Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters doubled down on last week's New Zealand First party attacks on the performance and leadership of Fonterra, saying the country's largest business was costing the economy more than $2 billion from food safety and animal welfare scares.
Speaking at the weekly post-Cabinet press conference in
the absence of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Peters said in reference to Fonterra: "I think we will not become a great, first world trading nation in the top of the world's trading nations until we face some blunt, commercial facts" and that "I do believe in commercial accountability".
Regional Economic Development Minister, Shane Jones, who is a NZ First party minister like Peters, last week called for Fonterra's chairman to "take the first cab out of town" and resign over the cooperative's commercial performance in comments that Ardern characterised as 'private' rather than made in a ministerial capacity.
Peters stuck to that line but backed Jones, saying: "We made our comments on Fonterra a long, long time before the last election."
Apparently referring to food safety scares earlier this decade, Peters said the cost of Fonterra decisions to the economy had been $1.383b, "including $100m of taxpayers' money trying to sort things out on the wharves and docksides of China".
