LEADERSHIP OF FARMERS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 89, Issue 300, 20 December 1945, Page 3

LEADERSHIP OF FARMERS

Sir, —In less troublesome times there are many points in your editoral "Farmers and their Leadership” with which one can agree. At a time, though, when every single plank in the very platform of the Farmers’ Union has ceased to have any meaning whatsoever, there is justification for a direct challenge to the kldership of an organisation that can so conveniently "fit in” with these vas.ly changed circumstances. Where that leadership has already, of its own hand, dragged the qualifications of its own leadership out into the public gaze, I have not the slightest misgivings as to the justification for my own use of the Press. You speak of “other forces that are arrayed against the farmer” and refer to the fact that these othei forces effect “their” changes in leadership from behind closed doors. The inevitable allusion is t® the Trades Union Movement. The Trades Unions have a narrowness of outlook, with a comparative simplicity in the machinery of election of officers, that, God forbid, the Farmers’ Union should ever acquire. The eleclion of a Dominion president takes place at the annual conference in July each year. The justification for my use of the Press can surely be realised, when one reflects that in the seven months of office still to run, weak and vacillating leadership of the Farmers’ Union may have untold consequences for the whole of New Zealand. The writer >s unaware of any means by which provinces and branches could discuss the question of leadership, in time to even remotely affect the present situation. The writer has viewed the recent activities of the Farmers’ Union witn a gravity fully comparable with that inexplicable period that preceded Dunkirk ... a sheer refusal to faceup to the inevitable. You, yourself, have referred to the need for someone with a "Churchillian touch” in the affairs of farming. Was it adverse opinions from behind closed doors in the House of Commons, or was it adverse opinion, freely expressed throughout the Press of Great Britain, that in one breath, removed a Chamberlain and ushered in a Churchill? As to an alternative leader, we have one in Mr. B. V. Cooksley, the present president of the N.Z. Farmers’ Federation, and also provisional president of the Dominion Council of Federated Farmers, Incorporated.

The leadership of both the Farmers’ Union and the N.Z. Sheepowner..’ Federation might well be asked to explain away the seeming contentment of both these organisations to fritter away time that should have been beyond price. I refer to the fact that the new “super” organisation that was to take over from all the existing farming organisations, “with such a monster flourish”—Federated Farmers Iscorporated—is, even yet, only about half way through the process of evolution. The rank and file farmer has been led to believe that his salvation lay in the success of this Federated Farmers Incorporated. His faith today is in Federated Fanners Incorporated. It may yet he that Federated Jtarmers Incorporated has been strang’d before birth, through lack of “wise, strong and resolute leadership” in the dying hours of the N.Z. Farmers’ Union.—l am, etc., R. O. MONTGOMERIE Kakatahl, Dec. 18, 1945.