OBITUARIES

ROGER FOWLER

12 September 1948 – 21 February 2026

David Robie

Reprinted with permission from Café Pacific, https://davidrobie.nz

Roger Fowler, an activist legend of social justice solidarity movements from Bastion Point to resisting apartheid and racist rugby tours and freedom for Palestine, has died after a long illness. He was 77. Described by some as a “true Tāne Toa”, his protest warrior courage and his commitment to a bicultural and cross-cultural vision for Aotearoa New Zealand, was perhaps best represented by his “Songs Of Struggle And Solidarity” vinyl album launched in 2025.

The first of 14 tracks on the album produced by Banana Boat Records, was “We Are All Palestinians”, which has become an anthem for the Gaza solidarity movement for the protest against the Israeli genocide since 2023. Ironically, this was sung yet again by a group in Te Komititanga Square in February within hours of his death. It was written by Fowler after the Viva Palestina solidarity convoy from London to Gaza in 2010.

Fowler led the Kia Ora Gaza team of six Kiwis who drove three of 135 aid-packed ambulances – funded by New Zealand donations — into the besieged enclave. This was followed later by two other land convoys and three Gaza Freedom Flotillas. In April 2026, a massive new siege-breaking Sumud Flotilla to Gaza with 100 boats and carrying some 1000 activists was being planned.

Gaza Solidarity Rallies

In spite of failing health in his final months, Fowler was frequently seen at Gaza rallies, speaking and singing in his rousing voice. Close comrade and friend, John Minto, Co-Chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA), paid tribute to his contribution. “Roger has been a legend of the solidarity movement for many decades as the founder and coordinator of Kia Ora Gaza which delivered aid to the besieged Gaza strip by land and by sea,” he said. “He was a man of great integrity and character with passion for justice. He will remain a guiding light for the solidarity movement here”.

Co-Chair Maher Nazzal presented Fowler an award for his contribution to Palestinian solidarity in September 2025. Another comrade from the 1990s onwards, Tony Fala, recalls his “dauntless courage, tireless optimism, boundless energy, and vast strategic capacity was profoundly inspiring. Roger was one of the humblest and kindest people I have ever met. He could build coalitions and strengthen community bonds with ease. He sought what brought people together, not what kept them apart”.

Belief In Ordinary People

“He believed in ordinary people and possessed a deep, instinctive understanding of justice. He was strong yet carried no ego”. Fala praised Fowler’s commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to Te Ao Māori community life, describing him as a “born oral historian. He gave selflessly to every cause he committed himself to and would move mountains to achieve victory for the struggles he served”.

In the weeks before his death, he and his whanau were working hard to complete a history of the socialist Ponsonby People’s Union, “Struggle And Solidarity”, due to be published soon. Fowler met his future wife, Dr Lyn Doherty (Ngāti Porou and Ngāpuhi), then while they were activists campaigning to stop landlords evicting tenants. Based in the working-class suburb of Ponsonby, the union activists campaigned alongside the Polynesian Panthers and ACORD (Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination) to defend civil liberties, fight slum landlord evictions, and oppose the dawn raids against Pacific Islands overstayers.

Fowler had seen the last proofs of the collaborative book before he died and was very happy. Activist author Dean Parker* once described Fowler as “the Great Helmsman of the legendary Ponsonby People’s Union, brave hero of so many struggles”. Fowler had lived for almost four decades in Mangere East, a multicultural quarter of South Auckland. He was manager of the Mangere East Community Learning Centre and an executive member of Out of School Care Network. * Dean Parker’s obituary, by Mary Ellen O’Connor (plus a short tribute from Murray Horton), is in Watchdog 154, August 2020, https://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/54/11.html Ed.

Impressive Community Tribute

In 1999, he was a recipient of the Queen’s Service Medal for his “public services” and the people of Mangere East paid an impressive tribute to him with a daytime concert in November 2025. One of his best remembered local campaigns was the community coalition in 2010 that saved Mangere East’s Postshop. A one-time bus driver, Fowler strongly campaigned for public transport. He was also involved with amateur theatre for several decades, including Auckland Light Opera, “The Aunties” children’s theatre and Manukau Performing Arts.

Fowler was a founding member of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign in the 1970s and he was part of the anti-apartheid movement for 15 years. In 1969, along with a large group of activists — including Alan Robson, Pat Bolster and Graeme Whimp — he opened the first Resistance Bookshop in Queen Street and he was co-director for a time. “The bookshop became a focus for radical political actors in Auckland in 1969 and the early 70s,” recalls Robson, now an academic at the University of Papua New Guinea.

