MEAT BOARD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 June 1939, Page 6

MEAT BOARD

ELECTION OF PRODUCERS’ REPRESENTATIVES COLLEGE SYSTEM CONDEMNED. “LENDS ITSELF TO GRAFT." “That this meeting is not in favour of the college system of election to the Meat Board” was a motion carried yesterday afternoon at a mass meeting of sheep farmers held in the Opera House. The matter was introduced by Mr A. McDonald, president of the Wairarapa Sheepowners' Federation, who said that voting on the American college system lent itself to graft. When Sir William Perry was sent down by the Wairarapa some years ago to represent this district he was well “grafted,” and the Wairarapa had no representative that year. Under this system, he said, it would be possible for Southland or Auckland to have the whole of the producers’ representatives on the board. He thought the time had come when the various districts of New. Zealand should be defined so that they could send their own representatives to the board. Mr Duncan McGregor, moving a motion expressing the meeting’s disapproval of the present system, said no doubt they would have Sir William Perry’s approval, as he had been turned down when he should have been elected. Mr Hugh Morrison, president of the Wairarapa Provincial Executive of the Farmers’ Union, agreed that each area should elect its own representative on the board, something on the lines of the ward system for the dairy board. Sir William Perry said they had to realise that with five representatives on the board, three for the North Island and two for the South, it would create a very large area for each representative, and the Wairarapa would have very little say in it. It would probably mean that the whole of the Wellington Province would elect one representative, and he did not think they would be any better- off. On the motion being put to the meeting it was carried without a dissentient voice being raised against it.