over several payments, to keep the Account alive. But this is not sustainable.

To quote from the latest monthly bank statement (February 2022) at the time of writing: the balance was $4,409.56. Money in was $2,214.81; money out was $4,229.99. That was a much bigger monthly drop than usual, largely accounted for by the fact that I got three pays in the period covered by the monthly statement, rather than the usual two. But even without that, there was still a shortfall of $600-$700 on the previous month. It was a quieter month than usual, with just one $100 online donation. On the other hand, several new people have started regular pledges in recent months. So, the Account doesn't lack for support from pledgers and donors.

But the long-term trend is down and there are two reasons for this - firstly, the commitment to pay the Organiser (me) the Living Wage (which increased in 2021 to $22.75 per hour). And the drop in the number of pledgers and donors - for the same reason that CAFCA membership is dropping. People are retiring and can no longer afford it. In some cases, regular pledgers have been doing it since the Organiser Account first started, back in 1991. I never cease to be amazed by their generosity.

It is remarkable that it has lasted for three decades without having been a drain on CAFCA finances (up until 2020). For nearly 30 years the Organiser Account was entirely dependent on the generosity of pledgers and donors. Recruiting new pledgers and soliciting more donations is a permanent project. But in 2021 we realised that we need to do more than that if the Account is to keep going at all.

So, for the first time, my paid hours have been cut from 40 to 30 per week, with a matching reduction in pay (but not the Living Wage hourly rate. Plus, the Organiser Account still pays, as it has done for decades, my monthly mobile phone and landline rentals, plus the bulk of my monthly Internet rental). I won't starve - I get the pension as well (for which I pay a higher tax rate). I've written the Account off more than once in the past and it just keeps going. Once again, I thank James Ayers who does a very good job of looking after the Organiser Account.

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 2021 issues were, respectively, 84 80 and 84 pages. We posted the hard copy August 2021 issue just days before lockdown - not that we had any warning that was about to happen. Lockdowns present problems for Watchdog. The April 2020 hard copy issue was delayed until our printers could get back to work in their building.

Watchdog will always be a niche publication - we now have only one retail outlet, which regularly sells out of the copies it stocks. We don't have the resources to compete with mainstream magazines. Nor the intention. Watchdog is a journal of analysis, not a newspaper. But you will find plenty of news in it that can't be found elsewhere.

Editing Watchdog takes plenty of my time but I also write some of each issue. In recent years I've written the lead article for each issue. Thanks are due - as they have been for more than 20 years - to (the now former) Layout Editor Leigh Cookson. At the end of 2020 she gave us a maximum of 12 months' notice, because Watchdog was taking up too much of her time on top of her fulltime job.

So, for the first time since the late 1990s, we had to look for a new Layout Editor. Thanks to a non-member supporter who circulated our appeal to her contacts, we found one too. That December 2020 issue turned out to be Leigh's last. From the April 2021 issue, Marney Brosnan took over as Layout Editor, and is doing a very good job. As for Leigh, she joins Bill Rosenberg as CAFCA's second Life Member. Leigh had been Layout Editor since the late 1990s, which is quite extraordinary when you consider that she did that on top of a fulltime job throughout all of those two decades. Three times a year Leigh and I had an intense burst of activity working together on the latest Watchdog.

She did the layout in a variety of settings and through the most trying of circumstances, such as the 2010/11 Christchurch earthquakes and the 2020 lockdown. Sometimes we would work together in the same physical space e.g., sitting at each end of the dining table at my home while doing corrections. But in recent years it has all been done remotely, with drafts, corrections and final versions all done electronically (and then e-mailed to the printer and Webperson).

Ian Dalziel has provided the wonderfully quirky cover graphics for many years now. Jeremy Agar not only produces a prodigious number of high-quality reviews but was Watchdog's resident Trumpologist for the interminable duration of that singularly inglorious Presidency. For five years Linda Hill did a superb job writing up the monthly Decisions of the Overseas Investment Office (plus some other articles).

She'd told us that she would write up those Decisions for five years and she finished as of the August 2021 issue. Dennis Small belies his name - he is very big in output. Dennis unearths issues before others become aware of them. It was his Watchdog articles, several years ago, that first alerted me to the threat posed by Rocket Lab, which now is the focus of the recently set up Keep Space For Peace campaign.

Watchdog attracts high-quality, high-profile writers. In 2021, those writing for us included Bryan Gould, Jane Kelsey, Catherine Delahunty, Geoff Bertram, Prue Hyman, John Minto, Mike Treen and Peter Richardson. And none of them gets paid anything. Readers have told us they appreciate the specialist articles, such as Liz Griffiths' ones on money and banks.

Online Watchdog

Terry Moon is in charge of this. She does a very good job and has introduced some innovations. 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. The reach of the online edition is much greater than the hard copy one. This was demonstrated in early 2022 when I was contacted by a former Australian anti-bases activist with whom I'd had no contact since the 1980s. He said that he found me through the online December 2021 issue.

Courtesy of former Committee member Warren Brewer, you can read online the most recent issues as PDFs, on Watchblog. It's worth noting that, although the hard copy issue is printed in black and white - because of the cost - Layout Editor Marney Brosnan provides us with a PDF which is partially in colour (i.e., individual cartoons, etc, which were in colour in the original). So, online readers and Watchblog frequenters get their Watchdog semi-coloured. And it looks great.

Key Facts & CAFCA Updates

Decades ago, Bill Rosenberg created, and every year updated, our Key Facts, which are uploaded to our Website. They are a vital CAFCA resource and one which has led to regular articles in the mainstream media. Bill's last annual update was at the beginning of 2020 and at the end of that most memorable of years he told us that he was finished. That cut Bill's last tie to CAFCA, other than being a member. We've said it before, so it won't hurt to say it again - heartfelt thanks, Bill.

Nobody else had ever done the Key Facts, they were very much Bill's baby. We put out an appeal in 2021 and very quickly got a taker - Edward Miller, Researcher and Policy Analyst with FIRST Union, which is a long-standing union supporter of CAFCA. Ed soon discovered just what a huge job it is and how much effort that Bill had put in year after year. Ed's work is right up to Bill's exacting standards of research and analysis. Welcome aboard, Ed. I started producing regular CAFCA Updates in 2020 and continued throughout 2021 and into 22. These are simply a collection of links to online mainstream media articles about subjects of relevance to CAFCA and its members. They have been well received.

