New leadership at the RSA is promising to overhaul the venerable organisation and return its focus to supporting veterans. Former two-star general Martyn Dunne is now chairman of the board and - along with patron Sir Wayne “Buck” Shelford - wants the RSA to be less about cheap booze and food and more about supporting those who served New Zealand. David Fisher spoke to Dunne and RSA chief executive Marty Donoghue - and local clubs wary of the national body poking its nose into their business.
Returned Services Associations (RSAs) are being told to live up to their name and provide support to veterans, rather than offering cheap booze and pokies to an increasingly non-military membership.
The organisation’s new chairman Martyn Dunne - a former general and public service leader - estimated more than $100 million intended for veteran support and welfare had been lost through collapsing RSAs.
The national office was now urging clubs to consider how closely their actions aligned with the ethos of the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services’ Association, as it was set up 107 years ago.
It was a measure being taken by the national office through a “warrant of fitness” study of the accounts and membership of the independent local clubs across the country.
Dunne said the club-by-club check had the national RSA body studying financial accounts posted by local clubs to the publicly-accessible Incorporated Societies Register.
It comes at a time when the needs of an estimated 30,000 contemporary veterans who served in Bosnia, East Timor and Afghanistan are emerging even as Veterans’ Affairs admits struggling to meet the needs of those it is meant to serve.
The clubs, set up during and after World War I, span the country with many building a strong asset base after more than a century of Anzac Day collections and poppy sales.
But the number of “bricks and mortar clubs” have fallen from 148 with clubrooms in 2010 to about 103 with clubrooms today as contemporary veterans look to connect away from the hospitality-focused legacy of the traditional RSA. As the number of older veterans has reduced as they die, traditional RSAs have struggled to maintain membership and income meaning - in some places - they have been forced to sell up.
One club, Point Chevalier, is expected to get around $10m if it decides to sell its 400 square metre clubrooms and get a potential new clubrooms built atop the new supermarket. Its 380 members - of which 15-20 are veterans - will vote to decide on the sale and what happens to the proceeds.
Another South Island club identified by the Herald turned over about $8m in the most recent year in which it filed financial accounts, with about $80,000 going toward veterans’ support and welfare.
The RSA is going through a period of significant overhaul with the arrival of Dunne, a retired major general, as chairman of the board, and retired colonel Marty Donoghue as chief executive. Both served in contemporary deployments, with Dunne leading New Zealand and other nation’s troops in East Timor.
Dunne told the Herald there were RSAs clinging to “bricks and mortar” because they were “hanging onto the past”.
In places where clubs were financially slipping, Dunne said there was a duty on the RSA “to protect that equity” and it was important to make sure “we don’t allow non-serving people who are on committees [to allow that equity to be] easily frittered away”.
“[We need] to make sure we preserve our equity in the assets we’ve got and put it to best use, rather than a booze hall or fellowship centre or whatever you want to call it.”
Dunne said he had recently been provided an estimate of $50m in equity being lost in Auckland RSAs alone. It was a figure he expected would expand to $100m if it included collapsing clubs across the country.
“The trick for us is to ensure that - in a legal way - we persuade people to preserve those things and put them to good use,” Dunne said.
“It may have to get ugly. We may actually have to have a test case that actually ensures that people understand.
“It will be ugly in the sense that some of them will have to leave the movement, so to speak, because we have to get back to the purpose of the RSA.
“We want to avoid a schism in the organisation, so we want people to come with us - but there will be some parts of it that will potentially be confronting for some, ugly for others, but we have to do this.
“We have to actually get people back to the clarity of purpose for what the RSA was meant to do.”
Dunne said there were those organisations which managed to be a “successful physical club”.
“That’s fine, as long as they understand their prime purpose - even if they’ve got fantastic gaming and bars - is to produce funds to actually support veterans, and a lot of them don’t.”
Dunne said the independence of the RSA was “probably our own worst enemy”, as it had resulted in some clubs drifting from their purpose, eroding equity and then financially collapsing.
“We need to, as these clubs wind up, sell their real estate.”
He said focusing funding into veteran support could see RSAs opening up veteran centres contracted to government agencies providing veteran-to-veteran support.
Dunne specifically referenced the Pt Chevalier RSA, which was in talks over the sale of its land to a supermarket chain with the possible sweetener of a new hospitality venue built atop the supermarket.
He said it would be good to engage the club in a conversation about whether opening a “veteran open door centre” to connect those who served with each other and support services would better serve the principles of the RSA.
