The last one of these annual reports filled 31 pages of Watchdog. You’ll be relieved to know that I haven’t had time to indulge in anything like that for this (2013) report. I’ve been too busy with projects like preparing for my March-May 2014 national speaking tour. So, this is very much the executive summary, cutting out great dollops of what one of my Committee colleagues (let’s call him Paul, because that’s his name) likes to call “typical Horton waffle”.

Committee: Bill Rosenberg, Brian Turner, Colleen Hughes, James Ayers, Jeremy Agar (Chairperson), John Ring, Lynda Boyd, Murray Horton (Secretary/Organiser), Paul Piesse, Warren Brewer. At ten members, it’s the biggest it’s ever been and is going very well. After six years in Auckland, Lynda Boyd (by far our youngest member and one of two women on the Committee) is back in Christchurch. She shot away again for a few months for her Big OE but is now back for good. Bill Rosenberg, in Wellington, is our sole “distance” member.

Website: Bill has been our Webmaster since CAFCA first went online, in the 90s. Ever since he moved to Wellington several years ago to work as Economist and Policy Director for the Council of Trade Unions, he has told us that he doesn’t have the time to do justice to the Website. Finding a replacement is an ongoing project. In the meantime Bill continues to do it, and does it well – it just takes time.

Other Means Of Communication: Warren Brewer does an excellent job at maintaining the Watchblog site (which is separate from the CAFCA one). In 2013 we set up a new Facebook group, administered by Colleen Hughes, and we have a Twitter account, also administered by Warren. Our Facebook group has about three times as many members as the “real” CAFCA does, but, of course, they don’t pay membership. The issue is to get any kind of cross-over from “virtual” to “real” membership. We’re far from the only group facing this issue.

New Means Of Sending Bulk E-mails: this was forced upon us by Google deciding to treat our bulk e-mails as spam and taking heavy-handed action against our Internet Service Provider (a small, local and very sympathetic company). We were offline for many weeks vis a vis bulk e-mails until we got set up with the Dadamail system that we now use. Many thanks to the person at our ISP who did all the data entry work needed to set up all the lists. But I have to say that Dadamail is slower and more cumbersome to use than our previous method.

Membership: I’m talking paying members. Hovering at 430+ but this is being written before the annual purge of non-payers. The trend is stable to declining. Gaining new members is a permanent project. Particular thanks to Brian Turner for his work in publicising CAFCA in church publications; in 2014 we will target unions. Hopefully, the speaking tour will get us some new ones. We have always emphasised paying members – 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 three term deposits hold $55,000- $60,000 (but this is being written before the bulk of the bills have to be paid for my speaking tour. That will cost thousands, plus we have other major expenses). We continue to be in a very healthy financial situation. For example, we are able to fund major projects like the speaking tour out of our own resources (despite not asking anyone for money for it we have received $1500 in unsolicited donations for it at the time of writing). Special mention to our Chairperson, Jeremy Agar, who volunteered to drive me (a non-driver) all around the country and personally paying all car-related expenses – effectively a personal donation of thousands of dollars.

Organiser Account: special thanks to Warren Brewer, who is in charge of this. It is holding steady, has around 60 regular pledgers, and around $25,000 in the bank (one account is used to pay me; the other one is a term deposit). Recruiting new pledgers is a permanent project; many of the existing ones are old or getting that way; some have been doing it since the Account started in 1991. Brian Turner launched project to attract more pledgers and donors in order to be able to increase Organiser’s pay rate to that set up by Living Wage Campaign (currently $18.80 per hour). This became a major project in its own right and is a work in progress (currently my pay rate is $17.70 per hour, having been increased from $17. Any further increase is dependent on the health of the Organiser Account.

