1990s Issues Of "Foreign Control Watchdog" Now Online

In a major addition to the Watchdog Website, 11 historic issues have been uploaded to it.

They are numbers 81-91 inclusive, 1996-99.

You can access all of them at www.converge.org.nz/watchdog Scroll down the Homepage and you’ll find them.

The plan was to upload all our old issues, right from the very beginning, and they have all been scanned (including a couple of special publications) going all the way back to 1974. But, unfortunately, that proved not to be possible because of the huge amount of space it would use on the Website.

As it is, we’d like to thank Converge for its free Web hosting of Watchdog and for making extra space available for these old issues (we now have the full set on disc, but whether any more of them will ever be uploaded is another question entirely).

These additional 11 issues are not of merely historic interest. Some of them are remarkably current. For example, as recently as May this year, the Christchurch City Council quietly revoked (as “obsolete”) its progressive policy on foreign investment. That had been adopted in the context of the Council expressing unanimous opposition to the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1998. You can read the full story about that, plus lots more on the MAI, in number 87.

Be warned – because these are scanned PDFs (complete with illustrations, unlike the post-1999 issues) they are very big files, each is several MBs in size – indeed number 81 is so big, it has been uploaded in two parts. If you are on dial up, I wouldn’t recommend trying to access them.

And they started off absolutely enormous (one issue alone was 45 MB) until we got all of them compressed down to their present (still big) size. That means that there has a corresponding reduction in the quality of some pages – I liken those ones to what you get when you print a page on a printer where the toner is running low. But overall they are of perfectly good quality and easily readable.

They mark a major addition to Watchdog’s presence in cyberspace. Enjoy!