“He Gave Us Hope”

Activist Del Abcede, a supporter of Kia Ora Gaza and the Palestine movement, recalls: “Roger did so much for social justice and humanity and yet he was so humble, gentle, kind and unassuming — one of a kind. I’ll always remember with fondness snippets of short but meaningful conversations with him. Memories of him will live forever — like a light at the end of the tunnel. He gave us hope”.

During his lifelong protests, Fowler was arrested many times and jailed four times and with colleagues he set up a free prison visiting service in 1972 for Paremoremo and Waikeria. The last track on Fowler’s album is titled “The Final Song” but his music will be long remembered as the hallmark of the legacy and life of an extraordinary community and social justice activist.

ROGER FOWLER

Murray Horton

Roger was never a CAFCA member. Indeed, here’s the only mention I can find of him on the Watchdog Website (a report of the 2011 event in Auckland to announce the winner of the annual Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand): “Musical entertainment was provided by veteran Auckland activist Roger Fowler (who vowed to me that he will change his first name before accepting another such invitation)”. I visited him once at the Mangere East Community Learning Centre where he was the manager.

I started out as a political activist in 1969 with the Progressive Youth Movement (PYM) and it was in that capacity in those action-packed years of the late 60s and early 70s that I first met Roger and his Auckland political activist contemporaries. They were extraordinary times. I was reminded of this in March 2026, after his death, when I visited a Christchurch exhibition of the graphics and layout of Earwig, an underground magazine that was published in Auckland from 1969-73. The exhibition included samples of Earwig’s content and there was an article about Roger being imprisoned for non-payment of fines (I was invited to the exhibition by its’ creator, a University of Canterbury graphic design student who had interviewed me in 2025 about “analogue publishing”, a phrase I’d never previously heard).

Punched By Piggy

In 1974 I was Editor of Canta, the University of Canterbury student paper (analogue publishing!) and I still have a much-cherished bound volume of that year’s issues. I very recently went through it and found a long, detailed eyewitness report by my old friend and colleague, Marty Braithwaite, about a militant protest outside a central Auckland meeting of landlords, a meeting addressed by Piggy Muldoon, who was then Leader of the Opposition.

“As Roger Fowler tells it, the new National Party Leader, Rob Muldoon, was ‘obviously under the influence of drink’ as he and property developers Bob Jones and Pat Rippin emerged from a landlords’ meeting in Auckland’s Peter Pan Cabaret in August 1974 ‘pushing and shoving and thumping people’ to get through a crowd of protesters”.

“‘He came straight for me and threw a punch at me. We both ended up falling down in the middle of the street,’ Mr Fowler said. The Herald reported that Mr Muldoon turned back to the protesters when he reached his car and called out: ‘One at a time and you’re welcome!’” (New Zealand Herald, 14/8/10, “Long Protest Road Leads To Gaza”, Simon Collins) https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/long-protest-road-leads-to-gaza/NIYNZL4Z24VEGMUZ3NH2VW47IM/ As for Piggy, he was quoted as saying: “I saw a face, so I hit it”. Believe it or not, he was never charged with assault (or anything else).

Another good recent source of historic Roger Fowler stories is “Jumping Sundays: The Rise And Fall Of The Counterculture In Aotearoa New Zealand” by Nick Bollinger (reviewed by Jeremy Agar in Watchdog 161, December 2022) https://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/61/12.html “At Jumping Sundays there had been one voice that could be heard as loudly, and almost as often, as Tim Shadbolt’s. That voice was Roger Fowler’s. But unlike Shadbolt, Fowler could sing and tended to express his politics through song rather than soapboxing”.

He founded the Frank E Evans Lunchtime Entertainment Band. “Humorously named after the USS Frank E Evans which had recently been ignominiously cut in half in a collision during training with the Royal New Zealand Navy, they were the embodiment of the slogan borrowed from the Furry Freak Brothers and graffitied on walls around the world: ‘While you’re out there smashing the State, don’t forget to keep a smile on your lips and a song in your heart’”.

Prison

“Fowler had an engaging smile and a heart full of song but he was also a natural organiser and a driving force in the People’s Union for Survival and Freedom.…Practising what Fowler called ‘revolutionary intercommunalism’ it was a broad church that encompassed students, hippies and dropouts, Māori and Pasifika radicals, immigrant families and others... They organised the charter of a bus which would make a trip every Sunday from the central downtown bus station to Paremoremo maximum security prison on the North Shore so that friends, family and supporters could visit inmates”.