Website & Other Digital Outlets

Terry Moon is also in charge of the CAFCA site and does a meticulous and very thorough job. In my previous two Reports l said that CAFCA is taking steps to upgrade and modernise our Website. This is being done by our Webhost (a small local company, the only Webhost we've had since we first went online in the 1990s). But it is taking an extremely long time to get implemented. I won't bore you with the details. At the time of writing, it is nearly but not quite ready to go live. This whole project will cost us serious money but, thus far, we haven't had to spend a cent.

In addition to the CAFCA site, we have the separate Watchdog one and the Historic Watchdog site, set up by former Committee member Lynda Boyd, which stores online all issues from the mid 1970s until 1999, when the actual Watchdog site was created. Sadly though, these historic issues are no longer accessible free of charge. The site host now requires visitors to it to open an account. Warren Brewer runs the Watchblog site and the Keep Our Assets (KOA) site.

Colleen Hughes has done a very good job of running the CAFCA Facebook site for years now. It has more than 1200 members, which is considerably more than our "real world" membership. But the trick is to get any of those Facebook members to become actual CAFCA members, let alone paying ones. It's the same issue faced by innumerable other organisations.

CAFCA did take one new step into the digital world in 2021 - we set up our own Twitter account and entered the weird and wonderful world of tweets. Previously, Warren Brewer had operated a de facto Twitter account for us, but it wasn't in our name (it dated back to a previous specific campaign from a decade ago) and it had fallen into disuse.

I offered to set one up for CAFCA, which was an adventure for me, as I had never previously felt the need to have anything to do with social media (I've never had a Facebook account or interacted with it at all). An awful lot of what is on Twitter is puerile superficiality (what would you expect from a medium whose most famous recent practitioner was Donald Trump?).

Essentially, it's a turbocharged, stream of consciousness version of texting, with the whole world as the recipient. It's a very useful discipline for me to have to confine myself to a 140-character tweet. I've got into the habit of regularly posting tweets and CAFCA has picked up a few followers. I strictly confine myself to business, with no personal opinions or details of what I had for breakfast. And, unlike Trump, I don't post tweets in ALLCAPS with numerous !!!!. You can follow us on Twitter @CAFCA_NZ

Twitter suits me more than other social media such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, in that it is more written than visual (I think in words rather than pictures). I've never taken a photo or video of anything with my phone, it never crosses my mind to do so. Even in the days of actual cameras with physical film, I never took photos. I never took a camera with me in my globetrotting days.

Overseas Investment Office (OIO)

This is a continuous CAFCA campaign that dates back to the 1980s (when the relevant body was called the Overseas Investment Commission). Linda Hill wrote up the monthly Decisions of the OIO, for both Watchdog and the CAFCA Website. When she took it on, she told us it would be for five years and that time was up in 2021. In the 30 plus years that we've been writing up those Decisions, there has only ever been three writers - Bill Rosenberg, James Ayers and Linda Hill. All set a very high standard of research, analysis and workmanship.

Linda was meticulous, a very good writer and, as the person who does the line-by-line proofreading and editing, I always enjoyed the jokes she buried in her otherwise very serious text. Some readers find it depressing; I (and plenty of others) find it informative. Linda also wrote several other Watchdog articles on aspects of foreign control e.g., "Private Equity Funds: The Swirling Billions Of The 1% Reach NZ", in Watchdog 154, August 2020. Heartfelt thanks to Linda.

There is no happy ending to the OIO story. Despite putting out an appeal (the same process by which we'd found Linda five years earlier) and doing so several times, we couldn't find anyone to replace her. We even paid an annual sub to join Volunteering Canterbury to be able to advertise on their network. A Wellington member volunteered to personally pay to advertise with the equivalent Wellington organisation.

Between them, those two networks produced a number of inquiries (one of whom got as far as writing up one month of Decisions as a trial). But no takers. It's a very specialist job and it involves a lot of work - James Ayers told his colleagues on the CAFCA Committee that when he did it, researching and writing up each batch of four months of Decisions took him the equivalent of one 40-hour week.

This has been a highly valued feature of both CAFCA and Watchdog that dates back more than 30 years. It has been a major CAFCA resource throughout that time, and one well used by the media, our members and the public. As a purely token gesture, CAFCA has decided to highlight one Decision (and one only) from each month of Decisions plus a list of all the Decisions for that month. I'm doing that now. It is the first time I have ever written up any OIO Decisions.

Keep Our Assets (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 remains in charge of the KOA Website. And Denis O'Connor, a CAFCINZ/CAFCA Committee member in the 1970s and 80s, is very actively involved with KOA. Other KOA Committee members include Steve Howard, Paul Broady, Kay Robertson, Mike Newlove, Dot Lovell-Smith and Jonathan Handley-Packham. Some - but not all - of them are also CAFCA members. It is the biggest Committee with which I'm involved.

KOA has been in existence for a decade and has plenty on the go. We've been actively involved in a number of issues, such as the Christchurch City Council deciding to charge householders for excess water usage. KOA is also keeping a close eye on the Government's three waters reforms, which proposes removing control of the 67 local bodies' three waters' infrastructure and turning it over to four newly created regional water entities. There are a number of opposing opinions on this within the KOA Committee but my concern is that it could be setting water up for privatisation, which pundits have pointed out could be done by a future change of Government and a simple Act of Parliament.

In both of his 2016 and 2019 Christchurch Mayoral candidacies on behalf of KOA John Minto made the Living Wage a central policy plank i.e., the City Council should be paying it to its workers and contractors. The Council has dragged the chain on this for years, so, in 2021, KOA got stuck into them, demanding that they not only pay it but back date it to when they first declared that they would pay it.

The local branch of the Living Wage Movement, which had been low profile to the point of invisibility, sprang into life with the appointment of a paid local organiser, Nathaniel Herz-Edinger. He met with John and Bronwen, then with me, and then with me, Brian Turner and Paul Piesse. The latter two comprised KOA's deputation to a monthly City Council full meeting to speak to them about the Living Wage.

The Living Wage Movement had its own deputation to that meeting, where the Council finally voted to pull its finger out and start paying the Living Wage (with some caveats). KOA has become a paying member of the Living Wage Movement, as an act of solidarity, and invited Nathaniel to speak at two KOA Committee meetings.

