PROXY VOTING.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 18 August 1927, Page 4

PROXY VOTING.

(To the Editor). Sir, —in vour report of the Riverdale Dairy Company’s annual meeting, the above matter was debated and still hold® power. The remarks of the supporters for this system of voting are certainly wisn-waishy, with one exception. One speaker defended the vicious proxy method on account of lady shareholders. Dear me ! What an argument! Ladies attend several annual factory meetings and their presence, I have always noted, has a beneficial and refining inliuence on the masculine debaters’ verbosity. The men at the trigger of the gun always uphold proxies. The urge for power and more power is only human, but, man’s inhumanity to man is historical. The proxy voting record is not a' criterion of the merit of the individual elected. In many cases it i<s the opposite, which, time alone proves. The professional proxy hunter (there are many of them) lias done a lot of harm to the status of directors on dairy companies. The time has arrived when it requires wiping out. In case of illness it may lie allowable, I admit, but the system has been abused. The small supplier is the backbone of dairying as regards quality and as time goes on he will be in evidence more so. The proxy outvotes him. In another twenty years I venture to prophesy most large holdings will have disappeared and milking machines and quantity and quality respective!v doubled. Times will become harder on account of our bulge national debt and focal taxation. Shareholders from now on will be found taking a keener interest in their living. Therefore thev will roll up personally to their meetings, especially if the guiding hand is tendered to them) by eliminating the proxy nunter and thus ending a method of voting which was meant for the best but has been sadly abused.—l am. etc., “SPERO MFiLIORA.”