DAIRY BOARD ASSAILED

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 450, 4 September 1928, Page 13

DAIRY BOARD ASSAILED

SHARP CRITICISM OF METHODS AN UNPUBLISHED DIVISION Press Association. PAHIATUA, To-day. Sharp criticism was expressed at the annual meeting yesterday o. the Rexdale Co-operative Dairy Company concerning the Dairy Control Board.

In reply to Questions by Mr. \V. RRoss, Mr. E. J. G. Brechin agreed that the time had arrived for some definite action to be taken by dairy farmers throughout the length and breadth ot the Dominion. There was not the slightest doubt in his mind that the Dairy Produce Control Board had oeen captured by the commercial interest of the Dominion. Their efforts, assisted by the votes of a few individuals who could not by any stretch of imagination be called representatives of the dairy farmers, had practically made the operations of the board of no more moment than if the board did not exist. The present board was making much ado about nothing and trying to exist on the good work done while the dairy farmers controlled it. The present position was intolerable. It was a striking fact even the present chairman of the board, Mr. W. A. lorns, was not only not the chairman of a dairy company, but not even a director of one. As indicating the class of business the board was doing, Mr. Brechin stated that quite recently the board received an offer from the National Dairy Association of New Zealand and the South Island Dairy Association to continue to carry out the shipping of dairy produce from all ports but Wellington, the cost to be £2,000 per annum. The secretary of the board had been requested to prepare an estimate of the cost if the board carried out this work itself. His estimate was £3.160 per annum. The committee of the board set up to.report consisted of the chairman, a commercial representative and one other membre who previously had been anticontrol. Notwithstanding the report of the committee, as was to be expected from its constitution, the board voted in equal numbers for and against the report that the board should take over the' work at the higher cost.

The voting was as follows, said Mr. Brechin, and he advised those interested in the operations of the board to examine the names very carefully. For the work to be done at £2,000: Messrs. Grounds, Ferguson, Winks, Hine, Reynolds and Corrigan. For the expenditure of over £3,000 for the same work: Messrs. lorns, Chapman, Hunt, Timpany, Lee and Fulton.

The voting therefore was equal, and it was necessary for the chairman to use his casting vote. Mr. lorns did this, and in doing so departed from all recognised precedent by voting against the existing system, which also was the least costly for the industry. If it could have been shown that the work had been accomplished •by associations not up to the mark, then the chairman of the board might reasonably have cast the vote as he did, but .in view of the fact that he already had made laudatory remarks, which the board had endorsed, upon the fine work accomplished by the associations for the board, he surely was not studying the dairy producers when he threw away over £I,OOO of their money by using his casting vote in the manner he did. Mr. Brechin stressed the point that it was significant that the “Exporter,” which gives the dairy farmers of the Dominion official news of the doings of the board, did not mention the division on this matter of shipping, nor had the division list yet been published. The meeting unanimously resolved: “That, in the opinion of this meeting, the matter of the continuation of the Dairy Profluce Control Board should be seriously considered by the dairy rindustry as a whole with a View to'(l) elimination of the Act, (2) to drastic revision of the board’s personnel with a view to members of the board being wholly representative of the dairy farmers only.”