Saturday, March 30, 2024

BLOG: Election is about more than ability

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Fonterra farmers are faced with a choice of five candidates for the three available directors’ jobs. Three are endorsed by the co-op’s formal selection process and two are standing independently.
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One the face of it the exercise is an easy one – pick the three best people for the job. It’s a nice idea but it doesn’t happen. In reality party politics, factions, prejudice, ideology, personalities, vested interests and populism are all factors influencing the way people vote.

This election can also be seen as an endorsement or rejection of Fonterra’s selection process though there is also the possibility of a hung jury because to be elected candidates must get more than 50% of the vote. This issue is personified by the presence on the ballot of paper of former director Leonie Guiney. We don’t know how Fonterra’s selection process works but it rejected Guiney. That and later events suggest Guiney was an odd voice out on the board. Farmers are now being asked if there should be a questioning voice at the table or if consensus rather than accountability and transparency should prevail. That’s a question that goes deeper than Fonterra because this obsession with presenting a united front and maintaining an image pervades society from the government down through our democracy and bureaucracy.

In the case of this election the vote is also a test of confidence in Fonterra’s new leadership of chairman John Monaghan and interim chief executive Miles Hurrell. They have made promises about future performance but farmers have little of substance they can use to evaluate those good intentions. The pair have put everything Fonterra does up for review but farmers are being asked to vote in the dark because there is no indication of where that review will lead. Depending on what the candidates have to say the vote might reflect farmers’ attitudes to the internal conflicts Fonterra faces, most notably those between milk price (farmers) and dividend (investors) and commodities versus value-add. There seems to be a growing voice that Fonterra is good at commodities and should stick to what it’s good at despite having invested enormous sums in infrastructure to produce value-added goods.

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