DAIRY PRODUCE CONTROL.

Waikato Independent, Volume XXVII, Issue 2765, 31 March 1927, Page 6

DAIRY PRODUCE CONTROL.

(To the Editor)

Sir, —There are facts of which all Tooloy Street is'aware, of which, therefore, the Dairy Control Board and the. Government cannot be ignorant, and which if they are duly considered involve the Government in complicity in a plot to. sacrifice, the dairying industry to commercial interests. At any risk it is time now to'speak out plainly and to give Messrs Forsyth, Timpany and Co. something else to think about besides admission of the. New Zealand butter speculators to the sack of the industry by Tooloy Street. What a hurry they are in! Dairy fanners, control and anti-control, should bo told what nearly everyone else not so vitally interested knows. It is not Tooloy Street us a whole which lias fought control. 'N.Z. proprietary interests, with Mr S. Paterson’s assistance, have stirred up almost all opposition that has been shown by Tooloy Street. Speculation is confined to a section of Toolev Street, and opposition there has been purposely and grossly exaggerated, every advantage being taken of farmers’ ignorance of conditions. A recent let-

tor widely published by the press stilted on the authority of Mr Robinson, a Tooley Street representative on the London agency, that the representatives of the trade had no real say in “pricefixing. ’’ The Government also slates that it has no evidence against Mr Paterson justifying his recall, though it might as well concede that point now as he has done what he had to do. One fact will contradict both statements. When the question of setting a price for the first controlled supplies came up, Messrs Paterson and Robinson fought tooth and nail, both at the time and afterwards, to get the price fixed at the level of stored butter prices, which would have driven stored butter lower and sent new stocks chasing a falling price.

The decision to fix tiro controlled price ten shillings above the price of stored butter, iwhich lifted prices and saved the situation, was carried by the votes of the other two Tooley Street representatives, Messrs' Ellison and Flint. If this is not true, will the board contradict it on Wednesday? if it is true, it will necessitate a new orientation of the subject on the part of honest opposors of control. Instead of cutting/'the throat of tho industry-it was appointed to protect, will the board toll the public the full story of Mr Cofites’ visit, and tell also, if it dares, why the board was called together over an anonymous cablegram, and why it decided to scrap control in fact of a statistical position more promising than it had any reasonable right to expect? It may be said that Messrs Pa-

terson and Robinson acted, according to their honest convictions. The reply is that, if this be so, a stone thrown into any crowd of farmers in New Zealand would hit a man who "knows more about marketing than either of those individuals. The whole thing is too transparent, too sordid. Every farmer from the North Cape to the Bluff should unite, in

a demand for re-institution of the policy decided upon by the people of the Dominion through their elected representatives, following oil- a ■ referendum in the industry itself. New Zealand is in need of a thorough spring-cleaning in

public life, starting, at. the top, if the dairy control question is any criterion. Otherwise, Tammany Hall will have nothing to teach us soon. I am, etc., A. E. ROBINSON, = Prov. See, N.Z.F.E. (Auckland). - '