Monitoring local bodies can be an interesting experience. For example, John Minto and I spoke on behalf of KOA at a full meeting of Environment Canterbury (ECan), the regional Council. We were speaking to our submission on its Long-Term Plan. Public transport was a major theme of our submission - in both his Mayoral campaigns, John had made free buses a central policy plank, and got a lot of public support as a result.

Ironically, the two ECan Councillors who openly tout their National Party membership were the ones who urged ECan to trial free buses as a practical response to the need to do something about climate change. Thus, I found myself in the unusual position of praising ECan's Tory Councillors - which led to the whole lot of them bursting out laughing. One of the Tories said to John: "We seem to have become strange bedfellows, Mr Minto". Nothing like a broad united front, eh. But, as at the time of writing, nothing has happened vis a vis any free public transport in Christchurch.

In recent years KOA was among those who urged the City Council to prioritise social housing over building a new rugby stadium. But politicians are always bedazzled by the next big shiny thing dangled in front of them, so they went for the stadium. In 2021 KOA watched with bemusement as the City Council tied itself in knots over how much to spend on it, and how many people it should hold. Rightwing Councillors (dubbed "the frugal five") who voted against adopting the Living Wage because "the Council can't afford it" fell over themselves to throw tens of extra millions of ratepayers' money at the stadium, because it would be "good for the Christchurch business community".

Not only did the Rugby Union contribute not one cent, it made it clear that the Council would have to make "incentive payments" (isn't that a nice phrase for bribes?) if the Council wanted the All Blacks to play at the stadium, regardless of how big it is. And so, the public continues to subsidise professional sport (and I speak as a rugby fan who attended every Crusaders' home game in 2020 and 21 in the rickety "temporary" Addington stadium, sometimes in some very exciting weather). One of my very first tweets read: "Congratulations, Christchurch City Council. You win the White Elephant Prize for voting to build a 30,000-seat stadium. Two days before the All Blacks struggled to attract 25,000 spectators to a half empty Eden Park".

Relations With Other Groups

In the KOA subsection (above) I mentioned the Living Wage Movement, which KOA just joined in 2021. CAFCA has actually been a paying member for several years, ever since it made the decision that the CAFCA/ABC Organiser (me) should be paid the Living Wage. Our first representative was Brian Turner, when he was a CAFCA Committee member, then he was succeeded by Colleen Hughes, who has been on the CAFCA Committee for many years.

But Colleen never heard anything from the local Living Wage Movement people, let alone got invited to any meetings. Indeed, the first time CAFCA heard from them in years was a mistaken message saying that we hadn't paid our sub (we had but I had to trawl back through months of bank statements to find it). Out of the blue we received an online newsletter from the national Movement in 2021. I referred to that in KOA correspondence with the City Council, which led to one Councillor asking me to send it to her as she couldn't find anything more recent than 2019 on the Movement's Website!

But things definitely improved in 2021. As I said in the KOA subsection, the Christchurch branch of the Living Wage Movement sprang into life with the appointment of a paid part-time organiser, Nathaniel Herz-Edinger, who is a keen young fellow. He has made sure that Colleen is back in the loop, he has met with both CAFCA and KOA Committee people, and has generally revved up that campaign in Christchurch, which has lagged well behind other NZ cities.

Since 2018 we have developed a productive working relationship with Aotearoa Water Action (AWA), which started off by fighting the Chinese-owned water bottling plant in Christchurch and has branched out into looking at the whole spectrum of water issues, not only in Canterbury but nationally. They have provided an update in virtually every Watchdog in that period. In 2021 I had a working meeting with AWA's Peter Richardson and he spoke at a KOA Committee meeting.

For many decades we have been friends with Coromandel Watchdog of Hauraki and they usually provide an annual update in (our) Watchdog. Written by Catherine Delahunty, Coromandel Watchdog Chairperson (and a former Green MP), it appeared in the August 2021 issue. Much more recently we have developed a relationship with Extinction Rebellion. It was one of their leading Christchurch figures who was instrumental in finding us a new Layout Editor for Watchdog. And there is an article from one of their Dunedin activists (who is also a CAFCA member) elsewhere in this issue.

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 its researcher, Ed Miller, now researches and writes CAFCA's Key Facts, with the union treating that as part of his job. Meaning that he gets paid to do it, at no cost to CAFCA. Other unions we work with, or have worked with, are the Maritime Union of NZ (MUNZ), Rail and Maritime Transport Union (RMTU), E Tū and Unite. Mike Treen of Unite has been a regular and greatly appreciated Watchdog writer over the years.

Relations With Government

CAFCA has been in existence since the mid 1970s but we have only claimed a "relationship" with the Government since 2017. Since then, I have detailed CAFCA's involvement in the review and amendment of the Overseas Investment Act. I, and others, have regularly written about this in Watchdog. I was invited to meet the relevant Minister (the Greens' Eugenie Sage - who is no longer a Minister after the 2020 election), been interviewed over the phone by Treasury, attended an official briefing on the Bill in Christchurch - all of those events were firsts for CAFCA - and put in a submission to the Treasury review.

In 2020 we put in a submission on the actual Bill, which became law in 2021. It does contain some features that CAFCA has been advocating for years - for example, the application of a national interest test (but it does not define "national interest" - that is left up to the reviewing Ministers). Another example - the "good character" test will now be applied to the applicant companies themselves, not merely to the individuals owning and/or controlling them. And, for the first time, "not of good character" is defined. So, the Act does have some definite improvements but its main thrust is to "streamline" and "make more efficient" the application and oversight process for the foreign applicants.

Since Labour became a single Party government at the 2020 election CAFCA has heard no more from anyone in Government or officialdom. That window closed when Eugenie Sage ceased to be the Minister in charge of the Overseas Investment Office, and has certainly not been reopened by her successor, Labour's Damien O'Connor. When Labour came into office in 2017, in coalition with New Zealand First and supported by the Greens, they recognised that foreign control is not just an issue, it is a problem for New Zealand and they had to do something about it.

