‘She hasn’t quite finished yet’

When Penny Bright rang to say she had been dying and might yet continue to do so, her voice was weak and she struggled at times.

“David Bloody Fisher,” she said, her usual greeting, but it was faint. Her Warship — as she likes to call herself — usually bellowed down the phone.

Here was Penny fighting a battle that everyone loses eventually and she knew it.

“I’ve never felt less energy or more tired in all my life,” she says.

But who’s going to do our democracy now, I asked her. For years I had watched with bafflement and some wonder at Penny’s determined fight against infringements on citizens’ rights.

It didn’t matter if it was hot, cold, pouring with rain — whatever the heavens might throw down, there was Penny battling local government, central government and anyone who deviated from her absolutist view of what democracy is.

Sure, Auckland has elected board and council members, MPs and ministers.

But we’re not Wellington with its political obsessions. For the bulk of Auckland’s 1.5 million people, it was Penny Bright who did the heavy

lifting. A while back, she tells me, she had a tip from an “impeccable source” about the cost of Auckland Council’s campaign to seize and sell her house to pay those rates she refused to pay. She had held off digging into it, afraid of revealing the identity of her source.

Then, “told six days to live — I thought, f*** that”.

So there she was in hospital, dying, rattling out another request to insist the council surrender its secrets.

I had told her I thought Auckland Council was becoming increasingly transparent but Penny, absolutist that she is, wants every transaction, contract, memo and email out where the public can see it.

So she dug her heels in, fought in court, argued at meetings and protested until her body and fate conspired to break her and she signed a postponement order to halt the seizure of her home.

It would have been galling for Penny had she not been trying to stave off death. That was a much bigger battle.

“Last Saturday night everything started turning to s***. Acute pain. ”

There was already inoperable stage three ovarian cancer.

When she arrived in hospital six days ago, Penny was told she could add ketoacidosis, pneumonia and a perforated bowel.

“Next thing, you’ve got six days to live.”

Pause. “My poor . . . messy stomach,” she says. “I was Penny the Pig. Miss Piggy. I’m transformed into Miss Picky. I haven’t eaten in 12 days.”

Pension next year, Penny. “Bastard,” she says, but not at me. “Get the pension next year. We shall see.” Then: “She hasn’t quite finished yet.”

Not quite, no. That dire prognosis was followed by dire and worsening health but she has reached a plateau, of sorts. “I’m stable and improving,” she says, because Penny always seizes the slimmest of victories from impossible campaigns.

She’s written a will and made her peace. Her plan involves staying in hospital — and that’s it. “I’m used to occupying places,” she says with a laugh. Occupy Auckland veteran Penny Bright spent a month sleeping in Aotea Square.

“Activists get things done, David.” She paused and in the background hospital machines beeped.

“That needs to be the epitaph on my gravestone,” she said. “She gave it a***holes.”