“Fowler was familiar with the inside of a prison. In 1968 he had been a student teacher, nineteen years old and fired up about the iniquities of the Vietnam War, when his number was called for compulsory military training. He went to the medical test, passed with flying colours and was summoned to training camp. But instead of boarding the train to Waiouru with the other conscripts, he leafleted the station with anti-war material and went home. When he was found to be absent at the start of training, he was issued a fine. He refused to pay and was sentenced to a fortnight in Mount Eden. Since then, he had been arrested twenty-odd times in relation to various protest activities”.

“Even after the People’s Union disbanded in 1979 – by which time its food cooperative encompassed six hundred households – Roger Fowler kept organising the weekly bus service to Paremoremo maximum security prison that he had initiated so families and friends could visit their loved ones. He eventually bought a bus of his own and added to the schedule a monthly trip to Waikeria borstal. When I interviewed him in 2019, the service was still operating, nearly fifty years after it had begun”. Roger Fowler, a man who personified the slogan “serve the people”, a man who stuck to his guns and his principles for his entire life. Rest in peace, Roger, after a lifetime of fighting the good fight.

TIM SHADBOLT

Murray Horton

Tim Shadbolt and Roger Fowler were Auckland contemporaries, colleagues and friends in the protest movement and counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. They died just weeks apart in early 2026, Tim at 78 and Roger at 77. But their life paths diverged sharply after the 80s, when Tim set off into local body politics, being elected, firstly, as Mayor of Waitematā City for two terms in that decade, followed by his extraordinary run as Invercargill Mayor for 27 years in total (22 of them consecutively). Who can forget his cheesy cheese advert on TV: “I don’t care where, as long as I’m Mayor”.

Personification Of Protest Movement & Counterculture

Tim never had any connection with CAFCA and I had no contact with him after the mid-80s. But I want to pay tribute to the tremendous leadership role he played in the political and social movement of the late 60s and right through until the 80s. He was the personification of both the protest movement and the counterculture. Handsome, confident, flamboyant, charismatic, courageous, humorous, a compelling speaker, Tim was the man. He was arrested more than 30 times and went to prison. He was always prepared to put himself in harm’s way.

Rather than go into details, I refer you to “Jumping Sundays: The Rise And Fall Of The Counterculture In Aotearoa New Zealand” by Nick Bollinger (reviewed by Jeremy Agar in Watchdog 161, December 2022) https://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/61/12.html Or you can read Tim’s own classic book “Bullshit And Jellybeans”.

I had the pleasure of knowing Tim in those days. I became a political activist in 1969, starting off in the Progressive Youth Movement (PYM). It was in that capacity that I travelled to Auckland in late 1969 (from memory, to speak at a rally against the Vietnam War). I slept on the floor of Tim’s Parnell crash pad (Parnell was very different in those days).

I went back up again at the beginning of 1970, travelling on the back of my best friend’s motorbike (the highly eventful story of that journey can wait for another time). This time the focus was to join the big protest against visiting US Vice President Spiro Agnew (which led to my first arrest). Once again, I crashed on Tim’s floor. During those stays I met not only Tim and his friends but his activist younger brother Rod (a great bloke), even his Mum.

From memory, she came to his place to plead with him not to go on the Agnew demo, knowing that the cops would single him out. “Timmy, come to my place and wave your flags there”. He looked suitably sheepish but I don’t think he followed Mum’s advice. I even met his famous Alsatian dog, Brutus, who was looming over me when I woke up on Tim’s floor one morning (I must have been sleeping in the dog’s spot).

His next-door neighbours were an even more boisterous bunch of radicals (some of them ended up in prison for various bombings). Behind the two houses was a walking track through native bush that took you through to the Domain. Naturally, it was renamed the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It passed by a disused railway tunnel which the bombers used to stash their stolen gelignite. Decades later I was delighted to discover that the houses, track and bush were as I remembered them, although Parnell had gentrified out of all recognition.

Tim was into everything from the late 60s until into the 80s. For example, in the early 70s he, along with CAFCA founder Owen Wilkes, was one of the editors of the New Zealand Whole Earth Catalogue (universally known as the "hippie bible". My obituary of Owen Wilkes is in Watchdog 109, August 2005) https://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/09/09.htm.

