Acquisition still hoped for

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33062, 1 November 1972, Page 18

Acquisition still hoped for

The chairman of the Wool Marketing Corporation Establishment Company (Mr H. P. Ralph), who sparked off the major controversy among woolgrowers, is still hoping for compulsory acquisition.

Mr Ralph led the group which recommended compulsory acquisition of New Zealand shorn wools from July next year. “I have said there should

■be no Wool Marketing Corp-, oration unless it has powers i of acquisition,” Mr Ralph; said at the wool marketing! symposium of the Canter-bury-Westland branch of the New Zealand Society of Farm Management in Christchurch yesterday. “I accept the present situation only because acquisition is still a possibility,” he said in a reference to the amended Wool Marketing Corporation Bill approved by Parliament. This provides for the introduction of acquisition only after it has been endorsed by a referendum not earlier than April, 1974. “Without acquisition the corporation will not be able to operate with full effect,” he said. JOINT TASK The Wool Board and the new corporation had a joint task to secure support for acquisition so that the corporation could operate in the full manner the marketing

situation demanded, Mr Ralph said. It could gain support by initiating projects within the present limits of its competence, by making itself known to growers, and by expanding the details of acquisition. Many a good project had foundered on the rocks of a referendum, Mr Ralph said, and it was regrettable that this should be exposed to one. But all the sound arguments were in favour of acquisition, he said. Without acquisition the same complications in handling and marketing would l continue. Prices would conItinue to bear —in the short run—little relation to care and quality. The struggle with rising costs and shrinking markets would continue; seeing the deterioration of wool’s place in the world and on the farm. “We satisfied ourselves

’that there was—and still is—la very serious situation for i the New Zealand woolgrower and his industry,” Mr Ralph I said. “We examined the proposal of the Battelle I Memorial Institute for the 'gradual introduction of an I acquisition scheme. We Hooked at other alternatives. iWe had to reject them all as costly, or unworkable, or not meeting the urgency of the situation. | “I have no doubt the I treatment prescribed is the right treatment —the only I treatment. And as prices I scale up and, no doubt, in jdue course swing down (again, I am sure it is more I urgently needed than ever.” ( Putting the case against (compulsory acquisition, Mr P. IS. Plummer, a former president of Federated Farmers of New Zealand, said that the patient referred to by Mr I Ralph still had enough life left in him to make a few decisions himself. Mr Plummer said that the corporation idea appealed to many, but those who favoured it had never been able to spell out how a monolithic corporation would save costs, improve returns to the grower, influence the price on the world market, or remove the threat of synthetics.

In opening the meeting for the Farm Management Society, Mr J. H. Oldfield said that in spite of New Zealanders’ penchant for refresher leave, seminars, and symposia, they still could not produce the answers as to why wool prices had shot up the way that they had or why the dairy cow had not become obsolete.