The Fonterra elections were always going to be interesting.
Leonie Guiney has been feisty but more so since the “independent” selection panel didn’t select her for renomination. She’d served a term between 2014 to 2017 then was cast adrift.
Then it got messy with Fonterra successfully getting an injunction stopping media using, publishing or otherwise disseminating confidential information supplied by its former director.
She, in turn, issued defamation proceedings over a letter sent by the board to shareholders alleging she had leaked and misrepresented board discussions. In the end both parties reached some type of settlement.
Which is just as well because it could have been quite tricky with the board she has now been re-elected to being in legal action with her.
This time Guiney went through the self-nomination process instead of the independent nomination system and has shown by winning a seat this is still a path a candidate can use to get on the board.
Enough shareholders believe she will add value and continue to question a strategy that has bled great amounts of shareholder wealth in recent years. But that questioning and her proclaimed opposition to group think will once again be from behind closed doors now she is back on the board.
Outgoing Zespri chairman Peter McBride secured another seat, which was expected, and he too will bring a new and different perspective.
However, the third vacant seat will have to go back to another election as none of the three remaining candidates achieved the necessary 50%.
Then there was the United States mid-term election, not usually an event we or even the Americans themselves get too worked up about.
But they turned out in big numbers and I even left doing some maintenance in the sheep yards to watch a critical couple of hours of coverage as the results came to a climax.
They, too, voted for change and in particular the women in the suburbs and the young moved to the Democrats in a rejection of not just the policies of President Donald Trump but of his crass style.
With the Democrats now controlling the House of Representatives Trump’s chances of getting the money to build his silly wall are gone and he’s not going to be getting any more tax cuts through.
It will be interesting to see if the Democrat-controlled House launches a string of damaging investigations into Trump’s administration and, in particular, his tax returns but that might not bode well for them in two years at the next round of elections, being seen as obstructive and negative, or whether they lay off and try some type of reconciliation though that would incur the wrath of many who voted for them this time.
However, there were wins for both sides with the Republicans increasing their Senate majority. It allows Trump to continue to appoint conservative judges and makes it easier for him to fire high-level officials. His own Attorney General Jeff Sessions has just read the writing on the wall and resigned and Trump will replace him with someone who might get the tenacious Robert Mueller to stop probing Trump’s affairs.
The democratic process has once again allowed folk to have an influence on the way companies and countries are governed and that is how it should be.