That "something" is basically the new law (plus emergency legislative measures taken during the pandemic to stop any distressed NZ companies being snapped up by transnational vultures). This was a start, with some good features but there is no sign that Labour plans to do anything else in the current term, or any beyond that. As far as they're concerned, the foreign control box has been ticked. I don't expect this subsection to appear in future Organiser's Reports.

I can only think of one former Labour MP who was happy, decades ago, to be briefed by CAFCA (we made the offer to all of them). Michael Cullen's death in 2021 reminded me that, when he was in Government in the noughties, I was told by a TV journalist that he had recently mentioned CAFCA to Cullen - who told the journo: "they're a one-man band in Christchurch". So, we don't have any illusions about Labour. To summarise - our "relationship" with the Government only spanned the years 2017-20, then it was back to business as usual.

Media Profile

Things were very quiet on that front in 2021, which might have something to do with the fact that I stopped putting out press releases, instead prioritising CAFCA Updates and Twitter. A lot of time and work can go into a press release for little or no return. That's not to say that CAFCA had no contact with the mainstream media in 2021. In short order, I was contacted by both the New Zealand Herald and Radio NZ, with both wanting help on the same very big question - who owns NZ?

I sent them our latest Key Facts but neither of them did anything with that. I get asked for the odd comment about a particular OIO Decision now and then. A specific senior journalist at the Herald has regularly kept in touch with CAFCA for many years and that continued in 2021. "You do an amazing job. I call you NZ's longest-established lobby group and greatly admire your work". The problem with dealing with the Herald is that the resulting article goes behind its paywall, meaning that I can't access it or distribute it.

I did one unique piece of media work in 2021, and it has led to more. Decades ago, in the pre-digital age, CAFCA used to get hard copies of the US publication Covert Action, which was founded by the famous CIA whistle blower and author, Philip Agee (my obituary of him is in Watchdog 117, April 2008).

I have had three file boxes full of the magazine, sitting on the topmost shelf of my home office for many years. But it stopped publication after several decades and its Website vanished. That, we thought, was that. Imagine our delight to discover that it had recently re-emerged as an online publication, founded by Philip Agee's son. It is well worth reading on a regular basis.

I contacted it to simply correct a photo caption. That led to a correspondence and invitation to write about NZ. So, I sent them a tweaked version of an article I'd first written for Watchdog in 2018, about the unsuccessful attempt by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its NZ allies to destabilise and bring down the 1980s' nuclear free Labour government, by using the sensitive issue of race relations (repeating a modus operandi which had worked a decade earlier to bring down the 1970s' Australian Labor government).

It was my first time to work with a 100% online publication, let alone an international one, and it was eye opening. The guy in the States that I was working with took it upon himself to add a whole lot of photos to the article, plus links to all sorts of contemporary material about New Zealand under today's Labour government. He also asked me for more details of the CIA's methods and personnel in this operation. But I couldn't find anything substantive in my limited archive of 1980s' hard copy material. So, he did it for me and it turned out, embarrassingly, that the answers were all right there in those very same file boxes of Covert Action, which have sat, unexamined, on my top shelf for decades.

I didn't think to look there. Not only that, but the source for it all was our very own Owen Wilkes, in a 1980s' interview with Covert Action. Owen has been dead since 2005 (my obituary of him is in Watchdog 109, August 2005) but remains indispensable. My article (with considerable unattributed input from one of Covert Action's own) can be read here.

Over the decades I've written for all sorts of publications but this one was a very stimulating co-writing exercise and I have been invited to do some more for it. The American guy wrote to me: "It's great generally working with you. If you want to write other articles for us on Australia and New Zealand that would be great, including current developments with the new cold war with China".

As with everything else, finding the time is the issue and there's no pay, I'm afraid, so this is not going to help with the Organiser Account. It did have one unexpected, welcome, spin off. A journalist at the Otago Daily Times became aware of it and wrote a late 2021 feature on the subject, citing CAFCA, Covert Action and me.

Much more recently I sent them a second article, namely the lead article for this issue of Watchdog, on Five Eyes and Rocket Lab. Unlike my first one, I did not customise it for an American audience. It was written as a straight Watchdog article for a New Zealand audience (a very specific CAFCA and ABC audience) and was only sent to Covert Action as an afterthought.

To my pleasant surprise I got an instant reply, saying: "The article is excellent and well suited for us". They "sexed it up", giving it a much punchier, more provocative title, made some minor edits and added a lot of photos. You can read that here.

CAFCA Priorities

Much the same as they have been in recent years. 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). This is taking much, much longer than we expected, literally years, in fact.

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, for example, Keep Our Assets. KOA doesn't just spring into life during local body election years. There is no shortage of issues to keep it busy. In 2021 these included water, social housing, the stadium, the Living Wage and public transport.

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 (as I've mentioned, we've now added Twitter to our portfolio of outlets). We have an aging, indeed aged, membership, so recruiting new - hopefully, younger - members is a constant project.

Since the 2017 change of Government CAFCA has operated in a different political environment, one in which the Government actually set out to address some of the problems arising from the ever-increasing foreign control of the New Zealand economy and, indeed, New Zealand society. It set out to do something about it - namely, to review the overseas investment regime and amend the Overseas Investment Act.

That was done and the amended Act came into force in 2021. But we get the very clear impression that the Labour government now thinks it has "done" the foreign investment issue, and can carry on with a slightly modified business as usual approach. So, CAFCA can't put our feet up just yet. 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. Becky is the Layout Editor, so it's a family business. PR shares some features with Watchdog - e.g., Ian Dalziel cover graphics, 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 issue (November 2021) here. But we only publish two PRs a year.

To fill in the gaps, since 2019 I've been putting together and distributing short, regular, electronic ABC Updates, which are simply a collection of links to online material. They have been very well received. You can read them here. They provided me with the inspiration for the online CAFCA Updates (finding material for either is not the issue - finding the time is).

ABC's major project in any year is the Waihopai spy base protest. You can read my report on the 2021 one in PR 61, June 2021. There was only one journalist present, from the Marlborough Express, but she gave it extremely generous coverage on Stuff (31/1/21). The article included lots of photos.