He was involved with the anti-bases’ protests of the early 70s, which I helped to organise. "Islands Of The Empire"*, the definitive 1980s' Vanguard Films documentary, includes an interview with Tim, describing what happened at the protest against the secret US military facility situated inside RNZAF Base Woodbourne (Blenheim Airport). He remarked on one unique feature - the police handed leaflets to the protesters (not vice versa), telling us where we could and couldn't go. The whole Air Force base was sealed off. *"Islands Of The Empire" can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDoobc7LFDA

Things Changed Once He Got The Mayoralty Bug

Once he became a professional politician in the 80s, things changed. As evidenced by his extraordinary longevity as Mayor of Invercargill, he was extremely popular for most of his time in that job. He did some good things, such as abolishing fees at the Southland Institute of Technology, which attracted students from around the country. But it didn’t end well.

Things got extremely rancorous in his final few years in office (the bitterness was on full display at his funeral). He went from being a character (Kiwis love a character) to being celebrity, then, finally, to being a caricature. His very public health decline was painful to watch (a sort of mini version of what played out in the US with Joe Biden). He did not go out while he was on top or even just gracefully retire but tried to hang on, with the result that he was heavily defeated in the 2022 local body elections. It was a sad end.

Champion Of Bluff Smelter

And CAFCA had a bone to pick with Tim throughout his Invercargill Mayoralty. There was a smelter-sized hole in the gushing praise bestowed upon him when he died in 2026. No mention of the Tiwai Point smelter or Invercargill’s role as a company town dependent on the whims of Rio Tinto, one of the world’s biggest and most ruthless transnational corporations, one which has been ripping off this country for many decades.

Tim always unquestioningly championed the smelter (in his youth he’d worked for a year on the Manapouri power project, which supplies the electricity for the smelter. Decades later that background gave him credibility as a Southland local). Whenever CAFCA criticised the smelter and its top-secret sweetheart power price deal, Tim leapt to its defence.

For example, this from Watchdog 109, August 2005: “CAFCA wrote to the Press (28/3/05; ‘No Tears Of Sorrow if Comalco Smelter Closes’), which duly gave it lead letter status and the headline. ’Comalco is threatening to close its Bluff smelter, saying that the Government's new carbon tax could put it out of business. We say bring it on! That smelter is the single biggest electricity user in New Zealand, consuming around 15% of the country’s power”.

“From its inception, more than 30 years ago, Comalco has had a sweetheart deal with whatever Government is in office. It has a special (and still secret) price for its electricity, a deal unavailable to anyone else. Throughout its controversial existence, the smelter has proven to be good for Southland but very definitely bad for New Zealand. So, please go and good riddance. Let's take the chance to shut down this parasite that has been draining our national grid for decades. That would free up a huge block of electricity to be used much more productively than subsidising one of the world’s biggest transnational corporations"(for whatever reason the Press edited out the words in italics)”.

“There’s nothing new about our demand that the smelter be closed, it’s been our position since Day One. But the Press then did something interesting. It devoted more than a page to considering what would happen if that scenario came to pass (‘Turning Off Tiwai Point’, 9-10/4/05, Paul Gorman). Not surprisingly the company screamed blue murder about what a disaster that would be, as did Invercargill Mayor, Tim Shadbolt...”

Self-Described “Mercenary” & “Salesman”

In late 2012 I was invited to write an opinion piece about the smelter for the Southland Times, which gave it the eye-catching title “Smelter NZ’s Biggest Bludger” (you can read it in Watchdog 131, December 2012) https://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/31/04.html Tim hit the roof again. He and I appeared in the same mainstream article a few months later (Stuff, 7/4/13, Charles Anderson) https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/8518742/Tracing-the-history-of-Tiwai-Pt

“Murray Horton, chairman of the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa, has long trumpeted the demise of the Tiwai Pt smelter and the company that owns it. ‘It's corporate welfare’, said Horton. ‘They have always been the biggest bludger in New Zealand’. Now, he said, it was acting like ‘North Korea’ - the threats might be for real or they might be a bluff”.

“The argument in favour of the smelter has long been the benefit it brings to New Zealand. Certainly, it's a big deal in Southland. The company produces $525 million a year, or about 10% of Southland GDP. It also consumes about 15% of all New Zealand's electricity. And, while people in Southland would lose jobs if it closed, Horton says some things just aren't in the national interest. Besides, Southlanders have been a happy hostage to Tiwai Pt, he says. They have painted themselves into a corner and become a company town. Mayor Tim Shadbolt is unapologetic. Not only did he help build the power station, which claimed the lives of more than a dozen Southlanders, but he has called himself a ‘mercenary’ and a ‘salesman’ for his region”.

