BRUCE WILLS will shortly step down as Federated Farmers president after the normal three years in the job. Let’s be frank, he’s achieved a helluvva lot.

He was elected, with his board, to change the image of the federation. Many members had grown weary of the ‘out there’, somewhat confrontational style of his two predecessors. They wanted change and quite deliberately at Rotorua three years ago a group of them engineered this: Bruce Wills, William Rolleston and Anders Crofoot in particular were central to that movement for change.

Wills, the banker turned farmer and now farmer politician, was given a mandate to make Feds mainstream and win back credibility lost with the public, politicians and others in agribusiness. This was no easy task: Wills and his team had to walk a tightrope – being seen to advocate strongly on key issues for members, but not to get into unseemly public debates in the media with groups that didn’t share farmers vision for the future. Wills came across as a person of reason and willingness to listen and get sensible outcomes.

Wills has done all that was asked of him and more. In three years, Federated Farmers has again become recognised as a well led, credible lobby group capable of significant gains by reasoned argument. The task is far from complete: only in the last few weeks has the impact of the urban-rural gap been highlighted, and without Wills’ efforts it would have been much worse. There is a lot of ground to regain, but the effort is rightly directed and will likely carry on this way under Rolleston’s stewardship.

In 40 years Federated Farmers has not had a president better than Bruce Wills: he ranks with Sir Peter Elworthy, Brian Chamberlain and the late Alistair Polson. The Federation and New Zealand owe a lot to Wills, a leader worthy of significant recognition.

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