In my previous Report I mentioned that 2020 was the first Waihopai protest not to feature a Green MP (or a Co-Leader) as a speaker since the Greens first entered Parliament in 1996 (Golriz Ghahraman had to pull out at the last minute, due to a serious health problem). Normal service was resumed at the 2021 protest, with newly elected Green MP Teanau Tuinono as a speaker. It was his first time to see Waihopai, let alone take part in a protest there, and it made a big impression on him. Not only was he a speaker but he joined those who climbed the base's outer fence and banged a placard into the farm paddock which surrounds the inner fence and the base proper.

In late 2021 Waihopai got more mainstream media coverage than it has done for years. This was prompted by the Government's announcement that the base's most conspicuous features - the two giant domes and the satellite dishes concealed within them - are obsolete and would be dismantled and decommissioned in 2022.

To be clear - this does not mean that the spy base itself is being closed; simply that it and the agency which runs it (the Government Communications Security Bureau - GCSB) would be using more modern and efficient methods of spying than 1980s'-vintage satellite dishes. And that the base itself will be a whole lot less conspicuous (in an ABC press release I described the domes as "sticking out like dogs' balls" and the media loved that good old Kiwi phrase, running it with gay abandon). In a short spike of media interest, I appeared in newspapers (including being name referenced in an editorial) and on radio.

And for the first time in many a long year I did a TV interview at home, for a TV3 weekly current affairs show. Times have changed - the fellow who turned up wasn't a TV3 cameraman but a contractor. I did the interview with the locked down Auckland reporter, talking to an out of shot phone. The cameraman (who had never heard of Waihopai or ABC) found it all very interesting.

He told me: "As I was going out of the office the boss said this was a covid interview. So, I was expecting an anti-vaxxer nutter". Of course, the 2022 Waihopai protest became the first one to be cancelled since the campaign started in 1988. It happened at very short notice, because of the Omicron outbreak and covid restrictions. I'll write that up in my 2022 Report.

Some interviews came from unexpected sources. I was contacted by a young Kiwi performance artist who is currently based in Melbourne. She was in Christchurch to perform her work, which is an artistic interpretation of Five Eyes (the five-nation electronic spying network of which NZ is a member). We met over a coffee and I found it refreshing to talk with a keen young activist (who wasn't yet born when ABC started protesting at Waihopai). I was also rung by a mainstream newspaper journalist for a phone interview on a wide range of questions about spying, for a feature he was writing. He told me that he first became aware of my work on the subject via my above-mentioned first article for Covert Action, the online US magazine.

Rocket Lab Campaign

For several years now, building on the excellent work by Dennis Small, I have been writing about Rocket Lab in both Peace Researcher and Watchdog, alerting people to its function as a privatised US base on NZ soil, operated by an American company, dragging NZ into the American militarisation of space. Its launch pad is in a remote location (Mahia Peninsula) but its assembly plant and HQ are in Auckland. It is NZ's fourth base - the others being Christchurch Airport (Harewood), Waihopai and Tangimoana.

So, ABC had been trying to get Auckland activists galvanised to campaign against this US military/intelligence presence in their city. Most gratifyingly, a campaign focusing on Rocket Lab kicked off in 2021, with activists in both Auckland and the Gisborne/Wairoa/Mahia area. Mainstream media started to take a critical look at Rocket Lab and cover the opposition to it. Prior to Auckland's prolonged 2021 lockdown, there was a well-covered protest at Rocket Lab's Auckland HQ. There have been a number of national campaign Zoom meetings, in which I took part.

ABC has done its bit in the Rocket Lab campaign. As part of our 2021 Waihopai protest, we held a public meeting in Blenheim, with three speakers - Nicky Hager, Ollie Neas and Green MP Teanau Tuiono. Nicky spoke about Five Eyes; Ollie is a journalist who has written extensively about Rocket Lab in outlets ranging from North & South to the Spinoff; Teanau has gone on to get very actively engaged in the Rocket Lab campaign.

In September 2021 we planned a Christchurch public meeting with Nicky Hager, Ollie Neas and Rocket Lab Monitor's Sonya Smith (from the Mahia area) as speakers. Lockdown and covid restrictions put an end to that but we converted it into our first ever Webinar (many thanks to ABC Committee member Lynda Boyd for setting it all up), which attracted more than 100 attendees from all around NZ and some from overseas. I spoke at that. ABC continues to actively build links with the Rocket Lab campaign. Mahia or Auckland are too far away for us to get to - Waihopai, at the top of the South Island is our limit - but we can actively help in other ways.

I greatly value the ABC side of my Organiser job, because it enables me to keep doing what I started out as more than 50 years ago (a 2021 mainstream media report on Waihopai referred to me as a "veteran protester". I'm happy with that description). It has been decades since CAFCA was a protest organisation; we are routinely described in the media as a lobby group. Equally, I'm happy with that description. Protesting and lobbying form two essential parts of the same big project - which is to fight imperialism, whether of the military/intelligence variant, or the transnational corporate one. Being Organiser for both CAFCA and ABC enables me to deploy different skills.

Philippines Solidarity Network Of Aotearoa (PSNA)

This is the last time this section will appear in my annual Report. In my previous one I said that, in 2021, the PSNA Committee had decided to call it quits and to turn things over to our friends in Auckland Philippines Solidarity (APS). We transferred all of our money to them, several thousand dollars (impressive when you consider that PSNA hadn't charged membership subs since we stopped publishing our newsletter more than a decade earlier). Then we closed our bank accounts and turned over our membership list and several other e-mail lists to them.

PSNA had three decades of activism of which it can be proud. For around half of that time, we regularly published our newsletter Kapatiran (Solidarity). You can still read 2003-09 issues online at PSNA's Website. I was the Editor of Kapatiran, meaning that, for years, I was Editor of three publications - Watchdog, Peace Researcher and it. Something had to give and it was the publication which was not part of my paid work

We helped to send New Zealand activists to the Philippines and from the early 90s until 2019 we either fully or partly organised and hosted a number of NZ speaking tours by Filipino progressive movement activists. Some of them were very high-profile national leaders - such as the late Crispin Beltran of the May First Movement union confederation, national human rights leader Marie Hilao-Enriquez, and Luis Jalandoni and Coni Ledesma, exiled leaders of the political wing of the Communist armed struggle, to give just a few examples. We regularly helped to raise funds for political causes and disaster relief in the Philippines, right up until 2020.

