Craig Norgate: Hawera to Brazil in hot seat

By WARREN GAMBLE

It is tempting just to talk rugby with Craig Norgate. You could easily slip into a lively discussion about the prospects of his beloved Taranaki marching to the division one title, a trail of broken city slickers behind them.

Or how New Zealand lost the World Cup hosting rights, a setback that still rankles him as an independent and now departing director of the rugby union.

Norgate is so sure of the 'Naki he had the semi-final date cleared in his crowded diary before the season kicked off.

But as a nod to his home of two years, he follows the Blues in the Super 12 despite the large number of Wellingtonians in his South Auckland head office.

"They don't have a lot to shout about," he laughs, a deep staccato chuckle.

Critics have made similar claims about Norgate's other team, Fonterra.

To paraphrase their concern about the 37-year-old chief executive: you can take the boy out of Taranaki, but can he run New Zealand's biggest company, one of the top 10 dairy companies worldwide?

Or, more specifically, can he meet the expectations of 14,000 wary farmer shareholders and a board of previously warring dairy industry factions?

Norgate himself seems relaxed about the demands. But you get the impression he would not be unhappy if the ever-steepening working curve which has taken him from Hawera to sealing billion-dollar deals in Brazil flattens out next year.

The day after our interview I email him with that impression. He replies he is sanguine about what will happen when his reputed $2-million-a-year contract comes up for renewal next July.

"We'll have achieved all I initially set out to by the time my initial two years is up," he says. "While there's clearly another journey to follow that, I've also got other goals in life."

One is to spend more time with his family, wife Jane, and children, Dylan, 13, Jordan, 10, and Alexandria, 8. He has seen his eldest son play only three games of rugby this year as the demands of the dairy giant intrude.

And Fonterra is a colossus. Formed a year ago in a mega-merger between the Waikato-based New Zealand Dairy Group, Norgate's rival Taranaki-based Kiwi Dairies and industry exporters, the New Zealand Dairy Board, it earns a fifth of the country's export receipts. It has 20,000 staff and an annual turnover of $14.4 billion.

The buck stops at Norgate's plain, medium-sized office in Fonterra headquarters, a grey two-storey building in a new industrial estate next to Auckland Airport.

One-on-one he speaks quietly and quickly. He has had to learn to slow down in public speeches, but has won grudging respect for fronting at sometimes angry meetings of the farmers who ultimately own the business.

Both he and his office seem largely devoid of corporate gloss. Says Norgate:

"We are here to do a job, and understated is the way we prefer to be."

Understated but highly competitive. It fits the boy from Hawera, the rural service town south of New Plymouth, where he grew up.

At Hawera High School he was into every sport going, outstanding at none, he says. But he made the under-17 Taranaki rugby team as a winger in the days before big guys played out wide.

He had a winger's build then, he says ruefully of his physique, which shows more unfavourably in photographs than in person.

A back injury shifting a piano in a part-time furniture moving job cut his Massey University playing days short. It left him to concentrate on a business career characterised by reaching the top early, overcoming often unspoken questions about his age and experience.

At 21 he became district accountant for the Maori Affairs Department in Hastings, responsible for 14 staff.

The previous year he had married Jane, a nursing student, whose mother also came from Hawera. The couple shifted home, where he worked as an accountant in a meat company and then got his first taste of the dairy industry.

Hawera was meant to be a stepping-stone but the sudden death of his father, Frank, a long-time Kiwi Dairies accountant and general manager, aged only 48, changed everything.

In 1991, Norgate followed in his father's footsteps to the Kiwi factory he played in as a boy. He came in as general manager, administration, but two months later the chief executive left and Norgate, aged 26, took the reins. One of his first tasks was to drive the merger between Kiwi and the other Taranaki dairy company, Moa Nui. It was a bruising introduction to what would become an industry battleground over the next decade, more efficient companies offering better payouts swallowing up reluctant rivals.

By the time Kiwi Dairies and New Zealand Dairy Group agreed to amalgamate with the Dairy Board to form Fonterra, Kiwi had gone from a small manufacturer with a $300 million turnover to a $3.9 billion player.

N ORGATE'S chair looks comfortable, but figuratively it has been one of the hottest seats in the country.

"It's been a tough year," he says in smiling understatement. "Tougher than most would have expected."

The merger was a long and difficult labour itself, the marriage of three proud and well-performed organisations that were often at each other's throats.

The hangover rivalries were fanned by Powdergate, the illegal dairy export scandal that broke on Fonterra's launch last October.

Norgate has denied prior knowledge of the illegal exports in his former role as head of Kiwi where much of the product originated. He was cleared in a Fonterra inquiry, but the Ministry of Agriculture has yet to finish its investigation.

Norgate says Powdergate was "a major impediment to leading the required culture change. We really couldn't get started until after Christmas".

The prospect of more tension arose last week with the resignation of Fonterra chairman John Roadley, and the promotion of former Dairy Group chairman Henry van der Heyden to the top post.

Norgate is diplomatically indirect about how he will work with van der Heyden, saying he has had five different chairmen in the last decade.

"He will have his own requirements and that is absolutely his prerogative as chairman. He's also been around for a long time so understands the industry."

Even Fonterra's good news has been overshadowed - a record payout to farmers last season was soured by the prospect of a much lower payout this season as world commodity prices plunge.

Lucrative international gains, led by the multi-billion-dollar deal with the world's biggest company, Nestle, have been balanced with the domestic problems of missed milk collections in the Waikato.

Norgate says he is not frustrated by the inevitable criticism of a large and vital company, but some has been unfair to staff who have "sweated blood". "The vast majority of senior people choose to live and work in New Zealand and work for dairy farmers because they give a damn so they deserve a pat on the back far more than what they get."

Senior staff on high salaries (14 get more than $1 million) would get far more working overseas.

Norgate says he does not have time to spend much of his own paypacket. One of his few splurges has been on an S-type Jaguar. "The reality is it's got to go away for a rainy day. You don't have very long at the top in business."

What motivates him to keep putting in the 15-hour plus days, the trips to Brazil for two days of business?

"I don't know, you have got to run out sooner or later eh?

"But yeah, it's achievement. When you are knocking things off then you keep going."

He uses the expression, made famous by Sir Edmund Hillary, again in saying the pressure does not get to him: "If there's a problem you either knock the bastard off or you don't worry about it."

Having reached a dairying Everest with Fonterra he may be heading for flatter fields. He talks about an eventual return to the rugby union through the provincial system when he has more time than the Fonterra job allowed in his last term.

His last club rugby game was 10 years ago, but he has kept his boots.

"One of the local clubs tries to twist my arm to play president's grade. You never know."