We know all about the RSA - it's been there for our entire lives.
Even if you're 100, the RSA has been in existence for 99 years of your life.
From school, we had the ANZAC message driven home and have worn poppies with pride. We salute our dead and revel in our peace, and behind the pomp and ceremony of the dawn parades lies the RSA, spiritual home to the returned servicemen and women who have worn the uniform of our country on our behalf.
My father wasn't a member, despite being more returned than most servicemen, having fought all through WWII and also the Korean War.
All he wanted to do was not think and talk about the war, so the RSA was a good place for him to avoid.
It never occurred to me until recently that the RSA is a huge part of our lives but we know almost nothing about what it does. We know what it stands for, but aside from that acknowledgement of our military heritage once a year, the RSA is a place we drive past and never think about.
The best way to find out what an organisation is up to is to have a look at the Annual report and financial accounts, so that's where I started: http://rsa.org.nz/annualreport/index.html
From this, we can see that the national organisation is just an umbrella body which is funded by the individual RSAs in each town & city. The national body has no assets outside of cash reserves, while the individual RSAs own their own premises and operate as separate entities.
The national body appears to have no charitable purpose and spends no money on charitable work.
There appear to be 175 individual RSAs in New Zealand, and each is run as a licensed club.
Using a blunt tool, I could estimate each RSA to own property worth an average of $400,000 and end up with a very conservative total asset base for the RSA in NZ of $75,000,000, so we are looking at a substantial organisation in Kiwi terms, even at the value I've allowed. (The valuation seems sufficiently low given some RSAs being worth many million)
Nice clubs, the RSA run. Friendly, cheap booze and meals: like a Cozzie club, only a little better than most of them. Lot of old people.
But what do they actually do?
That's the part where it starts to get interesting, because while I was taught as a child that the RSA paid for healthcare and other things for veterans, I can't find any of that happening these days. There might be a few Vietnam vets around who still need help, but all the WWI and most of the WWII guys are long since buried.
Anyway, I can find nothing in RSA accounts that show where they are spending money on any assistance to veterans, so have to presume it no longer happens.
The only activity - outside of ANZAC Day participation - that RSA seems to be involved in is running the clubs mentioned above - essentially privately-owned pubs, which gives them an advantage over real pubs because they don't pay tax.
Let's delve a bit closer, and we find that the combined RSAs form one of the largest pokie owners in the country. There 16,614 pokies in NZ and RSA owns 6% of them with 984 machines.
The RSA accounts for 3% of the total annual pokie spend, for a total turnover on pokies of somewhere around $300M. As most of the money is paid back as winnings, then duties are deducted from the balance, the RSA actually makes $6M annually from pokie receipts.
The amount of profit made on booze at RSAs would need to see someone add all 175 sets of accounts and I'm not about to do that, but it is clearly a very large amount of money.
So, we have discovered that the RSA generates enormous income, but the only expenditure seems to be keeping venues to a very nice standard to ensure its members have somewhere nice to go.
The RSA's motto is "Lest we forget".
Yet it appears they have done just that. They have forgotten that harm is not just caused by war and fighting - in fact, alcohol has killed more people than war, and christ knows how many suicides gambling addictions have caused.
I don't recall my old man ever saying that he fought a couple of wars so people could get drunk and hooked on pokies.
Copyright © Alan Charman