I pay tribute to my fellow PSNA Committee members - my wife Becky Horton, Leigh Cookson, and Trish Murray. Plus, former Committee colleagues - Paul Watson, Brian Turner and Eileen Shewan. Sadly, two of our former Committee colleagues are no longer with us - Father Mark Moesbergen, and Aziz Choudry. They died 25 years apart. My obituary of Mark is in Watchdog 84, May 1997 and Leigh Cookson's obituary of Aziz is in Watchdog 158, December 2021.

The end of PSNA, a Christchurch-based group, brings to an end a proud history of Christchurch as a hub for NZ's Philippines solidarity movement. It was born here in the 80s (before my time) and its father was Christchurch priest (an actual Father), the late John Curnow. My obituary of him is in Watchdog 68, October 1991.

The national movement was based in Auckland for years in the 80s and into the 90s, when NZ support for Philippines' solidarity was at its peak. Throughout those years the National Coordinator was Keith Locke. Christchurch had its own Philippines solidarity group in those days (I wasn't involved in that). But, by the early 90s, both the national and Christchurch groups had done their dash. PSNA was founded to take on both the national and Christchurch roles.

Jane Kelsey: Indispensable

PSNA was a proper national network, not simply a Christchurch group. People from elsewhere in the country played a vital role. Jane Kelsey has been very well-known to Watchdog readers for decades. PSNA could not have existed for so long without Jane. Let me explain. In the mid 90s PSNA received a whole lot of stuff from our Auckland predecessors. Amongst it, we were pleasantly surprised to discover a live bank account. Even better, that account included three regular automatic payments - from a couple, another member, and Jane. Who knows how long they had been paying into it before it came into PSNA's possession?

That combined total of $37.50 a month lasted for years, even surviving intact the fraught process of getting all three automatic payments transferred to our new bank. The couple retired and stopped the payment; the other member went into a home and died. But Jane kept going - $20 a month, right up until 2021 when we asked her to stop because we were closing down.

Jane's $20 a month enabled PSNA to keep ticking over, year after year. It enabled us to pay our basic costs. We stopped asking members for subs after we stopped publishing Kapatiran in 2009. Jane's monthly payment kept us going. When we needed to raise money for a major project, such as one of our NZ speaking tours by a Filipino progressive movement leader, we appealed for funds. It worked every time.

Jane was not merely a vital financial backer of PSNA. She has been active in Philippines' solidarity work for decades. I first heard her speak, about anything, at a late 1980s' Christchurch public meeting, reporting back on a Philippine visit she'd made. This was years before PSNA existed. That very active involvement continued right up until the present and has had many highlights - for example, when the above-mentioned Crispin Beltran was both a Congressman and the Philippines' highest profile political prisoner, in this century's first decade, Jane was the first New Zealander to visit him in his hospital confinement. Thank you, Jane, we couldn't have done it without you.

PSNA lasted nearly 30 years. The writing was on the wall in 2020 - the PSNA Committee didn't meet at all in that year, either in person or online (and I mean the whole year, not just the lockdown period). New Zealand was the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) host nation for all of 2021 (for the first time since 1999) and PSNA looked forward to playing a role in the campaign against that, particularly at the prospect of having Philippines' President Duterte in Auckland for the APEC Leaders' Summit in November - in 1999 PSNA brought Crispin Beltran to NZ for a national speaking tour to coincide with mass opposition to that year's APEC Leaders' Summit, also in Auckland.

But the pandemic put paid to all that. APEC went ahead in 2021 but everything was online only. With the border closed indefinitely (i.e., no Filipino speaking tours of NZ or NZ activists to the Philippines) and no activity to look forward to for the foreseeable future, we decided that 2021 was as good a time as any to wrap up PSNA and hand over to APS.

Actually, that hand over had already started. Our most recent - and, as it turned out, final - Filipino speaking tour (Professor Judy Taguiwalo in 2019) was nationally organised by APS - PSNA was only responsible for Christchurch. APS is an excellent successor to PSNA. They are a mixture of Filipino and Kiwi activists operating in the city with NZ's biggest Filipino population. We are delighted to hand over to them.

For me personally, it ends a major chapter in my life as an activist that stretches back decades (and frees up a noticeable chunk of time on a daily basis that I used to spend as an unpaid volunteer on PSNA work). I visited the Philippines several times before PSNA was founded (the first time was in 1987) and have done so several times since.

On one visit I lived in Manila for a few months and I've directly participated in the campaigns of the Filipino progressive movement in that country. I've learnt a lot from it and cemented links with the Philippine people (I've been married to one for 30 years - we got married in Manila - and I have a large whanau there). So, the Philippines and its people will always be part of my life.

Rita Baua: Champion Of International Solidarity

This is the appropriate place to pay tribute to Rita Baua, a veteran leading Filipino activist, and one with whom I worked closely decades ago. Rita died, in Manila in February 2022, aged 79. She died of pancreatic cancer (and it can be considered a minor miracle that an activist died of natural causes in a country where so many of them are murdered or disappeared). Rita was a leading Filipino movement figure for many decades and she took the struggle very seriously indeed, because in that country it is a matter of life and death. She personified what Filipino activists call G and D - grim and determined. In a good way.

One Filipino tribute described her as "anti-imperialist, internationalist, a pillar of the Philippine national democratic mass movement". Rita's speciality was international solidarity and that is how I met her. We first met when I was part of the New Zealand contingent (with a much larger number of Australians) as part of the Peace Brigade, which spent an action-packed month in the Philippines in 1989, lending our international weight to the marvellous campaign by the Philippine people to get rid of the accursed US bases out of their country. The most high-profile Australian participant was Senator Jo Vallentine (you will find more about her in my article "A History Lesson", elsewhere in this issue, specifically the subsections "The Long March" and "Pine Gap").

I wrote this up, in great detail, in a long report in Watchdog 61, (May 1989). One quote will suffice: "Personally, it was the most fascinating month of my life". One which has had long term consequences, because it was Rita who was (indirectly) responsible for Becky and I meeting. A central event of that month-long visit was the Asia Pacific Peoples' Conference on Peace and Development. Rita and Becky had previously worked together on activist campaigns - Rita invited Becky to help out as part of the secretariat at the conference. That's how we met (Rita used to jokingly refer to Becky and others as "solidarity brides").

