Steve Howard, who died in October 2023, aged 69, was one of the founders and key activists of Keep Our Assets Canterbury (KOA). CAFCA has been heavily involved in KOA since its inception more than a decade ago. I am the Convenor, and a couple of current or former CAFCA Committee members are also very actively involved with the KOA Committee - namely, Paul Piesse and Brian Turner. Former CAFCA Committee member Warren Brewer remains in charge of the KOA Website.

Denis O'Connor, a CAFCINZ/CAFCA Committee member in the 1970s and 80s, is very actively involved with KOA. Until his resignation in early 2022, the late Jeremy Agar, a CAFCA Committee member for decades, was also a long-serving KOA Committee member. Throughout the whole time that Steve was involved with KOA, he was very much a CAFCA supporter. He always read and commented on Watchdog. But he was only an actual CAFCA member for the last year of his life.

KOA grew out of the national Keep Our Assets campaign, which was a response to the Key National government's 2011 plan to partly sell the major State-owned electricity companies. The campaign successfully forced the Government to hold a citizens'-initiated referendum, which rejected the sale proposal. The Government ignored the referendum and went ahead with the sale. The national Keep Our Assets campaign folded up. But not in Christchurch, where it has remained focused on the public assets owned by local government. Christchurch has more of those still in public ownership than other cities (who flogged theirs off years ago), so asset sales are still very much a live issue here.

The first excuse to sell offered by the previous Lianne Dalziel-headed City Council was the cost of the earthquake rebuild - that attempt was defeated by public opposition, in which KOA played a leading role. The very recent excuse to sell was that the Phil Mauger-headed City Council is in too much debt (but not enough to have stopped it pouring hundreds of millions into the gold-plated stadium. Indeed, those two things - the stadium and debt - are directly connected as cause and effect). See my article elsewhere in this issue about what happened to that most recent attempt by the City Council to flog off our assets.

KOA Founder & Leading Activist

Steve was a KOA founder and very active, right from the outset. In the early years, he and I were the public face of KOA, until John Minto came along and took it to a whole other level with his 2016 and 2019 Mayoral campaigns on behalf of KOA. Steve did public speaking; he did the thankless but crucial work of writing (and speaking to) submissions to both the City Council and ECan (the regional council). He regularly appeared before both. He took part in all KOA activities, particularly the successful campaign to stop the previous Dalziel City Council from selling Citycare.

There were constant meetings, speaking engagements, lobbying, petitions, pickets (on the street and inside Council meetings). Steve was involved in all of that. Throughout the whole period he was a key member of the KOA Committee, always attending our meetings. He also did the invaluable donkey work, such as being a bank account signatory, collecting petition signatures, walking the streets stuffing letterboxes with leaflets for KOA's local body election campaigns and always wearing his Keep Our Assets T shirt on relevant occasions. He was a KOA representative on the local Living Wage Movement.

Until struck down in mid 2023 by the health problems that were to so quickly kill him, Steve had every intention of being fully involved in KOA's (successful) campaign to fend off the City Council's most recent attempt to sell our assets. KOA had some creative fun. We had a white elephant made and took it to pickets to illustrate what we thought of "anchor projects" like the stadium (that particular prop is still at Steve's place).To dramatise our opposition to privatisation, we set up a "toll booth" at the bridge into Hanmer Springs (where a National Party conference was being held) and leafleted and talked to the drivers who obligingly stopped. Some of them even offered to pay the "toll".

Steve's political activism was not confined to KOA. He had been in the Alliance and he was very active in the Green Party at grassroots level. He lived long enough to be able to vote Green in 2023 but he didn't make it to the actual election date. He took part in all manner of other political protests and events. To give one example, and wearing one of my other hats - the Anti-Bases Campaign - he was part of the small but gallant band which picketed the first NZ Aerospace Summit, in Christchurch in 2022, focusing on Rocket Lab. He merrily went about chalking slogans on the steps of Te Pae (the convention centre), which resulted in a particularly obnoxious security guard standing on his hand, and telling him that he should be at home "enjoying your retirement". Steve was undeterred.

Economics was Steve's passion. He'd studied it, he continued to read up on it, he loved discussing and debating it at KOA meetings. When he was actually in a rest home, receiving end of life care, he wrote and had published a letter to the Press about economics. I visited him several times when he was dying, including the day before his assisted death, and he was always keen - even when he had difficulty speaking and staying awake - to discuss all manner of political and philosophical subjects.

