Patience wears out in wait for punch line

By PHILIPPA STEVENSON

Between the lines

The dairy industry is beginning to reap the grim harvest of indecision.

Its leaders have ruminated, procrastinated and fought among themselves so long that their great hope is looking increasingly like so much cow dung.

The mega co-op that is supposed to deliver the industry from the evils of commodity trading, bring new prosperity to shareholders and New Zealand, and turn a producer board and squabbling manufacturers into an integrated, globally competitive enterprise is becoming the country's longest running shaggy dog story.

Five years is a long time to wait for a punch line.

Establishment board chairman Graham Calvert said "stress testing" is causing the latest delay to the fifth document produced in five years - a business plan which is supposed to spell out integration's financial advantages.

He might have been describing the process the entire industry is undergoing.

And cracks are appearing.

Urged on by nervous company directors, Mr Calvert wanted to be sure there would be an answer for every possible question shareholders were likely to ask. It wouldn't look good look to be tripped up straight out of the blocks.

On farm, however, it is not a good look that there has been so much secrecy in the past and so many broken promises recently over when shareholders will hear more than just optimistic guesses.

Earlier reports, like the 1996 industry efficiency improvement study done by the Boston Consulting Group for the Dairy Board showed an average dairy farmer would gain an extra $26,000 a year from integration, but only saw the light of day when leaked to the media.

Lately, farmers suspected that delays to the latest report's release are to allow numbers to be doctored, not crunched.

Directors are right to worry about an interrogation but they have only made their job harder by, as one farmer described it, their "shenanigans."

The frustration continues. A New Zealand Dairy Group spokesman doubts that shareholder meetings planned to start on March 7, at which it was hoped the business plan would be unveiled, will go ahead on time.

The company's supplier representatives, heading to meetings with their ward directors this week, are also likely to be disappointed.

Kiwi chairman John Young let a cat out of the bag last week when he suggested the mega co-op would have a small office in Auckland.

That pushed the panic button among staff at the Dairy Board's Wellington head office and later reports of possible redundancies at Kiwi and Dairy Group did the same among staff there.

Board and company employees are already unsettled by the likelihood of change resulting from the mega co-op. Just the waiting game has caused disruption as projects have been put on hold.

For farmers, Mr Young's comments raised the spectre of their industry being run from some unreachable overseas outpost.

All the speculation was denied, Mr Calvert describing it as premature and unhelpful, board chairman Graham Fraser questioning "the motives of anyone prepared to promulgate these fictions."

But where fact is scarce, fiction will flourish.