Rita and I next worked together here in New Zealand, when she was the leader of the Philippine contingent on the Anti-Bases Campaign's 1990 Touching The Bases Tour. I've written this up in another article elsewhere in this issue ("A History Lesson"), so I won't duplicate that here. It was written up in detail in Watchdog 66, March 1991. In it I wrote: "Heartfelt thanks to our good friend Rita Baua for ensuring such a high-powered Filipino delegation took part, led by herself". While she was in NZ, Rita came to my Christchurch home (the one I still live and work in).

In 1991 I was made redundant from the Railways after 14 years and used my redundancy pay to go to Manila for several months. That 1989 conference I'd attended had resulted in an organisation being set up (the Asia Pacific Peoples' Forum on Peace and Development), which was where Rita worked and she took me on as a volunteer there. So, we worked side by side for several months.

I can't remember the actual work that I did but I do remember that it was the last time that I regularly worked with a typewriter, something which I'd done since I was a high school boy in the 60s. Those few months in Manila marked the transition from my last "real" job (the Railways) to becoming the CAFCA/ABC Organiser, which I commenced when I got home from the Philippines, with Becky, in late 1991.

It was a fascinating experience, living and working in an Asian mega-city. While I was there Becky and I lived together, with an eclectic bunch of housemates from several countries. Rita arranged that accommodation. She arranged other things too. I have mentioned John Curnow, the Christchurch priest who was the father of NZ's Philippines solidarity movement. I was in Manila when John died, in Christchurch, in 1991. The Philippine movement held a memorial for him and Rita arranged for me to speak at it (for her 2022 memorial I sent a short video message).

Two very memorable things happened during those few months that I spent in Manila in 1991. The US bases did get kicked out, after nearly a century, when the Senate voted not to renew the treaty that permitted their presence in the Philippines and I had the pleasure to be amongst the jubilant crowd of tens of thousands outside the Senate, in the pouring rain, when the vote was taken.

And I got married to Becky. Being a couple of good political activists, we timed our wedding to coincide with an international anti-bases conference in Manila, which enabled Kiwi friends and colleagues to attend it (my old Anti-Bases Campaign partner in crime, Warren Thomson, was best man). Rita was among the guests.

Rita and I spasmodically kept in touch over the following decades but we were both very busy with our work in our respective countries. I last saw her on my last visit to Manila, a six week-long family holiday over the Christmas of 2008/09. We met at a glitzy fundraising dinner for a major human rights organisation.

I wrote up this occasion in my 2008 Organiser's Report (Watchdog 119, February 2009), under the subheading "Dining With A 'Communist Murderer'" - not Rita, I hasten to add. It was a great night and a great final memory of Rita. It was an honour and a privilege to know Rita and, even better, to closely work with her in person in our two countries. Rest in peace, kasama (comrade).

My Ancient Past

In my Report for 2020, this section was followed by one titled Death In The Family. I can combine them in my 2021 Report. The 2020 death was that of Trevor Wall, an old friend and comrade from our common membership of the former Progressive Youth Movement (PYM) in the late 1960s and early 70s. Actually, Trev died, in Sydney, in 2017 but none of his old mates (not even his former long-term partner) found out about it until 2020.

This latest death in the family involving someone from my ancient past actually went back decades. Let me explain. There's a first time for everything and so it proved in 2021. I received an e-mail from a stranger: "Hi, I am trying to contact Murray Horton, on a personal matter, and I'm hoping I have found you here at CAFCA. My name is (withheld) and I am trying to contact a man who I have been told you were friends with in the 1970s when you were both in the PYM in Christchurch. His name is Murray Shaw".

"Murray Shaw is my birth father and I would like to make contact with him before we all get extremely old. My birth mother remembered that you two were friends and I have had no luck tracking him down on-line. Hopefully you might have some information for me or possibly an email or address or something? Here's hoping anyway. No worries if you can't, I just thought it was worth asking".

Yes, I did know Murray when we were in the PYM together. In fact, Murray, Trevor Wall and I all lived in the same house which was my first ever flat in 1969. Murray was one of the very few of my political friends to ever meet my mother (who died in 1972). Mum called him "Murray Greenteeth", which tells you all you need to know about what sort of state he was in at that time. And many years later, Murray and I were fellow Christchurch railway workers and grassroots union activists. That, tragically, is where Murray's life ended, in a 1987 shunting yard accident. He was only 35. My obituary of him is in Watchdog 56, June 1987.

Obviously, this previously unknown daughter did not know that her birth father was dead and has been for as long as he was alive. I bit my tongue and decided it was not my place to tell her. I contacted the woman who was Murray's partner at the time of his death (we've been friends for half a century and she's been a CAFCA member for decades). She took on the gruelling job of breaking the news to the middle-aged North Island woman that her Christchurch dad is long gone. That, in turn, has led to all sorts of new connections being forged.

My 1987 Watchdog obituary of Murray was not illustrated (which was the norm for Watchdog in those days) and, at first, I had no photo of him to send to his daughter. But, in 2021, our mutual friend (and veteran railway unionist) Paul Corliss sent me the photo which accompanies the hard copy edition (which Paul took). It captures Murray's personality exactly (not to mention his truly hideous taste in trousers). I need to explain the photo, because it is another part of my ancient past. For a period in the 80s a group of otherwise sobersided friends and political activists (many CAFCA founders and veterans among them) took part in an annual social cricket match.

I had been a schoolboy cricketer, so I played, and I came up with the name of the annual match - Communists versus Terrorists. The photo depicts Murray being presented with the trophy, cunningly disguised as a common or garden coffee pot. Long before there were party buses, we had parties on real buses - a number of our mates, such as Bill Rosenberg, were bus drivers or had been and still had that licence. So, we used to hire a Christchurch public bus, complete with our own driver/s, and head out of town on a mobile pissup cum picnic with a cricket match thrown in (this photo was taken at Hororata Domain). This is the photo I sent to his daughter. She loved it.

My Health

This seems an appropriate place to talk about vaccination. I've already mentioned, at the start of this Report, that I've had all three Pfizer shots (as has Becky). It was a no-brainer for us and I regard the covid shots in the same way I regard annual flu shots - as a simple (and free) practical piece of health insurance. Coincidentally or not, I haven't had the flu since the 80s. So, I'm one of those who recommends that everyone gets vaccinated. And I do so as someone who has had an adverse reaction to a vaccine in the past.