When I visited him on his last full day alive (I didn't realise that's what it was until I spoke to him) we discussed religion. He had been raised and educated Catholic and had been part of Christchurch's Catholic activist circle, back in the day. So, I asked him if he'd like me to get a well-known priest of our mutual acquaintance to give him the Last Rites. He said "no", emphatically. I asked if he was a lapsed Catholic. He replied: "Not lapsed - rejecting". I asked if he'd replaced Catholicism with any other religious or philosophical system of belief, but he replied "no".

Fulltime Caregiver; Former Shearer

Throughout nearly his entire time of active involvement with KOA, he was the full-time live-in caregiver for his terminally ill father (who died in 2022, in his 90s). That is hard, demanding and thankless work. He did it for so long that it became incorporated into KOA's monthly meetings. Upon arrival, I'd ask him: "How's Dad?" and he'd reply "still dying" (we modified that routine in Steve's final few months. I'd ask him "how are you?" and he'd reply "still dying"). I never met his dad; even though Steve hosted more than one KOA meeting at his dad's home (the old man was bedridden).

We did speak on the phone once. As a fellow type 2 diabetes sufferer I took a more than passing interest in his symptoms (which included blindness and double leg amputations) which can happen if diabetes gets away on you. I asked Steve once why didn't he put Dad into a home? He said that he didn't agree with putting old people into homes. So, there is a cruel irony in the fact that a home is exactly where he ended up for his final few weeks, and that he died decades younger than his dad.

Steve was a father and grandfather. He had suffered the tragic death of a young daughter, from his first marriage, dying in infancy. He had an adult daughter from that marriage, plus two young boys from a second marriage (they're only teenagers now) - sometimes he would bring them to KOA meetings with him. His first wife is Māori - both she and their daughter have moko. Steve always made a point of leading off in te reo when he spoke publicly on behalf of KOA. Māori people made a significant contribution to his commemoration gathering, both in speech and song.

He owned a ten-acre lifestyle block in Eyrewell, North Canterbury, that he was planting in native trees and plants. He had only just had the chance to move back out there after his father's death, and was starting to enjoy once again living out in the country. He had worked indoor jobs (for example, as a union organiser for the Nurses Organisation and a temporary office job with a dairy company) but he greatly preferred rural life. I didn't know him before KOA brought us together but I'd known his late brother Mike, half a century ago, when he was a University of Canterbury student politician in the early 1970s.

If you didn't know anything about Steve, you might have thought he had an academic or professional background (and, indeed, he did have a degree). But you would be wrong - Steve worked as a shearer for decades, including a stint of several months in Italy. He loved that so much that he recently took an Italian language course.

His former shearing workmates were well represented at the commemorative gathering that was held at his Eyrewell home a couple of days after his death (his body wasn't here. He donated it to the University of Otago Medical School). They spoke affectionately of a man who was nicknamed The Protester - "because he always argued about everything". He would have liked that the whole gathering was held in a paddock, sitting around a bonfire that wreathed everyone in smoke, followed by all of us planting native trees and shrubs.

Death On His Own Terms

Steve developed irreversible heart problems (he'd had heart surgery in 2022), compounded by other health issues, such as more than one stroke. It all happened shockingly fast. In the first half of 2023, he was his usual highly active self. It was as recently as February 2023 that he and John Minto spoke at a Christchurch City Council meeting, on behalf of KOA, in opposition to the Council's recent proposal to "investigate" selling our assets.

Uniquely, he wrote his own death notice in the Press and in the first person. "After four months of pain and disability, I, Stephen Howard decided to make use of the assisted death legislation". He was the second person that I know to have had an assisted death, the other one being a neighbour. The home that he was in wouldn't let it happen on their premises, so he died, outdoors, in his daughter's garden.

She told me that it was "lovely". He was very determined to go out on his own terms. His first application for an assisted death was rejected, so he successfully applied again. I reckon it's a good way to go. I voted in favour of it at the 2020 referendum, doubtless the only time I'll ever vote in favour of anything promoted by David Seymour.

Steve Howard was taken from us too young and shockingly fast. But his legacy is one of which he, his whanau and we, his KOA friends and colleagues, can be proud. I made sure that I told him, before he died, that he is one of the reasons that Christchurch still has publicly-owned assets. We owe it to his memory to ensure that it stays that way. My only regret is that he didn't live long enough to see the December 2023 stunning victory of the campaign to keep Christchurch City Council's public assets. He definitely did not die in vain.

DEATH IN THE FAMILY

LIGAYA ROQUE

- Murray Horton

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