BAC to SMOG

a brief history of a community newspaper and beneficiaries group

Both SMOG and BAC had their origins in the April 1997 national anarchist conference in Wellington. Following that conference, a small group of Christchurch anarchists set up the Anarchist Round Table (the name is a piss-take of the Business Roundtable). ART used to meet every one or two weeks, but after six months or so it became apparent that we weren't getting very far. We were stuck in the old anarchist ghetto.

from art to bac to smog

Like many anarchist groups, we spent many wasted hours stewing over ways to break out. Some of us lived or worked in the Inner City East, a working class area of Christchurch, and so we decided to establish a small neighbourhood newspaper with an anarchist bent. We formed a new group with a few sympathetic non-anarchists on board, and in December 1997 we published the first issue of SMOG. We produced 3000 copies of the paper each month and did everything ourselves, from writing articles (we also received a lot of contributions from residents), and laying the thing out to printing, folding, and then stuffing the finished product in letterboxes. We covered our costs by carrying advertising from local businesses.
There were never more than six to eight people involved in the core group, although quite a few others helped out with the folding and distribution. A lot of the people living in the area were beneficiaries, and the paper covered issues of concern to them and other low-income residents. As time went on, the SMOG group became more and more involved in activist work on beneficiary issues, and so in the middle of 1998 a decision was made to form a separate group to distinguish this activity from the newspaper work. This new group was the Beneficiary Action Collective (BAC).
By this stage, ART had been left behind and was no longer meeting as a separate group. SMOG also suffered as we became more and more involved in activist work. It was always a struggle to involve new people, and so we were often overstretched. Direction was also a problem.

CONTENTS

from argentina to aotearoa

anti-capitalist uprising in argentina: an analogy

organising against capitalism in the 21st century

conference report

anarchy in the r.k

bac to smog

the 24 milion dollar minute

war is terrorism

aotearoa news round up

workfare?? hell no!!

However, SMOG and BAC still achieved some positive results. A total of 22 issues of SMOG were published over a period of just over two years. BAC helped organise several high profile and successful actions, including a public burning of copies of Jenny and Winston's infamous Code of Social Responsibility in Cathedral Square. The group also carried out hit-and-run raids on Income Support and Employment Services offices if we heard about beneficiaries getting badly treated. A number of us would storm into the office and present the manager with a huge Bastard of the Month certificate. The event would then be covered in the pages of SMOG, often with a photo of the hapless "victim"!
In October 1998, BAC joined forces with the Enough is Enough group (based around Christchurch CORSO) to organise a protest against the introduction of the Community Wage, or workfare. Several hundred people attended the demo, and we briefly occupied the High Street WINZ office in central Christchurch before marching down to the City Council offices. Coverage of this event in SMOG featured a priceless photo of WINZ manager David Rhodes smiling as he accepts a huge Bastard of the Year certificate on behalf of Work and Income Minister Peter McCardle. This was not the last time David was the butt of our humour.
SMOG was also very active on neighbourhood issues. One of these was the demolition of a community art gallery and other buildings on Gloucester Street to make way for a council housing unit. Although we eventually lost this battle, our involvement in helping to organise a spirited occupation and protest made sure mayoral candidate Garry Moore and other councillors ended up with plenty of egg on their faces.

going potty outside winz

.Another high-profile campaign organised by BAC was over access to toilets at the High Street WINZ office. This was around the time when Christine Rankin had taken over, and WINZ was chucking money everywhere. Yet they couldn't find a way to allow beneficiaries waiting for interviews access to the toilets! We started by staging occupations of the High Street office, on one occasion even delivering our own homemade WINZ-a-loo! All of us were eventually served trespass notices, so we then settled into a routine of weekly pickets outside the office. These usually featured a good dose of toilet humour, dressing up and, in the spirit of the Wobblies, lots of sing-alongs. We had good coverage on the local TV stations (not to mention in SMOG), and even the ultra-conservative Christchurch Press ran the odd story about us, although this usually consisted of reprinting WINZ press releases. But in the end we failed to get what we wanted and the strain on the group was beginning to show.
As I mentioned earlier, the core group never numbered more than six to eight people. We tried to make decisions on a consensus basis, and this mostly worked. However, we failed to keep some strong personalities in check, especially at our meetings, and this perhaps put new people off. So we never had a strong platform to work from, relying on other groups for meeting spaces and resources. This was sometimes difficult, especially as we fell out with some groups over our uncompromising attitude towards the Community Wage. Many community groups wanted to - and did - use this abhorrent scheme.

group dynamics - a real problem

However, our real problem was group dynamics and a lack of conflict resolution processes. We never really sorted this out, and as we were basically an affinity group, when friends stopped being friends, that was it. If we had devoted more time to establishing processes and learnt to say "no" collectively to some people, things may have been different.
BAC and SMOG both folded in May 2000. By this time ART had long ceased to exist as a separate identity. This was a mistake, as it took some time for us to get an anarchist group going again, and in many ways we had to start from scratch. However, after six months or so of recharging our batteries, ART was resuscitated, and is in many ways a stronger, more focused group. Hopefully we can use some of the lessons we learnt from our experiences in SMOG and BAC to ensure we don't repeat the mistakes of the past.
- Frank