Its chief executive Bernie Knowles never failed to front and its public relations manager Neville Martin used to interrupt his lunchtime run around Wellington to drop in for a live interview with Rural Report on National Radio.
The Dairy Board was open and accountable to its shareholder farmers in every way. It was also a great business that opened up new markets and fought the EU every inch of the way to retain access for New Zealand butter and cheese.
Contrast that with the PR out of Fonterra today.
The latest bizarre decision was to refuse to give Dairy News an update on seasonal milk production because “Fonterra is listed on the stock exchange so it will only report six monthly and will report it to all investors”.
For heavens sake, it’s dry out there and we all know production is down. Is it too much to ask for a bit of honesty and transparency? Is the share market going to crash because the obvious is stated? We don’t think so.
Fonterra is fundamentally doing a good job marketing our milk products, in part thanks to what it inherited from the past.
But in respect of PR, we rate our chances of getting through to Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin a much higher than getting through to Fonterra chairman John Wilson.
This latest move by Fonterra to restrict and limit information is not smart, although it claims it’s because of stock exchange rules.
One could argue that Fonterra is becoming more uncooperative than cooperative – except when it’s dishing up reams of gushy blurb when there’s a challenge to its TAF proposal, or when its milk-in-schools scheme needs more grease on the skids.
While one accepts a lot of information is commercially sensitive, it’s not hard for anyone to make an educated guess about the impacts of dry weather.
It’s pretty hard to keep the weather secret and confidential. Fonterra needs to find a way around what are clearly silly rules.