This is how I explained that in my Report for 2018: "I decided to avail myself of the free shingles vaccine for the over-65s. I'd had shingles in 2016 and have no wish to do so again, if at all possible. You have to answer questions in advance and I answered 'yes' to: 'Have you ever had an adverse reaction to a vaccination?'. My first overseas trip was on a 1973 student delegation to China and smallpox shots were compulsory in those days. I got a funny reaction (it showed up in my eyes, which was rather alarming)".

"Each subsequent time I went travelling overseas in the 70s and 80s this remained an issue, which was only resolved when smallpox was declared globally eliminated and the shots were never needed again. But, in 2018, having declared this, my GP quite correctly decided to check it out with the ominous sounding Infectious Diseases. In the meantime, I did something that I'd never done in the intervening 45 years and researched the subject".

"I discovered that my 1973 adverse reaction could have been fatal and that smallpox shots should never have been given to people with eczema (which had caused the reaction). Nobody had told me either of those things in 1973! My shingles vaccine was delayed but, eventually, Infectious Diseases (whoever and wherever they are) gave my GP the all clear, I had the shot and lived to tell the tale". When I wrote that, only a few years ago, I had no idea that vaccines would be such a vital, not to mention contentious, global issue in the very near future.

I'm a child of the 1950s, so my earliest primary school memories include being lined up and vaccinated against all manner of potential killers. This was the era of the polio (infantile paralysis) epidemic. I knew kids who got it. My mother used to terrify me by talking of people who ended up in iron lungs. Medical science wiped it out.

TB was a killer in those days - I had an aunty who died of it in her 30s. It is still a potential scourge. 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. When I most recently went to Australia, in 2017, I noted that the only health-related question on the arrival card was to ask if you had, or ever had had, TB.

I've had things like regular tetanus shots and one-offs like the shingles one. When I did a lot of international travelling decades ago, I had shots and medication against everything from polio to malaria and hepatitis to yellow fever (the latter was such a rare vaccine that I had to get it at Christchurch Hospital, after they had specially imported it from Melbourne). Vaccine passes are nothing new for me - when I first started going overseas, you had to carry one (a physical one) to prove that you'd been vaccinated against the likes of smallpox.

My point is that I follow the advice of medical science, for the protection of both myself and everyone else. It's called "for the common good". My daily walk takes me through the nearby historic (and long closed) Addington Cemetery, which dates from the mid-19th Century. As well as the celebrities buried there (e.g., Kate Sheppard) there are an awful lot of babies, children and young women - they died from viruses and infections that are easily treatable now, or because childbirth was so much more dangerous back then.

So, I have no time for the anti-vaxxers. A late 2021 Press/Stuff editorial described me as a "veteran protester" (in relation to Waihopai) but I feel no empathy with the anti-vaccination/anti-lockdown protesters. So much of what they regurgitate is imported holus bolus from the lunatic fringe of the US (Donald Trump flags in NZ, for Christ's sake) that the most appropriate response is to quote a US politician: "disinformation hinders our free exchange of ideas and creates super spreader digital viruses that create a fever of nonsense". That not only has a nice ring to it, but is also spot on. A fever of nonsense.

ABC had to cancel, at very short notice, the planned January 2022 Waihopai spy base protest because of covid restrictions (I'll cover this in my 2022 Report). It was our first cancellation since protests started there in 1988, So, that became the mainstream media story, in the Marlborough Express and on Stuff. The young reporter (whom I've known since she was a journalism student at the University of Canterbury) rang just as I was going out the door to get my booster shot.

She asked me if she could include that detail, as "we tend to think that protesters are anti-vaxxers". Not this one. So, if you read her article (24/1/22) you will see the views of both me and the ABC Committee on vaccines and vaccine passes. The CAFCA Committee are all fully vaccinated too.

I can't be bothered wasting any more time on the anti-vaxxers, not to mention the open-air looney bin that was their 2022 Wellington camp. Life is too short (and their fevered nonsense risks making it shorter, certainly for them, let alone the rest of us). I'll conclude by using an acronym that I only learnt from my recent excursion into Twitter. It is admirably concise and very much to the point. STFU. Look it up.

Work/Life Balance

I turned 70 in 2021 but unlike earlier birthdays ending in 0, I couldn't be bothered with a party this time. Not because I want to keep my age a secret but because I didn't feel the need for it. I actually receive a lot of affirmation in the course of my regular life and work. As a special treat, I went to a show at the Town Hall for the first time since before the quakes. I went to see Bill Bailey, one of my favourite comedians (indeed, in my long hair and beard days, people remarked on the resemblance) and it was a great show. I, or we, very regularly go to movies. I went to some art exhibitions. With a couple of old friends, I went to every Crusaders' home games and thoroughly enjoyed them.

People have stopped asking me about retirement. But thinking about it, in the past couple of years, I have retired from a number of things. In 2019, after more than 55 years, I called it quits on pedalling a bike and bought an e-bike that doesn't require any pedalling. Not coincidentally, the muscles I used to do that pedalling (i.e., my thighs) withered away with alarming speed.

However, in 2021, I belatedly remembered that we've had a (very) old, second hand exercycle lying around the place, unused for many years. A few minutes a day on that of stationary pedalling has done the trick. And it has also helped strengthen my crook knees (I am literally weak kneed). Indeed, it was general aches and pains that led me, also in 2019, to retire from mowing our quarter acre lawn, and clambering up a ladder to trim the top of our giant hedges, and now I pay someone else to do so regularly, and to cart away the cut grass and hedge trimmings. Result - freed up time.

And in 2021, with the closure of the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa, I retired from international solidarity work, after more than 30 years of intense involvement with the Philippines. That has definitely freed up a lot of time and enabled me to concentrate on the CAFCA and ABC work for which I'm actually paid (PSNA was an all-volunteer group). Those paid work hours were cut by 25% in 2021, so more free time.

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 actually got involuntarily "retired" (via redundancy) in 1991 and have been getting paid to do what I love ever since. I'm both a worker and an old age pensioner. And what I do is exactly the sort of thing that a lot of people say that they'd like to do if they had the time. It's not physically demanding; it gives my brain a good work out.

I have an active social life with friends, both local and from out of town (and I keep in touch with friends and colleagues around the world). 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?