Milk Inspections

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25732, 18 February 1949, Page 6

Milk Inspections

The Municipal Association, meeting at Napier, yesterday rejected a remit calling for wider powers of inspection for milk authorities or, where none exists, for local authorities. It was rejected for no very clear or good reason. None, at least, was reported. To say, as Auckland delegates said, that inspections in the north are satisfactory is to say something that barely touches the issue. To say, as was also said, that milk authority inspectors may visit farms if farmers approve is also to miss the central fact. The central fact is, as has been shown here many times before, that milk authorities have been made directly responsible, under the Milk Council, for a wide policy of reform in the control of milk supply. They have defined functions of great range and great powers to correspond with them. But they are disarmed in two major respects: their financial powers are almost ludicrously defective, and they have insufficient authority to supervise, by direct inspection, the whole process of supply, the very thing that is their charge. The Marketing Department has this full authority; so has the Milk Council. The milk authorities themselves may appoint their own inspectors with the council’s approval; even then, these inspectors may go beyond “ milk “ stores ” to “ dairy premises ” only if the district producers’ association consents. Now this is an absurd situation. Powers of inspection now criss-cross among the agencies already mentioned, local bodies, the Department of Health, and the Department of Agriculture. Yet if anybody tells himself that, where powers are so abundant and so variously directed, they must be pretty efficiently exercised—for what dirt could escape so many brooms?—he tells himself what is not true and what, in those circumstances, never will or can be true. The first step to reform is to accept the first principle: that the milk authorities should have and exercise the full inspecting powers of the Milk Council—on the one condition that they exercise them through properly qualified staff and exercise them systematically. And if they do not, of course, they will need to be disciplined by the council as for any major neglect of duty. The whole point is that they cannot do their duty surely and efficiently without these powers. The next step, of course, must then be to rearrange on the new basis the over-all system of inspections and inspection rights, from farm to delivery point. None of the Government departments mentioned can be expected to surrender all rights and functions, nor should

they do so. But the suggestion that they, the Milk Council and authorities. and local bodies (which might perhaps withdraw entirely from this field) can certainly evolve a system much simpler, much more effective, ana more constructive is no rash one.