He said he expected there would be pushback from RSAs that didn’t have veterans deeply involved in the organisation.
Dunne said RSAs in their bricks-and-mortar club form were not the places contemporary veterans identified with or wanted to be. He said the online RSA would be “the biggest RSA by 2030″ because it allowed a broad range of options to be created through which veterans could become engaged and connect with each other.
The “Warrant of Fitness” check on RSAs had five key areas - support, finances, remembrance, governance and membership.
RSA chief executive Donoghue said the development of a volunteer support system in recent years had made it clear which RSAs were providing support to veterans. That information was bolstered by financial information data and other details, such as the number of former service people among members.
“We’ve got some big problems that we have to sort out,” said Dunne.
The national office strategy comes after the new RSA national president Sir Wayne “Buck” Shelford spoke of clubs being a “drinking hole”, rather than somewhere a veteran would seek support.
For those returning, the context is different than those who sought out RSAs in the past. In earlier days - such as during the World Wars - military personnel tended to be grouped based on the area they came from, and returned to those areas after service.
Those regional groupings are less a feature of the modern military, which drew volunteers from across the country, organised based on trades.
Friction between current and previous generations has also been marked with the military having a lower profile in New Zealand than in decades gone by, with less recognition for conflicts that created modern veterans.
Wayne Morris at the Pt Chevalier RSA bristled at the prospect of the national body issuing instructions to the independent local clubs.
He said no final decision had been made about the RSA’s valuable land, and whatever decision reached would be one for the members. He would not comment on the value, which had been estimated at around $10m.
“To be honest, Wellington is probably looking for our money. As far as I’m concerned, they can get stuffed until it had been put to members.”
Morris said it was understood the RSA existed to support veterans. He said of its 380 members, about 15-20 were veterans who were “rarely” seen because of their age. “Because they can’t get to the club.”
“Don’t forget, we haven’t had a war since Vietnam.”
Asked about Bosnia, East Timor and Afghanistan, Morris said: “I haven’t had any contact with any RSA veterans that served in those places.”
Rangiora RSA Club president Ross Ditmer said the club budgeted about $2000 a month for veteran support and welfare, which was paid to the local RSA organisation, which had its own leadership.
The club became a stand-alone body when the RSA gifted it the land and building which - with earthquake recovery funding - had developed into a centrepiece of the town.
Ditmer said the club itself was a “very significant community building” that drew support from across Rangiora and provided space and support for around 30 not-for-profit groups from the area.
The 2023 accounts for the Rangiora club show it has almost 5000 members, of which 576 were service members and 96 were returned service members.
The accounts show the club had assets of $7.9m and pulled in $3.6m in revenue, with almost a third coming in through gaming machines. The accounts show it paid $26,485 to the Rangiora RSA “to reimburse welfare grants” it had made.
“Those grants are allowable authorised purposes payments from the gaming fund,” the accounts say. Other authorised purposes included grants to local schools for sport and recreation and to local community groups for administration and equipment.
Ditmer, when asked if the RSA could as easily be a cosmopolitan-style club, said: “It certainly could.” However, he said it also maintained RSA traditions, such as the playing of The Last Post on club night.
The most recent Rangiora RSA accounts from 2021 show nine welfare payments made worth $20,677.
Ian Thompson, a trustee of and welfare officer for the Rangiora RSA, said the mid-2000s separation of the RSA and the hospitality venue came after a realisation “it was the hub of Rangiora”.
He said it had worked well providing welfare funding but the club also “worked hard” to support 27 other charities. “As a welfare officer, I can tell you I could always do with more. I would love to be able to do more.”
In Christchurch, Dennis Mardle is president of the Christchurch Memorial RSA, which now styles itself as The Original RSA after financial calamity in the mid-2010s led to a rebrand and a fresh focus.
In doing so, it has lost the clubrooms and hospitality venue seen at the time as its pathway forward.
Mardle said the ill-fated venture into hospitality cost at least $4.5m of the RSA’s wealth. “The most galling part of that whole process [was] the money was created by sweat equity of former service men and women.”
He said the RSA was left with about $700,000 that was “the base of the future” in providing support and welfare to veterans, along with a small residential block that housed nine veterans.
“We have to protect that. We’re in the middle of transitioning between a membership used to having a restaurant and beer as their central place of gathering towards younger people who get together very differently.
“It’s not easy to change course from the old to the new.”