It’s quite a transition from leader of the protest movement to a self-described “mercenary” and “salesman”, championing the transnational corporation which has been in CAFCA’s sights as long as we have been in existence, a company which twice (2011 and 2013) won the annual Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Tim has left a very mixed legacy. The contrast with Roger Fowler’s life couldn’t be more striking.

JIM BOLGER

Murray Horton

Post-Politics Revisionism

Bolger’s reputation received quite a lot of revisionist scrubbing after he retired from politics. There was evidence that he had changed his mind on some of the fundamentals from his time in power. For example, he publicly renounced neo-liberalism, and bewailed the decline in strength of unions, to boot (Stuff, 21/4/17), http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/91769882/The-9th-floor-Jim-Bolger-says-neoliberalism-has-failed-NZ-and-its-time-to-give-unions-the-power-back. In 2021, he stated that the modern National Party should reimagine capitalism because social inequality was causing division, saying free market capitalism is "on the verge of destroying the planet and destabilising society" (NZ Herald, 28/11/21).

And here he is on AUKUS: "...former National Prime Minister Jim Bolger (1990-97) participated in a forum about New Zealand's foreign policy in Wellington, in which he is reported by the Herald's Audrey Young to have criticised the Australian submarine buy up as 'beyond comprehension' because of the cost and the damage to peace in the Pacific region".

"Bolger said that New Zealand certainly doesn't want any such submarines, and challenged proponents of the AUKUS deal to defend it: 'If you can find any Australian official who can explain why they need nuclear-powered submarines, come and tell me. I'd like to know'. And Young reported Bolger asking rhetorically: 'How mad are we getting?' She says 'he spoke with despair about the near-daily threats of nuclear war, which had the potential to destroy the planet'" RNZ, 25/3/23, Bryce Edwards

Kiwibank & Kiwirail

After he retired from Parliament in the late 90s (having been rolled as National Prime Minister by Jenny Shipley), Bolger became the next Labour government’s favourite Tory. They appointed him to be Chairman of State-owned New Zealand Post and its new subsidiary, Kiwibank. That was done by Jim Anderton, with whom Bolger got along very well. Here’s an extract from my obituary of Anderton (Watchdog 147, April 2018) https://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/47/10.html

“It was a stroke of genius from Anderton to persuade former National PM Jim Bolger to become the first Chair of Kiwibank’s Board. National had opposed the bank and threatened to sell it off once back in Government – Bolger’s involvement helped to undercut that. It was untouched during the subsequent nine years (2008-17) of the Key/English government, despite the drive of that Government to privatise public assets”.

“After Anderton’s death, Jim Bolger very proudly told the media that the bank’s name had been his ‘masterstroke’ (Anderton had wanted to call it People’s Bank). Bolger was at Jim’s funeral – I have an indelible memory of him exiting the local Addington Catholic church lustily singing”How Great Thou Art“. CAFCA was a foundation customer of Kiwibank and remains so today (Becky and I were also foundation members and remain so for our personal banking)”. Kiwibank remains in public ownership.

And this from Wikipedia: "On 1 July 2008, almost 15 years after his National government sold New Zealand Rail Ltd, the Labour-led government repurchased its successor, Toll NZ Ltd (less its Tranz Link trucking and distribution arm), having repurchased the track network in 2004. Bolger became Chair of the company, renamed KiwiRail, a position he held until 1 July 2010. A number of commentators, including Winston Peters, viewed this as ironic. In response, Bolger acknowledged his involvement in privatising New Zealand Rail, remarking that ‘my life is full of ironies’, and added that ‘the world has changed’".

A Very Different Story

But it was a very different story when Bolger was in politics, particularly when he was in power. He entered Parliament in 1972 and was a senior Minister in the 1975-84 Muldoon National government. Most notably, he was Muldoon’s Minister of Labour, when that was a very important portfolio because unions were strong and compulsory unionisation was the law. Muldoon was the closest thing NZ has had to a dictator in my lifetime and Bolger was a central figure in those years – the 1981 Springbok Tour, Bastion Point, you name it (my obituary of Muldoon is in Watchdog 71, November 1992), https://www.scribd.com/doc/24209988/mpaign

Following Labour’s 1984 victory, he became Leader of the Opposition in 1986 and led National into the 1987 election, campaigning to reverse Lange’s nuclear free policy and to get NZ restored to ANZUS, which was a complete misreading of the public mood. Labour won and safe Tory seats like Fendalton and Remuera came within a few hundred votes of going Labour. Fortunately for the Rogernomics Labour government, that election was held just before the October 1987 Wall Street crash.