Watchdog: I am the Editor; it is our flagship, our “face”, our voice to our members and the world at large. Looks the best it ever has. Thanks to Layout Editor Leigh Cookson and cover artist Ian Dalziel. We’ve changed the design of the cover so that Ian’s graphic now takes up all of it, rather than having to share with text. The lead article now starts on page 3. Thanks to my Committee colleagues, Jeremy Agar (Reviews Editor) and James Ayers (who writes up the Overseas Investment Office Decisions). Thanks to our regular writers Liz Gordon and John Minto (not to forget the prolific Dennis Small. Small by name but not by output!). The variety and quality of writers is very high (and none of them get paid), including well known academics, economists, political commentators, poets, activists. Watchdog is famous for its obituaries and my one of our old mate Bob Leonard was the biggest ever. For a few years we had the luxury of unlimited size but no longer. Due to our printer changing equipment, we’re back to a 100 page limit (which means that this issue includes a couple of articles that had to be left out of the previous issue). That will reimpose some discipline on us (it’s not a problem for this issue, which is one of the smallest for years). Postage costs keep going up and up. Only a few years ago it cost $1 to send a Watchdog; now it’s $2.60 (and is going up again in July 2014, meaning that we will stockpile more postage paid envelopes, to lock in the present price until 2015). Thanks to Cass Daley who is in charge of the Watchdog Website (our online-only readers have been receiving each issue as a PDF in recent years 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).

Roger Award: see Watchdog 133, August 2013, “Roger Award Event: Wellington Put On A Great Night” http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/33/03.html for my report on that. For the 2013 Roger Award Wayne Hope replaced Paul Maunder as Chief Judge and David Small replaced Paul as a judge (the Roger Award was originally David’s idea, cooked up at a Christchurch brainstorm meeting in 1996. It’s taken a long time but he’s finally directly involved with his brainchild). Thanks to the judges, the report writers, the event organisers (the latest one was held in Nelson, the first time it’s been held outside the four main centres), and the groups which help us publicise it and distribute the nomination forms. We run the online Roger Award People’s Choice poll, administered by Warren Brewer. The winner of that is invariably different to the official winner selected by the judges.

Media Profile: not nearly as many CAFCA press releases in 2013 as in 2012 (which was a purple patch) but we still have a high reactive media profile (by which I mean that the media contacts us, rather than us proactively contacting them). In the past year I have done media interviews with outlets including student radio, community radio, major daily papers and a monthly national magazine. In 2013 CAFCA targeted church papers, so I wrote articles which appeared in those. And sometimes we turn them down because they want us to comment on something that is not strictly our issue or is one where we don’t have any specialist knowledge (this happened recently with a national network TV request for an interview about Chinese buying urban housing). We are very careful not to get ourselves into a position where the media could falsely portray CAFCA as “racist” or “xenophobic”. We will pick and choose what we will comment on.

Relations With Political Parties: we have always been fiercely independent and unaffiliated to any party, whether Parliamentary or extra-Parliamentary.  We reserve the right to criticise all of them, and do so. That doesn’t stop us productively working with political parties. See the next item on the Keep Our Assets Christchurch network. The Greens have regularly helped to distribute Roger Award nomination forms (but we have to pay a not insignificant fee for that. By contrast, on the odd occasion when the Greens have asked our help to distribute things, we have done so free of charge).

Keep Our Assets Christchurch (KOA): this was our major issue for 2013 (previously it had been the TPPA – see next item). I am the Convenor and a number of other Committee members are also actively involved. 2013 was the year of the national referendum on asset sales (which opposed them, and which the Government ignored). In the course of one weekend in April KOA took part in a march and rally in Christchurch, and held a picket of the National Party’s South Island Conference at Hanmer Springs. At the latter we gained good media coverage, and public support, by declaring Hanmer’s sole access bridge to have been privatised and set up a toll booth on it, handing out leaflets to motorists waiting to cross the one way bridge. But most of our work involved the threat to Christchurch City Council’s extensive portfolio of publicly-owned assets. For the local body election we asked all candidates to sign a Public Ownership Pledge (and held a public signing event outside the City Council Building). Fully 50% of the new Council signed it, plus a good number of Community board members (but not the Mayor or Deputy Mayor). KOA has its own Website, administered by – you guessed it – Warren Brewer. This is the campaign in which we work most closely with the Greens (they host all KOA meetings), and it is a most productive partnership.

Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA): this had been our big issue, certainly in the lead up to the 2011 election. But we had decided to switch focus back to the asset sales issue. The national campaign against the TPPA is in very good hands and has made great progress. CAFCA’s role in 2013 was basically a watching brief, to offer support wherever possible and to help financially (we donated $1,000 to one specific advertising campaign against the TPPA). We still have the New Zealand Not For Sale Website, administered by the ubiquitous Warren Brewer.

Annual Strategy Meeting: this is a very useful exercise for the Committee and enables us to set goals and projects for the year ahead.

2014 National Speaking Tour: this project arose from our 2013 strategy meeting and became our biggest undertaking since the last time I did such an election year speaking tour (2011). It took place from March to May and incorporated the Roger Award event in Nelson into my itinerary.

2015 40th Anniversary Celebration: this is being planned now and will one of our major projects for the next year. We will combine it with the next Roger Award event. Details will be released later. We last had an anniversary do for our 25th and really we should wait until our 50th but we’re all getting old and mightn’t be around by then. So let’s make hay while the Sun shines and grow old disgracefully (and any other appropriate clichés that come to mind).

Quake Effects On Committee Members: ongoing and, it goes without saying, very disruptive. Warren Brewer and his wife Tracy had to get out of their Lyttelton home for many weeks while it was repaired in 2013 – and in 2014 they had to get out again in order for the repairs to be repaired. The homes of Jeremy Agar and James Ayers are scheduled to be repaired in 2014.

Anti-Bases Campaign: I co-edit Peace Researcher, with Warren Thomson. ABC’s major project in any year is the Waihopai spy base protest. See my report on the 2013 one in PR 45, June 2013, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/45/pr45-002.html. You can see media coverage of it at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/waihopai2013/waihopai13.html. ABC was actively involved in the massive national protests against the GCSB Bill (now Act) – I was one of the speakers at the Christchurch rally. Bob Leonard, our former colleague and old friend, was much in our thoughts in 2013. The ABC Committee went into his quake-buggered and abandoned home to rescue heaps of his ABC and peace movement files and photos, etc. spanning decades.  They were put to a number of good uses. Bob died in August – we hosted his Christchurch memorial celebration in September. And, in November, we co-hosted the Christchurch launch of Maire Leadbeater’s “Peace Power And Politics: How New Zealand Became Nuclear Free” (reviewed by Jeremy Agar in this issue). That includes a number of the photos rescued from Bob’s house.

Philippines Solidarity Network Of Aotearoa: I work for this on a voluntary basis. It is basically just ticking over. I appeared in the Philippine media a number of times via letters and press releases. PSNA helped to fund an NZ delegate to attend an international human rights conference in Manila in July. And in November/December, after the Typhoon Haiyan catastrophe, we received the biggest ever response to one of our disaster relief appeals (we raised $5,500 with one e-mail). This was a tiny part of the unprecedented outpouring of generosity by grassroots Kiwis, not to mention NZ media coverage of a country which is usually ignored here. My wife Becky (who visiting family in the Philippines at the time), took part in two relief convoys to the disaster area.

Priorities: major campaign – asset sales; major project – speaking tour. Other issues – TPPA; post-quake disaster capitalism in Christchurch; public private partnerships (PPPs); privatisation; corporate welfare; corporate tax dodging; mining; offshore oil drilling; rural land sales; the merger of CAFCA and ABC issues vis a vis the GCSB Act, with the spies working on behalf of transnational corporations (my speaking tour, for the first time, was in both of my roles as CAFCA & ABC Organiser). There is no shortage of issues to get our teeth into, bring on the next 40 years.