The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND SATURDAY. FEBRUARY 22, 1929 DICTATORIAL WOOL BUYERS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 904, 22 February 1930, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND SATURDAY. FEBRUARY 22, 1929 DICTATORIAL WOOL BUYERS

IN its checkered history the wool industry has witnessed some I strange spectacles. Periods of golden "prosperity, followed by disheartening reversals and setbacks, mark its progress since the early years when courageous settlers grazed their first flocks on restricted clearings, or sent them out among the native grassland and the fern. There have been definite milestones, such as the introduction of refrigeration and the inception of the frozen meat industry; and there have been slow and almost imperceptible movements of progress, in which developments such as the fast steamship superseded the stately old wool clippers, while wool as a staple export climbed slowly to the ascendancy from which, in normal seasons, it has never yet been dispossessed. In all this period the episodes invariably attendant upon commercial growth and expansion have never been eclipsed-by the extraordinary spectacle witnessed on Thursday, when the Wellington wool sale opened to a bench on which no buyer or buyer’s representative sat in his place. Prices in the industry have fallen to a heart-breaking level this season and, as if that were not enough, a deadlock has now arisen in which the buyers, with extraordinary presumption, are attempting to dictate the business policy of wool-growers throughout New Zealand. For that is all that their boycott of the Wellington sale amounts to, and their implied suggestion that wool has been withheld for any other reason than the whim of individual growers, and that there is a sinister combination of brokers, growers, and perhaps the New Zealand Government, aligned to defeat their interests, can be dismissed as poppycock.

Unfortunately the buyers are supported in their action by their powerful principals overseas. To that extent, as they are well aware, they control the present situation, so that whatever estimate of their conduct is formed, the reproaches of the New Zealand public cannot modify it. People will generally agree that the wool-buyers in the past have been accorded a respect and deference to which their latest action no longer entitles them. Indeed, a number will suspect that hotel-keepers and brokers have mistakenly given the buyers an altogether false idea of their personal importance. After all, the psychology of the woolbuyer is no different from the psychology of other men. The human susceptibility to flattery is comomn to us all, and a woolbuyer who finds other guests turned away from hotels to make room- for him, and who sees brokers and other business men conspiring to accord him an almost religious deference, may perhaps logically, if not always correctly, assume that he is a person of great consequence in the community. This boycott offends an elementary principle of trading—that there should be freedom of individual action on both sides. The buyers may respond that, in declining to attend the Wellington sale, they are exercising their own right to that freedom. Yet their action is admittedly dictated not by unwillingness to purchase any particular lots of wool, but simply as a reprisal against those responsible for curtailment of the offerings. Their refusal to attend is not individual, but collective, and members of their organisation who dissent from the policy may nevertheless be bound to obey it in accordance with the obligations of their freemasonry. On the other hand, the reduction of the offerings is simply a matter of individual choice among scattered woolgrowers. These farmers regard the ruling price of wool as inadequate, and they propose to await better returns, just as the property owner awaits a favourable time for the disposal of his land, and the stock raiser a suitable time to sell his herds. In the present instance the buyers seem inclined to blame the broker rather than the grower for the curtailment. Yet although they blame the brokers, it is the farmer they are injuring. Their position is hopelessly illogieal from whatever angle it is viewed, for no broker could withold his client’s wool without the farmer’s fullest concurrence, and the fact is that brokers very rarely accept the responsibility of advising that wool be held over. But while the position of the buyers is illogical, and tbe policy they have adopted unreasonable and unfair, indignant farmers must face the bitter fact that the buyers have the whiphand. No doubt many would like to defy this boycott, to challenge the buyers, with 60 per cent, of the season’s wool as the Stake in a national endurance test. But the stake is too valuable, and the risk too great. New Zealand is not the only wool-growing country in the world. To avoid worse trouble it may be better to swallow the forced humiliation, and initiate diplomatic negotiations with the dictatorial buyers.