Bashed Beneficiaries, Unions & Workers; Pushed Foreign Control

Bolger’s time came at the 1990 election, which National won in a landslide. Bolger promised to stick with the nuclear free policy (which was law by then) and all subsequent National governments have done so. He also promised to not continue with disastrous Rogernomics – and promptly accelerated it further. His Minister of Finance, Ruth Richardson, unleashed her self-styled Mother Of All Budgets in 1991, which was a declaration of war on beneficiaries. Benefits were slashed and those cuts have never been fully reinstated.

That same year, the Employment Contracts Act, spearheaded by Bill Birch, was a declaration of war on workers, specifically by destroying unions. This was greatly assisted by the sheer gutlessness of the union movement’s national leadership (see my obituary of Ken Douglas in Watchdog 161, December 2022) https://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/61/13.html I was made redundant from the Railways – one of the many thousands of railway workers laid off in the 80s and 90s – just before that Act came into force.

Bolger continued the Rogernauts’ privatisations – as already mentioned, in 1993 his Government sold the Railways to an American railway company, which duly sold it on (and Labour renationalised it in 2008. It remains in public ownership). CAFCA had our own battles with the Bolger government. We were actively involved in the major national campaign against its’ Overseas Investment Amendment Bill (which became an Act), once again spearheaded by Bill Birch.

We worked with both the then Alliance and the newly formed New Zealand First. That included us hosting a 1995 Christchurch Town Hall public meeting where both of their leaders, the Alliance’s Jim Anderton and New Zealand First’s Winston Peters, were among the speakers. It came just after a much talked-about merger proposal between the two parties had come to nothing and there was bad feeling between both leaders and their supporters (who attended the meeting in equal numbers). I had the interesting experience, as a fellow speaker on the night, of sitting between the two of these short, immaculately coiffed and suited men, both of whom had king size egos. They didn’t like each other and I could feel the animosity radiating off both of them.

That was more than 30 years ago, the Alliance is long gone and Jim Anderton is dead. But some things never change – Winston Peters (who started off as a National MP under Muldoon and was a Parliamentary colleague of Bolger’s for decades) is still very much with us. And this Coalition Government has just pushed into law yet another amendment to the Overseas Investment Act, this one spearheaded by David Seymour.

Verdict: A Tory Bastard

It wasn’t all bad during Bolger’s years in power. Although he was personally opposed to electoral reform, he allowed two referenda (the second one being binding) which led to the country adopting the MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) system as from the 1996 election (which saw Winston Peters adopt his starring role as kingmaker, a role he has reprised at several elections in the ensuing 30 years). Bolger was the last Prime Minister to contest a First Past The Post election, in 1993, one which National won by the narrowest of margins.

And it was the Bolger government, spearheaded by Doug Graham, which signed the first two Treaty of Waitangi settlements, with Tainui and Ngāi Tahu. This was a major shift of emphasis from a Tory Prime Minister who had been involved with Bastion Point and the other racist horrors of the Muldoon years. And I’ll give Bolger credit – like Helen Clark, but unlike John Key and Jacinda Ardern, he declined a title.

Who knows why, in his post-politics years, he reversed position on several of the fundamentals from his time in politics. Maybe it was Catholic guilt. But the fact remains that when he was in politics and in power, and in a position to actually do something about these issues, he instead inflicted a lot of damage on the New Zealand people, damage which has lasted until today. He was very much a Tory bastard when it mattered and that is how he will be remembered.

CAFCA promotes the concept of an independent Aotearoa based on policies of economic, military and political self-reliance, using Aotearoa's resources for the benefit of the people of Aotearoa, and refusing involvement in the self-serving military and economic treaties of big foreign countries. We oppose foreign control, irrespective of which country it involves. We oppose the exploitation of Aotearoa's people and resources by foreign companies, and any foreign military or intelligence activities in Aotearoa. CAFCA does not support the replacement of foreign exploiters with local ones. New Zealand big business interests are collaborating with foreign companies in the exploitation of its own country - its only loyalty is to improve profits. CAFCA is not racist. We do not oppose the people of foreign countries, only the transnational corporations (TNCs) exploiting the people of New Zealand. CAFCA's full Charter is at https://www.cafca.org.nz/about-cafca/#our-charter/ .